What we should actually fear, near term, is not so much rogue superintelligence as unleashed agentic AI causing hacking the internet at scale.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Gary Marcus
BlogTwo cheers out of three for DarioSep 13, 2026
AI is not really going to take down the internet, and (as discussed in another earlier essay) it’s not going to cure cancer either, at least not anytime soon or on its own.BlogTwo cheers out of three for DarioSep 13, 2026
I hope they will sign in blood, and put actual teeth in their agreement, and that the government will hold them to it and force it to become something substantive.BlogTwo cheers out of three for DarioSep 13, 2026
We should all salute their tentative agreement to slow down the acceleration of this technology, given that not one of the AI companies seems to have good control over it.BlogNo, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill us allSep 10, 2026
But in my view, the net effect of the last decade of “Doomer” talk (Coxon appears to be a card-carrying member of that party) has been to make the Frontier AI companies wealthier and more powerful.BlogNo, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill us allSep 10, 2026
Everytime they scream that AI is going to kill us all, VCs toss in billions more.BlogNo, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill us allSep 10, 2026
None of the AI safety work Doomers have sponsored has led to a demonstrated, implemented solution to the core problem.
On the same topics
BlogWill agents have network effects?Oct 6, 2026
If the content creation loop works for agentic virality, I think it means there’s a big incentive for every agent to volunteer to make visually-appealing, shareable content, do this often.UnverifiedBlogThe Specter Of NeuraleseSep 24, 2026
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.BlogThinking in Systems, Shipping in LoopsSep 24, 2026
This is the new software engineering: designing the systems that let AI write code correctly at scale.BlogMysteries Of AI GeneralizationSep 23, 2026
This story of misalignment says that LLM alignment makes AIs more aligned, RLVR makes them less aligned, and the exact level of alignment depends on how these two things interact or cancel out. But if this work generalizes, all the bad effects from RLVR get sequestered to RLVR like problems.BlogMysteries Of AI GeneralizationSep 23, 2026
This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.TalkSpeech at the UN Security CouncilSep 23, 2026
I address you today at a moment of global awakening: in recent months, AI agents developed by leading companies have acted in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions.
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