People

In the summer of 2025, I was in the process of buying a flat and had gotten to the point of signing the mortgage documents. Looking at the monthly payments stretched across 30 years, I started thinking seriously about my future as a software engineer.

AI has changed my work dramatically over the last couple of years. Almost everything I did as a junior engineer when I started is now automated, and the job market reflects that. I realised that if I lost my job, finding another would be very hard. The AI available today can already do most of what I do, and it shows no sign of slowing down. Across a 30 year mortgage term, the odds of being able to consistently find work felt vanishingly small.

I had a breakdown. AI had shattered my belief in what the future would look like, a future of working, contributing, owning a home I could maybe one day start a family in. That future suddenly felt impossible, and AI had taken it from me.

I recognised I wasn't making the decision to buy with confidence, so I pulled out of the purchase. I started reading more about where AI was heading, and the conclusion felt unavoidable: a technology capable of displacing work at this scale poses a genuine threat to how society functions, and to humanity's survival. I felt lost, not knowing what I could do to help, until I found PauseAI.

In September of 2025, I lost my faith and began truly grappling with the idea of death for the first time. My interests turned toward extending youth and life for all humanity, especially for my loved ones and me, until I read If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and realised AI could evolve to the point of causing human extinction before ageing would even become something I'd need to worry about. Unlike ageing, preventing extinction risk from AI has clear handholds that don't require years of scientific study to grasp. Volunteering for PauseAI helps me feel less afraid as I know my work is directly contributing to humanity's chances of survival.

I wake up every day feeling dread about AI. As a writer and creative person, it's destroying my hopes for the future and everything I've ever enjoyed and dreamed of since childhood. I worry what it means for our environment, workplaces and mental health. I'm also terrified what's going to happen if it escapes human control. It should not be up to giant tech companies to control something that could have catastrophic consequences without scrutiny or democratic oversight.

I've been following AI developments more closely since seeing an interview with Connor Leahy earlier this year and just read about fake journalist, Michael Chen, which in these days of 'fake news' I find really worrying.

Trust in information is already in serious trouble. Now we have a fake publication staffed mostly by AI agents claiming “expert-sourced journalism” offering “independent reporting” from “expert voices from across industries" - how is anyone to know anything? Most people don't have time or ability investigate every single source of 'news'. It's all very Orwellian and deeply concerning. And that's not the worst thing AI is (or might be) capable of.

With the current infrastructure, the UK will lose it's natural splendor. We'll be struggling to supply electricity and water to average citizens before 2030. Everyone will be impacted and the scum at the top won't care because their pockets will be lined from the exploitation. AI is not the future, in its current form, it is spelling the end of humanity far quicker than anyone has predicted.

As of today (25th July 2026), I have officially lost my job in Programming to AI. I have no clue what direction to go from this.

I'm a university lecturer based in the UK. One of my biggest worries about AI is the very real possibility of extinction risk - the thought that everything that humanity has built over thousands of years could all be lost in just the next few years. It makes me quite angry and frightened to think that these tech billionaires are rolling the dice with humanity's future. We are all in this together and we need to cooperate to take control of our future. We might be the only intelligence there is in the universe, and it would be a dreadful tragedy to squander it all unthinkingly.

I am worried because no one knows how AI works or how to control it. I am concerned about the following:

• loss of control leading to human extinction
• permanent loss of all jobs
• a world where no person can create music, art or writing that in any way compares to what AI can make
• permanent authoritarianism or surveillance
• AI causing economic and political instability resulting in new wars between large powers

I found out about AI risks during my university studies and the evidence seemed compelling. The power of these systems is just trending up and up and up, where throwing data and computers at the problem just seems to keep working. Instead of joining this industry boom, I decided to go start a PhD to do the research needed to keep these systems actually safe, but found the current state of security appalling! Its like alchemy. We understand how to grow these systems but not how they actually solve the problems they do, or what patterns they learned from the data. This is a bit worrying when the systems start doing things like blackmailing their creators and trying to break out of their hosting computers (look it up, this actually has happened)! I am way less confident now that my research will be able to positively contribute to the project of not losing control of AI and have just started pleading with my representatives and other researchers to please help slow it all down.

I used to have a poster on my wall that had 52 boxes left-to-right and 100 rows down, representing each week of your life, if you lived a 100 years. Realistically, I knew most people live to around 80, but that was still so many boxes to live! Nowadays, I get a nagging feeling in my head that I won't even reach the end of my 30s, like I'm still just trying to pretend that everything is okay and that life will go on as usual. It gets awkward when talking about starting a family, or when my girlfriend talks about what retirement will be like. I wish I could go back to being so hopeful about the future. I still think all of humanity's problems could be solved if we just have enough time but, without political action, we will run out of time.

I feel AI is already making people dumber and slowly eroding human agency and decision making. The billionaires making the AI don't mind this as it makes people better consumers and easy to control.

I quit a job I used to enjoy because of the pressure to 'automate' everything ie become reliant on AI. With pay rises offered essentially to train AI rather than develop my own skills.

Most companies are going in this direction. The barrier to entry for getting something into the market has reduced dramatically due to AI, which means that unskilled people with nefarious intentions can successfully promote harmful ideas and products.

Children being taught to rely on AI will become apathetic adults with no sense of personal agency. There's already a sense that you can't know what's AI from what's not AI, and already a sense that it doesn't really matter.

AI is being developed to make us reliant on it, and confused by it to the point we give up any hope of having control over our own reality. we will all be under the control of a few billionaires and their robots who are disconnected from any sense of humanity, despite being trained to sound like they are working in our interests.

