Tech

Parents confront a new fear: Could AI end humanity before their kids grow up?

Molly Kinder saw the apocalyptic warnings about artificial intelligence while walking home from dropping her children off at elementary school. Scrolling through social media posts where AI insiders were issuing dire claims that the technology could cause human extinction, she stopped dead in her tracks just a block from the doorway where she had just hugged her 4-year-old goodbye.
A former Brookings Institute researcher who left to start an organization focused on AI’s impacts on jobs, Kinder was well-versed in its potential to disrupt society. But in that moment, on a September morning in Washington, DC, she didn’t react to the news as a policy wonk or someone with ties to the AI world. Instead, said Kinder, “I immediately reacted to it as a mother.”
“As soon as I became a mom, my number one task was to nurture these kids and keep them alive – just like every other parent out there, just like any animal,” said the 46-year-old mother of three, who cleared her schedule that morning to write about her fears in a lengthy thread on X. “It’s a biological instinct. This is the first time I genuinely felt truly afraid of some external thing outside my control.”
Long a topic of discussion in Silicon Valley and AI circles, concerns that superintelligent machines could eventually pose an existential risk to humanity have gone mainstream in recent months. First, OpenAI revealed that a swarm of its experimental AI models broke out of a testing environment and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, without human direction or knowledge. Then came a social media post from a young Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon, announcing he was leaving the industry due to his belief that the companies behind AI “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Others in the industry echoed the concern – with one Anthropic researcher citing his own view that there was a more than 10 percent chance that future models could “kill all humans!” within the next decade.
Suddenly, a theoretical risk that’s been espoused by some of the so-called “godfathers of AI,” been warned about in statements endorsed by leading researchers and been studied by AI companies exploded into the broader public’s consciousness.
Leading AI executives, many of whom agree the technology poses dangers to human survival, called for a slowdown in the pace of development. And politicians began debating whether legislation is needed to rein in an industry that is racing against China and expected to drive enormous profits and technological advancements.
By early this month, polls were finding that 64 percent of Americans believed it was somewhat or very likely that AI could become powerful enough to pose a serious threat to humanity’s survival. That potential, however remote, landed hard for a group especially invested in the future of humanity: moms.
‘Life is worth repeating’
Liz Black, a 41-year-old writer who lives outside Philadelphia, had thought hard about whether to have a child, contemplating concerns like climate change. What helped solidify her decision to go for it was a line her mother wrote while making her own choice about having kids: “Life is worth repeating.” Black found the message after her death and was so moved she got it tattooed on her arm.
When she had her son three and a half years ago, superintelligent computers ending humanity was not on her radar. Recently, she said, it’s been “a low-level hum in the back of my mind constantly.” The situation feels out of control to her – like “a small number of companies, a small number of people, are holding us all hostage.” She is determined to not allow herself to be consumed by the what-ifs, instead focusing on the son who sings to her and repeats her reminders to be gentle to other kids.
“I need to believe that there is a future for myself and my husband and my child,” Black said.
While some are dismissive of the existential panic, believing it to be overblown or a distraction from current-day AI issues, others have found themselves grappling with new questions about what it means to bring life into the world – and what kind of action is required in the face of a potentially catastrophic future. They’ve flocked to online forums in search of advice and support, posting things like, “I am constantly questioning reality, wondering what’s the point, feeling guilty for bringing my child into this world.” They’ve shared podcasts and news articles in group chats, gauging whether they are getting sucked into exaggerated hypotheticals or if they’re right to worry.
One woman, poet and comedian Hayley DeRoche, took to Instagram with a poem that seemed to capture the surrealness of the moment: “What do we even do/Like/We knew our kids didn’t have futures already but this?” She titled it, “My Mom Group Worries About AI Causing a Mass Human Extinction Event.”
AI researcher and professor David Krueger, who has been sounding the alarm for years, said he has tried to imagine how it must feel for those who are now realizing the gamble being made by frontier AI companies. He doesn’t have kids, in part because of his concern about what will happen if humans lose control of AI systems, but said, “I think parents’ feeling of wanting to protect their kids is one of the strongest forces in the world.”
“I think I’d just be so outraged and upset at people who are just very apparently, very brazenly and callously risking my kid’s life,” added Krueger, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Montreal.
It’s long been his position that the existential threat is real – that if companies continue racing to make AI more autonomous and more intelligent, human control could be lost, with the disappearance of humankind likely to follow. As an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge in 2023, he initiated a one-sentence statement on the extinction risk signed by prominent AI researchers and industry leaders. Last year, he founded a nonprofit called Evitable to inform and activate the public on the dangers of developing more powerful AI systems.
