Pointless privilege? MIT student drops out over fears AGI will cause human extinction

An MIT student dropped out of college in 2024, citing fears that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will cause human extinction before she can graduate. Alice Blair, who enrolled at MIT in 2023, now works as a technical writer at the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing AI risks, and represents a growing concern among some students about AI’s existential risks, even as the broader tech industry continues pushing toward AGI development.

What she’s saying: Blair’s decision was driven by genuine fear about humanity’s survival timeline in relation to AGI development.

• “I was concerned I might not be alive to graduate because of AGI,” Blair told Forbes. “I think in a large majority of the scenarios, because of the way we are working towards AGI, we get human extinction.”
• “I predict that my future lies out in the real world,” she explained about her decision not to return to MIT.

Others share similar concerns: Some students and recent graduates are questioning traditional education timelines given their AGI predictions.

• Nikola Jurković, a Harvard alum who served at his school’s AI safety club, believes career automation is imminent: “If your career is about to be automated by the end of the decade, then every year spent in college is one year subtracted from your short career.”
• “I personally think AGI is maybe four years away and full automation of the economy is maybe five or six years away,” Jurković said.

The industry perspective: Major AI companies continue promoting AGI as their ultimate goal, with OpenAI leading the charge.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently called the launch of GPT-5 a major stepping stone toward AGI, even describing it as “generally intelligent.”
• This messaging aligns with the broader AI industry’s positioning of AGI as an achievable near-term objective.

In plain English: AGI refers to AI systems that can match or surpass human intelligence across all tasks—essentially creating machines that can think, learn, and solve problems as well as or better than humans in every area.

Expert skepticism: AI researchers challenge both the timeline and extinction concerns surrounding AGI development.

• “It is extremely unlikely that AGI will come in the next five years,” Gary Marcus, an AI researcher and industry critic, told Forbes. “It’s just marketing hype to pretend otherwise when so many core problems (like hallucinations and reasoning errors) remain unsolved.”
• Marcus also dismissed extinction fears as far-fetched compared to AI’s current, more mundane harms like job automation and environmental damage.

Why this matters: The narrative around AI extinction risks may serve corporate interests rather than reflecting genuine technological capabilities.

• Tech CEOs like Altman actively promote doomsday scenarios, which creates the impression that AI is more capable than it currently is while allowing companies to control regulatory conversations.
• This focus on apocalyptic scenarios may distract from AI’s immediate, measurable harms including job displacement, environmental costs, misinformation proliferation, and increased surveillance.