Gebru tells Wired AI 'machine-god' talk is a distraction

Timnit Gebru, founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute, told WIRED's Lauren Goode that the extinction talk dominating AI policy debate is a diversion. "This machine-god narrative is, in my opinion, meant to distract us," she said, pointing to harms she considers already in the world: autonomous weapons used in warfare, climate damage worsened by data-centre demand, and bosses invoking AI to justify layoffs.

Asked to walk through, step by step, how AI would actually push humanity to extinction, Gebru answered, "I can't really envision it." Her list of what she does count as existential is specific. "What's really existential is AI powering autonomous weapons, killing machines, that are actually being used in warfare," she told Goode. On the workforce question she is blunter: "Bosses are using AI as an excuse to get rid of their pesky workers."

Gebru's critique of the current AI mood borrows theological vocabulary. She has previously described the push for superintelligence as "almost like a secular religion, and these are true believers," a frame she extends in the Backchannel interview by casting the industry as "a mix of cults" and comparing forecast-mongers to a preacher "who says the end times is coming."

On who is accountable when AI systems cause harm, she rejects the premise that the machines themselves are agents. "Can a bridge decide to collapse?" she asks — the responsibility, in her telling, sits with the people who build and deploy the systems, not with the systems.