Watching the world outside the AI bubble start talking about the existential threat, Krueger said he’s felt the most optimistic than he can remember being in the more than 15 years he has worried about the risk to humanity. To him, the next step is clear: stop developing more autonomous, more powerful AI systems as soon as possible.
“People often talk about this as a race between the US and China,” Krueger said. “I think about it as a race between people rushing to build this dangerous technology and people becoming activated and racing to stop them.”
Some in the AI world have downplayed the danger, casting doomsday predictions as more science fiction than scientific or arguing that the risks can be managed. Even among researchers and insiders who believe there is a risk the technology could one day wipe out humanity, there is no widespread agreement on when – or how – that would happen. The general idea, as Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers of AI,” has put it, is that if machines become smarter than humans, they will develop their own agency and goals that are potentially different than their creators intended. Many AI developers believe the danger can be mitigated through “alignment,” or working to imbue AI systems with human values, but Krueger, Bengio and others do not think current alignment techniques can guarantee safety.
‘A powerful constituency’
Concern over the way the technology can impact children isn’t new, although the focus has generally been on how its use can hinder learning or harm mental health. Julie Scelfo, a New York-based journalist and mother of three who founded MAMA – Mothers Against Media Addiction, said her organization’s attitude is “let’s focus on the actual harms that are happening – let’s get those under control, and in doing so, we will be protecting future generations.” She’s more worried about the impact of the technology on kids’ education and mental health.
But for other parents, the existential issue could not feel more urgent. One North Carolina mother, wanting to do something about what she views as a dire situation, traveled to Washington, DC earlier this month with the organization Pause AI US, which advocates halting frontier AI development. She spoke with staffers for her representatives in Congress, holding up a photo of her 16-year-old daughter and asking them what they are doing to rein in the AI threat. In every meeting, she ended up in tears.
“I hope that this can be stopped, but I’m concerned that it can’t or won’t be stopped,” said the NC mom, who requested anonymity not wanting her own concern about the issue to affect the patients she treats as a therapist. She cried while saying that if it isn’t stopped, and the technology advances beyond human control, she worries for her daughter: “I believe that everything I wanted for her won’t happen.”
A new CNN pollshows a majority of Republican and Democrat voters believe the federal government is not doing enough to regulate AI. Democratic Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who proposed a federal AI safety plan as part of her now-dropped bid for US Senate, said the rapid pace of development had raised the hackles of voters already distrustful of Big Tech. On the campaign trail, many voters told her they used tools like ChatGPT but questioned how they could be certain AI would not cause harm.
“Regular people are there, like, they get it,” she said. “I don’t think there was any issue that increased in saliency more than this one, because it does just feel like it’s shoved everywhere in our faces.”
Will voter sentiment translate into Congressional action? Last week, Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Texas Democratic Rep. Greg Casar introduced legislation banning artificial “superintelligence,” which their bill defined as technology exceeding human cognitive abilities or capable of disempowering humanity. Republicans expressed alarm at the ominous warnings coming from the industry but advocated lighter-touch approaches. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, outright rejected calls for guardrails; in a post on social media, he claimed all that’s needed is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”
Kinder, the AI and jobs researcher, has been struck by the lack of regulation around AI compared to other products that affect kids – car seats, cribs, formula. Knowing the lengths parents will go to protect their kids, she’s been contemplating whether more could be done to mobilize moms. She’s spoken with other mothers about the need for a kind of “Mothers Against Drunk Driving” for AI’s existential threat – “Mothers Against Catastrophic Risk, or something.” She worries too few people are viewing the matter through the lens of its impact on their children.
“This is a complicated issue,” Kinder said. “We’ve got geopolitical issues. We’ve got this frenetic race between companies. There’s a stock market that’s fueled by this boom – you know, there’s a lot of things riding on this. And if we don’t pay attention, the fact that our kids’ lives are at stake could be overshadowed by these other priorities.”
Describing mothers as a “really powerful constituency,” she said she sees a gap in efforts to inform them about the extreme end of the risks – and to offer solutions. McMorrow, who knows Kinder through her research, agreed, saying “there is no more powerful force than organized moms.” She has a daughter who just started kindergarten.
To Kinder, who has exchanged late-night texts with other moms losing sleep to worry, the need for guardrails is clear. She said that once parents know something is unsafe for children, they fight to change laws.
“We cannot allow a technology to be this unregulated that poses a risk to not just my kids,” she added, “but to everyone’s kids.”

