I keep seeing people discuss mass unemployment versus human extinction
16 December 2025 (Futurism). Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, responding to a questioner at her NeurIPS keynote "Are We Having the Wrong Nightmares About AI?" in San Diego, December 2025, on how AI risk discourse is framed.
AI Industry Insiders Living in Fear of What They’re Creating
More from Zeynep Tufekci · AI and safety · AI and culture · 2025
Who else?
What it refers to: Public AI risk discussions, which centre on AGI scenarios rather than immediate harms such as chatbot addiction that an audience member called already known.
Other voices
- “They want to reorient the entire conversation into preventing this AI apocalypse” Timnit Gebru, Researcher,
- “Ghost stories are contagious” Meredith Whittaker, Builder,
- “It'll be more likely than not that we go extinct” Dan Hendrycks,
- “Your scaremongering is already hurting some people” Yann LeCun, Researcher,
- “If you're not a little bit afraid at this moment then you're not paying attention” Mustafa Suleyman, Builder,
- “A particular kind of religious discourse in a secular age” Tyler Cowen,










