Bill Maher closed out Friday’s “Real Time” with a dire warning about artificial intelligence, noting just how ominous its progression has been and asking why we’re even building a “super intelligence that can outthink us” — before addressing “another scary thing” about it.
“The people who run it, i.e., the people who run the world,” said Maher. “And it’s like five guys. Five guys who, between them and working as a team, couldn’t correctly read a social cue. I wouldn’t let these guys around a mixed drink, let alone my personal data.”
He said, “So, just to be clear, what we’re doing here, we’re letting a handful of hoodie-wearing, on-the-spectrum sociopaths, practically robots themselves, roll the dice on species extinction. You see an out-of-control robot and you run.”
Then came the punchline: “Mark Zuckerberg sees one and thinks, ‘Dad?’”
Photos on screen identified the five people in question as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, X CEO Elon Musk and Zuckerberg, who runs Meta. Maher spent his entire “New Rules” segment on their work.
“When the people who are making AI are scared of AI, it’s time to shut the whole thing down until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said, imitating President Donald Trump, adding he hopes aliens will “save us from ourselves” before AI becomes sentient.
Maher continued, “Because last week, Anthropic, one of the big AI developing companies, announced its newest version of Claude called Mythos, which they say has ‘capabilities substantially beyond those of any model we have previously trained.’”
The comedian noted that Mythos was developed to prevent cyber attacks and that it can thus “do the hacking” itself, which is why Anthropic won’t make it public and only release it to 40 large corporations — including Google, Apple and JPMorgan.
“You know, the good guys,” he joked.
Maher said Musk warned AI could be “more dangerous than nukes.” He noted it’s “already convinced people to kill themselves,” asking, “I mean, what was the plan? Just create an all-powerful, self-sustaining super intelligence that can outthink us and then see what happens?”
“Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, says that it’s not that far off when robots can build other robots and data centers that can build other data centers,” said Maher. “And then what? I keep asking this question. What do we do when everyone’s job gets taken?”
He noted Altman himself said in 2023 that he was “afraid” of what he was creating, that Musk admitted in 2018 that AI “scares the hell out of me” and that Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of AI, said last year there is a 10% to 20% chance that AI is “an extinction event.”
“We’re fucking around with something that has a 20% chance of extinction?” Maher asked.
He closed by stating that most people still think you can simply unplug something to stop AI from improving itself, but that all leading models will “fight back” and “blackmail you” if you try. He said “AI programs are geniuses,” but unfortunately, “also psychopaths.”
“In war games, they choose the nuclear option far more than humans do because they can only calculate,” said Maher, citing a recent study. “They have no humanity. They have no conscience. They don’t have that thing that gives human beings pause.”
He concluded, “AI is not like a human mother who mostly has an instinct so strong to protect the baby, she will sacrifice her own life for it. AI ain’t that kind of mother. It’s the psycho mom who drives the kids into a lake — where we’re all happily swimming.”