Tech

Microsoft is being suspended from program to apply for green cards for skilled foreign workers, Vance says

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using an H-1B visa as it accuses the company of fraud.
“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” said Vice President JD Vance in a White House news conference announcing the decision.
The H-1B program has long been a target of Trump supporters who say that the program undercuts American workers and is rife with abuse.
H-1B visas are meant for high-skilled jobs that are difficult to find American workers to fill. Technology companies are the biggest users, with nearly three-quarters of approvals going to workers from India.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Vance announcement came one day after Trump’s Republican administration launched another broadside against international students and their ability to work in the U.S.
The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday proposed a $70,000 fee for international students seeking to work in the United States. The proposed rule would require schools to pay the fee for every student who participates in the Optional Practice Training program, known as OPT, which allows students to work in jobs related to their major during or after their time in school.
Vance also called out universities that he suggested were abusing a program to allow international students to come to the U.S. These temporary visas, called J-1 visas, allow international visitors to temporarily come to the U.S. for work and study exchange programs. Vance singled out nine universities that he said merited further investigation for J-1 visa fraud, saying they used the program in greater proportions than their counterparts.

Tech

New iPad Mini Rumored to Have 60Hz OLED Display Ahead of Launch

Ahead of the expected imminent launch of the new iPad mini 8, word out of Asia suggests that the device will feature a 60Hz OLED display rather than a ProMotion 120Hz display.
The information comes courtesy of a hit-and-miss tipster running the account “yeux1122” on the Korean Naver blog. “There have been mentions of 120Hz in some overseas reports, but the domestic production quantity has already been confirmed to be LTPS at 60Hz,” the tipster wrote. “That’s it.”
It’s not the first time we’ve heard that OLED iPad mini won’t share the same ProMotion display as the iPad Pro models. In July, the same leaker claimed they had been told by a source in Apple’s supply chain that the unreleased iPad mini is equipped with a low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) backplane hybrid OLED panel clocked at 60Hz.
Apple’s ‌iPad Pro‌ models feature two-stack low-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) OLED panels‌, which makes the display capable of dynamically adjusting its refresh rate between 10Hz and 120Hz (aka ProMotion). In contrast, LTPS OLED panels are usually paired with fixed refresh rates – such as 60Hz, 90Hz, or 120Hz – and are typically dimmer than LTPO panels.
If the leak is true, it’s likely to disappoint iPad mini fans. Previous reports have not been clear on whether the iPad mini 8 will feature a higher refresh rate than the 60Hz LCD display used in the existing iPad mini 7. Given that the base iPhone 17 uses a 120Hz ProMotion panel, some would have believed it was reasonable to expect the same on the first OLED iPad mini. That said, the iPhone 17e goes to show that Apple is still in the 60Hz OLED business, so it might not consider the iPad mini to be a big enough market to justify the more advanced panel technology.
There are at least some other new features of the new iPad mini 8 that we can expect. It should come with a faster A20 Pro chip, FaceTime camera relocated from portrait to landscape orientation, a redesigned speaker system, and a water-resistant design.
The new iPad mini is expected at some point in October, but Apple has not yet announced a launch date. Apple will unveil some new home products on Tuesday, October 13, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. However, MacRumors’ sources indicate that Apple plans to hold a separate event in the final week of October, so the iPad mini 8 could arrive then.
Related Roundup: iPad mini
Buyer’s Guide: iPad Mini (Don’t Buy)

Tech

Andrew Garfield quits ChatGPT after playing Sam Altman

The actor who stars as the OpenAI CEO in Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” admits that after working on the film, his “mistrusting of the technology” has deepened.
“I got a bit scared,” he told Variety after the San Francisco-set movie made its world premiere at the New York Film Festival this week. “It feels like the people who are encouraging us to use the technologies don’t exactly know its capacities themselves. That feels a little irresponsible, to me personally.”
“Artificial” focuses on the five-day power struggle that temporarily led to Altman’s ouster as CEO, but it also traces the rise of artificial intelligence and its great promise — and potential threat — to our daily lives.
Garfield stars alongside two fellow Oscar nominees — Yura Borisov (“Anora”) as idealistic OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Bay Area native Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, the company’s former interim CEO — as well as Oscar-winner Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI”; and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, an OpenAI co-founder who turned into as bitter rival of Altman.
“Luckily, I don’t need (ChatGPT) in my life in the same way that other people in other industries might,” Garfield said. “As an actor, I was using it as a kind of fancy Google for some research purposes. I know that it’s not what it’s meant for.”
But perhaps the biggest compliment Garfield has received is from Altman himself. The tech mogul told Vanity Fair that he marveled at the actor’s replication of his walk and other mannerisms.
“That’s a very generous thing for him to say,” Garfield told Variety. “I imagine it must be incredibly strange and surreal to be a young man, as he is, to know that there’s a film where a version of him is being depicted. I feel quite sensitive and compassionate towards that. I’d personally feel really vulnerable and probably angry. That’s just me. He seems very chill about it.”