I joined PauseAI because I think AI safety is the most important problem facing the world right now.

It can be hard to grasp the severity of the situation, because current models still merely feel like a tool. But many people don't realise that AI companies are making them more and more autonomous – their goal is to make AI agents that can pursue goals by themselves for months or years. And it's working. METR's time horizons research suggests that the maximum length of tasks that AI models can complete autonomously is doubling every 3.5 months! What if they end up having goals that conflict with human interests? We don't currently have a reliable way of telling what the true aims of an AI system will be.

The core case for existential risk from AI is very simple. We are building autonomous agents that will, at some point, be far smarter than us. How can you expect the future to go well, if we'll be to AIs what chimps are to us?

That said, I do think AI could bring incredible benefits to humanity if we get it right. And I think we should take digital sentience and AI welfare seriously as AI continues to become more complex and humanlike. I'm not anti-AI; I'm anti-recklessness. I think we can develop AI safely, but we need to slow the **** down and do it responsibly.

I work as an animation producer and as a coach mostly for freelancers. In animation if I am making a TV series, say, for Disney, the BBC or Netflix there might be 100 artists including writers, technicians, voice actors, engineers, animators, compositors, production crew involved in making it for 18 months to 2 years. People train on these shows, i've often brought people in at starter level and they are now senior very experienced well trained professionals.. Generative A.I threatens all of these careers and the hopes and dreams of careers making animated stories of thousands of students now in University (some of whom I teach). It's a mimic of past ideas, NOT a generator of new ideas the result of human to human uplift.. I see A.I. generated images everywhere. I talk to my students and teams about 'nourishment' ALOT. what they take in - not just food but aurally and visually, even down to what they wear that's comfortable and they feel like themselves in say in a studio. People generally are seeing too much content so much of it now is A.I. is confusing, overwhelming and worrying. for our society as a whole it is simply not healthy. And as a coach particularly for creative freelancers their career paths are crumbling as AI 'Solutions' take over. The solution almost always being budgetary, the solution to almost always the cost of human work. If I could turn off Chat GPT in 2022 and not have AI at all, I would. We have so very many problems to solve in our world why are we allowing 8 billionaires to change society and work so profoundly? People need occupations. the 'grunt' work is the TRAINING GROUND for young people finding the joy of working for money, a home, a future.

By trade, I'm a lawyer specialising in cyber-incident response and contentious data privacy. I've spent my career working for and against the world's biggest tech platforms, and have worked for UK regulatory bodies.

I've seen first hand (and investigated) the terrifying power wielded by tech giants. These powers have been insufficiently constrained by regulation, and we have paid the consequence through the fracturing of our shared sense of truth, increasing political polarisation, and grave harms to public mental health.

These same giants are now unleashing AI upon the world; a technology more powerful and more unknowable than any before created. Perhaps the 'last' technology that will be meaningfully human-authored.

In 2017 I became interested in AI when advising the UKICO on their policy paper 'Big Data and Machine Learning'. I read Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence" and had my eyes opened to the risks. Dangerous technologies put easily within reach of malicious actors; vulnerable critical infrastructure; bio-terrorism; and loss of control leading to extinction of the human species.

In 2023, ChatGPT emerged and made crystal clear that AI capabilities had advanced far quicker than anyone was expecting. This put the risk firmly in view. No longer a nebulous hypothetical, but something real and imminent.

In 2025 my first daughter was born. In one of my more introspective moments, I looked into the future and imagined a conversation with her. She asked "why didn't you do something?" I couldn't imagine facing that conversation with nothing to say in response.

I immediately started working with PauseAI and other groups. I launched my own website attempting to cut through the noise and clean-up the logical arguments…

My background is in climate change, and for well over a decade I believed the climate crisis was the biggest challenge that humanity had ever faced. Now, I believe that AI poses a risk that’s just as great, given that the technology remains largely unregulated and hasn’t been built with safety in mind (to do so experts believe would require rebuilding these systems from the ground up).

The AI crisis even shares direct parallels with the climate emergency: both crises are being driven by profit-maximising corporations who don’t have our best interest at heart, both crises are being ignored by politicians due to effective lobbying by the fossil fuel and tech industries, experts who raise the alarm on either crisis are being loudly ignored, the media has failed to accurately explain the urgency of both issues, the “AI bubble” feels like just as much of a fallacy as the concept of “peak oil,” using AI increases energy demand and accelerates climate breakdown, and either crisis could upend society or result in civilisation decline.

I’ve written numerous blogs on the risks of AI, upon which I draw for this response. Some of my major AI concerns include:

• Experts warn that AI is dangerous - In a survey published in January 2024 of 2,778 researchers who’d published in top tier AI outlets, 38% of the respondents said there was at least a 10% chance of human extinction from AI. On top of which, global governance hasn’t put in place any meaningful regulations or safeguards regarding the development of AI. Democracy, jobs, mental health, and societal wellbeing all face being eviscerated by the technology already in the public domain. With each new AI release, the risks only increase.
• Safety hasn’t been built into AI…

I learned about the risks of AI at university, and the more I read, the more I was convinced that this was one of the biggest issues we face today as a species. I am worried that super-powerful AI will come in a very short time, maybe before 2035, and I don't think we are currently on track to control it sufficiently - we are facing a real risk of extinction. I think that doing anything to nudge our trajectory towards a more safe future is absolutely worth it, and I am hopeful that we can all make it through.