We’re all probably feeling a little anxious about AI.

It’s horrible for the environment, is used as an excuse to fire workers, floods the internet with misinformation and slop, entrenches government surveillance, and appears to be driving people into psychosis. 

And so, at a time when many college students are dropping out to join AI startups, one former MIT student says she called it quits because she’s afraid of something altogether more catastrophic: that an artificial general intelligence (AGI), or superhuman AI, will completely wipe out the human race, Forbes reports.

“I was concerned I might not be alive to graduate because of AGI,” Alice Blair, who enrolled at the university in 2023, told the publication. “I think in a large majority of the scenarios, because of the way we are working towards AGI, we get human extinction.”

Blair now works as a technical writer at the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, and has no plans to go back to MIT. She joined, hoping to meet other people interested in making AI safe, and apparently was disappointed.

“I predict that my future lies out in the real world,” she told Forbes.

Nikola Jurković, a Harvard alum who served at his school’s AI safety club, is sympathetic to the idea.

“If your career is about to be automated by the end of the decade, then every year spent in college is one year subtracted from your short career,” he told Forbes. “I personally think AGI is maybe four years away and full automation of the economy is maybe five or six years away.”

Building an AGI, a system that matches or surpasses human intelligence, is much of the AI industry’s endgame. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the recent launch of its poorly-received AI model GPT-5 a major stepping stone towards AGI, even going as far as to call it “generally intelligent.”

Many experts are skeptical, however, that we’re anywhere near building such a powerful AI model, and point to recent signs that improvements to the tech are hitting a wall.

“It is extremely unlikely that AGI will come in the next five years,” Gary Marcus, an AI researcher and outspoken critic of the industry, told Forbes. “It’s just marketing hype to pretend otherwise when so many core problems (like hallucinations and reasoning errors) remain unsolved.”

And while there are very real forms of harm that AI can cause, outright extinction is a little far-fetched, Marcus said. 

In fact, the AI industry probably wants you to buy into AI doomsday prophesying. Altman and other tech CEOs raise these risks themselves. Doing so creates the impression that the tech is far more capable than it currently is, and allows these companies to control the narrative around how the tech should be regulated. 

And if you’re envisioning an apocalypse like in “The Matrix” movies — human enslavement at the hands of machine intelligences that rebelled against their creators — you may be ignoring the very mundane forms of harm it’s already causing, like job automation and the gutting of the environment.

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