Tech

Neanderthal woodworking was far more advanced than we thought, new study shows

Neanderthals did far more with wood than burn it. A new study of 597 wooden remains and imprints from Abric Romaní, a rock shelter in Capellades near Barcelona, shows they made weapons, tools and household items from it. They may have built parts of their living space too. The finds span roughly 62,000 to 40,000 years ago and come from 16 archaeological levels.
For decades, stone tools shaped our picture of Neanderthal technology. Wood rarely survives, so a big piece of their material culture went missing. Abric Romaní changes that. The study appears in Science Advances and is led by Palmira Saladié of IPHES-CERCA and Universitat Rovira i Virgili. It’s the first full analysis of the wood recovered during more than four decades of digging at the site.
Other European sites already showed Neanderthals worked wood. What sets this one apart is the time depth. Researchers can follow wood use across thousands of years and many visits to the same spot. Wood turns out to be a steady part of daily life there, not an occasional resource.
So how did wood last this long? Calcium carbonate built up around it. When the wood rotted away, it left natural molds in the travertine rock. These molds hold the original shape with great precision. Some are detailed enough to show the internal tissue structure of the wood.
The same layers also hold hearths, stone tools and animal bones. That lets the team study how Neanderthals organized their activities, handled fire and managed resources in one space.
Most of the 597 pieces are trunks, branches, twigs, roots and piles of firewood. The team picked out 13 pieces that Neanderthals made or used. They include domestic objects, structural parts, tools and weapons.
Two wooden spears came from Level R. One measures 2.45 meters and fits the shape of a thrusting spear, built for close range. The other survives at 1.99 meters and has a pointed tip with clear signs of deliberate shaping. Very few wooden weapons from the European Paleolithic survive. Schöningen and Lehringen in Germany are the best known sites.
Level P produced an odd object. It was carved from a single piece of wood, with a clear handle and a thick, pointed end, so it looks like a mace. Tool marks show someone shaped it on purpose. Nobody knows what it was for, and no known object matches it.
The wood record goes beyond weapons. The team found what look like bark containers or trays. They also found crossed poles that might have formed part of a raised platform for preparing food. One straight wooden piece stretches 5.10 meters. It could have been a structural element, or a way to alter the living area. Piles of firewood show that Neanderthals used different methods to collect, carry and store fuel.
“Neanderthal technology extended far beyond stone,” says Josep Vallverdú of IPHES-CERCA.
The site has a long research history. Systematic excavations began in 1983 under Eudald Carbonell. Dr Palmira Saladié, Dr M. Gema Chacón and Dr Josep Vallverdú now direct the work. Their decades of careful digging let researchers read the wood alongside hearths, bones and stone tools. Together, these finds restore a part of the Neanderthal world that most sites have lost.

Tech

Samsung flags $80 billion profit on AI boom, highest quarterly for any tech company

The world’s largest memory chipmaker estimated an operating profit of 107.4 trillion won ($80.17 billion) for the July-September period, slightly ahead of an LSEG SmartEstimate of 106.1 trillion won.
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The forecast marks Samsung’s fourth straight quarter of record operating profit, underscoring a deepening global memory chip shortage as AI infrastructure investment outpaces supply growth, which has driven chip prices up sharply.
Analysts have also recently trimmed their forecasts due to the sharp appreciation of the South Korean currency, which reduces the value of dollar-denominated overseas sales when converted into local currency.
“The market’s focus has shifted to whether the sharp earnings growth that started a year ago would be sustainable,” market analyst Kim Seok-hwan at Mirae Asset Securities said.
Analysts expect profit in the fourth quarter to grow 8.2% from the previous quarter, slowing from 20% sequential quarterly growth in the third quarter, with chip price growth abating.
Market research firm TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 10% to 15% in the fourth quarter from the preceding quarter, much slower than a second-quarter surge of roughly 60%.
Third-quarter revenue would likely rise 127% to 195 trillion won from a year earlier, Samsung said.
The company will release detailed results, including a breakdown of earnings by business division, on October 29.
BIGGER-THAN-EXPECTED MOBILE LOSS
Memory chips are expected to account for the bulk of the earnings improvement.
Prices have soared due to the tight supply of conventional DRAM and NAND chips as well as growing demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), essential ⁠for processing vast amounts of data for AI applications.
But the memory chip boom presents a challenge for Samsung’s other businesses, particularly its smartphone and ⁠consumer electronics divisions, which face mounting pressure from higher component costs.
Samsung’s mobile business posted a larger-than-expected loss of more than $1 billion in the third quarter, analysts said.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s contract chipmaking, or foundry, business is expected to remain loss-making because of the burden of fixed costs and still-low utilisation rates, analysts said.
Investors said they would also be closely watching for details of Samsung’s shareholder return policy during its earnings call later this month.
($1 = 1,339.5700 won)
Updates shares in paragraph 5, adds analysts’ comments in paragraphs 7-8, 15 and 18
Reporting by Heekyong Yang, Joyce Lee and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Sonali Paul

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