AI Could Destroy Humanity... Should Investors Be Worried?

Dan Coatsworth (0:09)

Hi, welcome to the AJ Bell Money & Markets podcast. I'm Dan Coatsworth, and joining me today is Sarah Coles. Hi there, Sarah.

Sarah Coles (0:15)

Hi, Dan. It's good to be back. So this is actually my first podcast after the summer break. And it does feel like I'm coming back to quite a lot, because there's just so much to talk about, including rather alarmingly, the end of the world.

Dan Coatsworth (0:27)

I know, tech experts are now talking about whether AI can kill off humanity. So with that in mind, we're going to chat a lot about AI in the show. I also spoke to tech journalist, Will Guyatt, about whether AI can actually play a positive role for investors. We're also going to explore what else has been moving on the markets, including headline grabbing, bond sell-off.

Sarah Coles (0:48)

Yeah, and on the back of your really interesting chat with Danny last time about student finances, we actually are going to hear from a couple of listeners about the approaches that they've taken. And obviously, it's something that I know I'm facing this year, and it's weighing quite heavily on my mind at the moment. Plus, I've got some less cheery news about what the new term can mean for relationships and how to protect your finances from the fallout of it.

Dan Coatsworth (1:09)

There's been a lot of interesting data out this week, including wage data, that gives us an idea about how the state pension will rise next April. So we're going to have a look at the implications of that. There's also some savings data out. So we'll have a look at the world of ISAs with that. And of course, we've got inflation, but just as we're recording this, we've revealed that it's gone up by 3.1% over the last month.

Sarah Coles (1:29)

I have to say, I think now my teenage son has returned, my spending has definitely gone up more than 3.1%.

But that's just me. And finally, there's a new report into the gender pensions gap. So we'll explore the findings and share some tips of what people can do to boost their pension if they're away from work or working part time. So there's loads to discuss, but we really should start with the end of the world. It does feel like we should avoid having that elephant in the room for too long. So senior tech bros have been warning that AI can be getting too powerful too quickly and could wipe us all out. So has this had an impact on the sector for investors?

Dan Coatsworth (2:03)

I mean, it's like, it's pretty alarming stuff. So this is sort of, I'm sure most people listening or watching this podcast will have sort of caught this news. But if not, we had the boss of Anthropic, which is one of the AI platforms that owns Claude, coming out and basically urging all the AI big platforms to voluntarily work together, try and set some standards. And what it was is the crux of this sort of thing was he's warning that AI technology is actually advancing dramatically faster since the summer and could be capable of taking over the entire internet and causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage in the next six to 12 months. So that's about as alarming as you can get. And we've got a chap called Jacob Coxon, who's a researcher at Anthropic had said last week that he'd actually resigned from the company because he said the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. So how on earth do we deal with all that information? So of course, this has naturally led to people debating about should there be a kill switch if everyone's now thinking that what if these AI platforms get out of hand and cause terrible damage? Donald Trump has come out and said, of course we don't need all this stuff. Just let them do their thing. NVIDIA boss Jensen Huang, he's come out and dismissed the idea of really tough AI regulation. And he was talking at a conference in San Francisco saying, companies should be responsible for the safety of their own tools and they should decide themselves whether they should release or not release dangerous products. So I think that obviously when you've got the boss of the person who, as the company is at the center of supplying chips into the AI industry, they're coming out and being quite relaxed. The president of the United States is being quite relaxed. He's like, who's right or wrong here?

Now, Jensen Hwang did say, he said, run as fast as you can, but if you feel that if you're not in control, take a pause. Obviously, that's a sort of a sensual approach, but Sarah, I wanted to mention this on the podcast. I don't know whether anyone obviously watching it has caught on to it. There's another company called TSMC, which is Taiwan Semiconductors. This is the world's largest AI chip manufacturer. Someone there came out and said it was basically comparing AI to a three-year-old Superman. Basically saying AI can be quite powerful, but doesn't know what kind of damage it can inflate. And I thought that was a pretty accurate description.