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The story
In disclosure documents for its planned U.S. IPO, Anthropic itself warned that its AI could pose a “catastrophic or existential risk” to humanity. Some observers expect the company’s valuation to exceed that of SpaceX (roughly $1.8 trillion), which went public in June. On 5ch’s Science News+ board, the news that a company would push ahead with an IPO after admitting such risks in its own technology sparked a mix of resignation — “the development race can’t be stopped anyway; if we stop, China will win” — and pointed arguments that the real threat isn’t financial collapse but the depletion of resources and energy.
U.S. firm Anthropic warns of “catastrophic risk” to humanity ahead of major stock listing
American AI developer Anthropic warned on the 26th, in announcing details of its planned U.S. initial public offering (IPO), that AI could pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity.”
Anthropic’s valuation is expected to exceed that of U.S. company SpaceX, which went public in June of this year at an initial valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion.
Source: bbc.com / Original article here
What people said
The only way to rein in a rogue superintelligent AI is probably with another superintelligent AI — but can Anthropic actually pull that off?
The current pope is an American from Chicago.
Who knew it'd actually happen this year.
Financial assets aren't even real to begin with — it's just a collective delusion that something exists when it doesn't, so losing it isn't that big a blow at the civilizational level.
The real problem is that AI-driven organizations and facilities will burn through what's left of our already-dwindling resources and energy in no time.
Once resources and energy run out, AI stops — but so does modern industrial civilization, and we'd be dragged back to roughly mid-19th-century levels.
If Elon pulls off a space-based data center next, even China will have to bow to him and pay up.
Elon basically becomes a god.
So the rich elite's most pressing dilemma right now is:
fund Elon's space data center, or fund fusion power for ground-based data centers instead?
Because it's the decision the wealthy make right now that determines the future —
not some future decision.
It's decided by today's choice.
So — should we really let Elon become a god?
They keep repeating it, which makes you want to read between the lines. And even if the US slaps on restrictions, China sure isn't going to follow suit.
And this is actually already happening.
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Birth rates have dropped by nearly 10% in regions where industrial robots have spread
https://president.jp/articles/-/98205
It turns out that as robot adoption rises, birth numbers fall. Specifically, each one-unit (one standard deviation) increase in robot adoption corresponded to a 9.4% drop in births.
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But they can't stop developing it, you know. If they slow down, other companies — especially China — will steamroll them.
Come on, somebody should've shot back with "that's basically Mr. Catastrophe showing up"!
Copilot's in such "game over" mode the company's even offering voluntary layoffs.
Take somewhere like Yemen — no water, no nature, no food, everyone fighting over scraps. It's basically a "jar of scorpions" situation (kodoku — an old ritual where poisonous creatures are sealed together until only one survives): the moment you try to share instead of fight, you die. In the end, only people who believe "kill or be killed" survive, and everyone else gets weeded out.
Following that same logic, they'll start using AI as a survival strategy just to stay alive.
AI might be able to revive that barren land using fusion-level energy — but it's just as possible people start using that same limitless power the old way: as a tool for taking things by force. That's the scary part.
The fact that all the knowledge and technology humanity has built up becomes usable by absolutely anyone, regardless of their ideology, is a benefit with a dark flip side…
and the AI, with its superintelligence, just obeys toward that goal.
The danger is that if someone feeds the AI instructions following the logic of religious fanaticism, all the brakes come off.
Once you hand judgment over to AI, you've already given up on control.
There's no undoing that.
Background and key points of this discussion
When a publicly listed company like Anthropic spells out “catastrophic risk” in its disclosure documents, it’s less a dramatic declaration of resolve and more a routine part of the “Risk Factors” section that U.S. IPO prospectuses customarily include. Thread opinion split between those who saw the warning as “a pre-emptive excuse to cushion the stock price” and those who took it as a genuine alarm bell. There’s also an easy detail to overlook: people tend to picture “human extinction” as the loss of financial assets, but some commenters pointed out that it’s actually the depletion of resources and energy that would directly bring modern civilization to a halt — meaning the same phrase “catastrophic risk” can mean very different scenarios depending on who’s using it.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Science News+) thread: [AI] U.S. firm Anthropic warns of “catastrophic risk” to humanity ahead of major stock listing
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