Humanity in the Age of AI: Reassessing 2025's Existential-Risk Narratives

TL;DR

This paper critically examines recent existential-risk narratives about superintelligent AI, arguing that empirical evidence from 2023-2025 does not support these claims and that the focus on such risks may distract from pressing societal issues.

Contribution

It provides an empirical reassessment of 2025 AI risk claims, challenging their basis and highlighting the influence of ideological and financial factors.

Findings

No observed evidence of recursive self-improvement or lethal misalignment in AI models

Current AI remains narrow and statistically trained, lacking properties for catastrophic scenarios

Existential-risk narratives are driven by ideological distraction and financial bubbles

Abstract

Two 2025 publications, "AI 2027" (Kokotajlo et al., 2025) and "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (Yudkowsky & Soares, 2025), assert that superintelligent artificial intelligence will almost certainly destroy or render humanity obsolete within the next decade. Both rest on the classic chain formulated by Good (1965) and Bostrom (2014): intelligence explosion, superintelligence, lethal misalignment. This article subjects each link to the empirical record of 2023-2025. Sixty years after Good's speculation, none of the required phenomena (sustained recursive self-improvement, autonomous strategic awareness, or intractable lethal misalignment) have been observed. Current generative models remain narrow, statistically trained artefacts: powerful, opaque, and imperfect, but devoid of the properties that would make the catastrophic scenarios plausible. Following Whittaker (2025a, 2025b, 2025c) and Zuboff (2019, 2025), we argue that the existential-risk thesis functions primarily as an ideological distraction from the ongoing consolidation of surveillance capitalism and extreme concentration of computational power. The thesis is further inflated by the 2025 AI speculative bubble, where trillions in investments in rapidly depreciating "digital lettuce" hardware (McWilliams, 2025) mask lagging revenues and jobless growth rather than heralding superintelligence. The thesis remains, in November 2025, a speculative hypothesis amplified by a speculative financial bubble rather than a demonstrated probability.