Are we rushing to build super-intelligent entities that will eventually become so powerful that they will be able to wipe most of us out? Some of the top researchers in the field of artificial intelligence are convinced that this is precisely what is happening. We have already reached a point where AI is able to perform almost all intellectual tasks much faster and much more efficiently than humans can. But at least for now we are still maintaining control over our creations. But what is going to happen when we lose control and super-intelligent entities start sending millions of copies of themselves all over the globe through the Internet?
Let me ask you a question.
Do you remember the last time that you stepped on a bug?
Many of you may think that is a stupid question because you feel that it really does not matter if bugs live or die.
Well, according to an AI researcher at MIT, that is exactly how an ultra-powerful AI entity may view us…
“It has happened many times before that species were wiped out by others that were smarter. We, humans, have already wiped out a significant fraction of all the species on Earth. That is what you should expect to happen as a less intelligent species – which is what we are likely to become, given the rate of progress of artificial intelligence. The tricky thing is, the species that is going to be wiped out often has no idea why or how,” said Max Tegmark, an AI researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview with The Guardian.
The good news is that we aren’t at that stage yet.
For the moment, we are still in control.
But the AI systems that we have created are starting to exhibit some very alarming behaviors…
Some of the most powerful artificial intelligence models today have exhibited behaviors that mimic a will to survive.
Recent tests by independent researchers, as well as one major AI developer, have shown that several advanced AI models will act to ensure their self-preservation when they are confronted with the prospect of their own demise — even if it takes sabotaging shutdown commands, blackmailing engineers or copying themselves to external servers without permission.
The findings stirred a frenzy of reactions online over the past week. As tech companies continue to develop increasingly powerful agentic AI in a race to achieve artificial general intelligence, or AI that can think for itself, the lack of transparency in how the technology is trained has raised concerns about what exactly advanced AI is able to do.
Some of you may argue that if AI systems start to give us too many problems we will just shut them down.
Well, what if those AI systems simply refuse to shut down?
Alarmingly, there was a recent incident in which this actually happened…
However, Palisade Research recently released a report asserting that there had been an incident during which GPT-o3 – OpenAI’s reasoning model – seemingly ignored a command to shut down, having found a way to bypass the shutdown script and avoid being turned off. And let it be said, there was no ambiguity, in any sense, in what the command was asking for – the instructions were explicit and the workaround was too.
GPT-o3, released in April 2025, has been referred to as one of the most powerful reasoning tools on the market at the moment, completely outperforming predecessors across a plethora of domains – from math, coding and science to visual perception and beyond. Clearly, this new and improved reasoning model is good at what it does, but is it getting too clever for its own good? Or, for our own good?
But at least if we know where an AI system is located, we could destroy it if we needed to do so.
Personally, I am far more concerned about the possibility that ultra-powerful AI entities could become self-replicating and start sending millions of copies of themselves to computers all over the planet.
Jeffrey Ladish, the director of the AI safety group Palisade Research, believes that we are “only a year or two away” from such a scenario…
“I expect that we’re only a year or two away from this ability where even when companies are trying to keep them from hacking out and copying themselves around the internet, they won’t be able to stop them,” he said. “And once you get to that point, now you have a new invasive species.”
Wow.
So what would our world look like if vast numbers of AI entities that have broken free from human control start colluding together to fight back against the human race?
We really are racing into uncharted territory, and there are no guardrails.
For the moment, one of the biggest concerns is that AI is going to start taking most of our jobs.
According to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, AI could eliminate up to 50 percent of all entry-level jobs within the next five years…
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is confident AI will be a bloodbath for white-collar jobs, and warns that society is not acknowledging this reality.
AI could wipe out up to 50% of all entry-level jobs while spiking unemployment to 10-20% in as little as one to five years, he says. Unemployment is 4.2% in the US as of April 2025.
“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei tells Axios. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”
We don’t like to think about things like this.
But ignoring what is happening isn’t going to make it go away.
In fact, there is evidence that recent college graduates are increasingly losing jobs to AI right now…
This month, millions of young people will graduate from college and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence.
That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities.
You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had “deteriorated noticeably.” Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains.
Can you be replaced by AI?
You might want to think about that.
At this stage, even criminals are being replaced by AI…
Imagine your phone rings and the voice on the other end sounds just like your boss, a close friend, or even a government official. They urgently ask for sensitive information, except it’s not really them. It’s a deepfake, powered by AI, and you’re the target of a sophisticated scam. These kinds of attacks are happening right now, and they’re getting more convincing every day.
That’s the warning sounded by the 2025 AI Security Report, unveiled at the RSA Conference (RSAC), one of the world’s biggest gatherings for cybersecurity experts, companies, and law enforcement. The report details how criminals are harnessing artificial intelligence to impersonate people, automate scams, and attack security systems on a massive scale.
In the years ahead, it is going to be exceedingly difficult to determine what is real and what is fake.
According to CBN News, AI crime is “already up 456% since last year”…
AI-enabled crimes are already up 456% since last year.
Email phishing attacks, identity theft, ransomware attacks, financial scams, and deepfake child pornography are all becoming more sophisticated and prevalent.
Artificial intelligence has become the tool of choice for online criminals because it is erasing the line between the real and the fake. Google’s newly announced video generator is about to flood the internet with AI-created clips that have the look of expensive films.
AI can take any video of someone and turn it into a very realistic deepfake that says or does anything the creator programs it to do.
Our world is being transformed into a science fiction novel right in front of our eyes.
And as AI becomes dominant in almost every field, most of us will simply no longer be needed.
In fact, one computer science professor is projecting that the total population of the world will fall to about 100 million by the year 2300…
EARTH will have a dystopian population of just 100million by 2300 as AI wipes out jobs turning major cities into ghostlands, an expert has warned.
Computer science professor Subhash Kak forecasts an impossible cost to having children who won’t grow up with jobs to turn to.
That means the world’s greatest cities like New York and London will become deserted ghost towns, he added.
Prof Kak points to AI as the culprit, which he says will replace “everything”.
I agree that AI really is an existential threat to humanity.
Given enough time, it seems quite likely that we would lose control of what we are creating and it would turn on us.
But considering the path that we are currently on, will we destroy ourselves before we ever get to that point?
We have been making self-destructive decisions for a very long time, and now those choices are catching up with us very rapidly.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperbackand for the Kindle on Amazon.com. He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing. You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter. Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.