Worried AI Will Kill Everyone? A Former FTC Commissioner Says Ignore the Doomers
A former US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner has dismissed the wave of synthetic intelligence (AI) doom warnings popping out of the largest labs.
Alvaro Bedoya served on the fee from 2022 till his disputed elimination in 2025. His submit lands in the center of a public argument over how briskly AI ought to transfer.
Humanity Has Survived Worse
Bedoya lists what people have already lived by.
“AI won’t eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (thus far) the creation of nuclear weapons. Anyone who’s loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction shouldn’t be taken critically,” he said.
He rejects the concept that he’s an AI booster or that the expertise is innocent. His goal is the use of AI extinction language. Bedoya calls it a strawman deployed to justify a cartel of billionaire AI firms.
He supplied a take a look at for sincerity. Anyone who actually believed the product may kill everybody would halt operations and name the police.
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A 2014 Memo Already Answered This
Anthropic chief Dario Amodei asked Washington for a narrow antitrust waiver so labs may maintain security talks. It sits inside the second of three steps in the pacing plan Sam Altman endorsed final week. Elon Musk backed the concept, too.
Bedoya says they by no means needed to ask. He factors to a joint coverage statement the Justice Department and the FTC issued on April 10, 2014. It stated antitrust shouldn’t be, and shouldn’t be, a roadblock to authentic cybersecurity data sharing.
“I’m, somewhat, explaining that the firms have, proper now and yesterday, the means to coordinate to cease any security and well being dangers. Antitrust is not any barrier to that,” Bedoya wrote on X
Safety coordination is authorized, he defined. Coordination that locks cheaper rivals out of the market shouldn’t be.
He tied that threat to the economics. The largest labs are burning money with out reaching profitability. Open weight fashions undercut them on worth.
“The panic of particular person workers could also be honest if misguided, however the strikes by their CEOs to attain some type of broad antitrust waiver or exemption needs to be meet with deep skepticism in mild of the economics of the trade and the risk they face from open fashions,” he added.
Altman has reached an identical conclusion from the different aspect. In an extended submit on X, he stated OpenAI doesn’t imagine it wants to attend for an antitrust exemption or laws to begin the work.
He nonetheless desires a federal framework setting constant security necessities for frontier labs. Where authorities assist is required, he stated, is worldwide coordination.
That skepticism runs towards every week of warnings from inside the labs themselves. The debate traces again to September 9, when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit. Lawmakers began advocating for a ban on superintelligence. Bridgewater funding chief Greg Jensen has additionally warned that nothing changes until AI kills somebody.
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