Today’s AI won’t achieve superintelligence. But catastrophic risk is real | Sunita Verma
A commentary by Sunita Verma argues that current AI systems are unlikely to reach superintelligence, but that the same technical constraints making superintelligence improbable also create serious near-term dangers. The piece contends that existing regulatory frameworks, including a recent White House accord, fall short of addressing those concrete risks.
Why this matters: The superintelligence debate is doing something unfortunate. It pulls attention toward a dramatic, distant scenario while the harms available right now — bias, manipulation, opaque decision-making, misuse — keep accumulating. When regulators and company leaders spend their energy on extinction-level speculation, the people most likely to be hurt by today's AI lose ground. The argument here is not that catastrophic risk is fiction. It is that framing everything around a future threat is a convenient way to avoid accountability for what these systems are doing today.
Who should care: Lawyers · Compliance · General readers · AI governance · Policy
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