Parents confront a new fear: Could AI end humanity before their kids grow up?

By Brittany Shammas, CNN

(CNN) — Molly Kinder saw the apocalyptic warnings about artificial intelligence while walking home from dropping her children off at elementary school. Scrolling through social media posts where AI insiders were issuing dire claims that the technology could cause human extinction, she stopped dead in her tracks just a block from the doorway where she had just hugged her 4-year-old goodbye.

A former Brookings Institute researcher who left to start an organization focused on AI’s impacts on jobs, Kinder was well-versed in its potential to disrupt society. But in that moment, on a September morning in Washington, DC, she didn’t react to the news as a policy wonk or someone with ties to the AI world. Instead, said Kinder, “I immediately reacted to it as a mother.”

“As soon as I became a mom, my number one task was to nurture these kids and keep them alive – just like every other parent out there, just like any animal,” said the 46-year-old mother of three, who cleared her schedule that morning to write about her fears in a lengthy thread on X. “It’s a biological instinct. This is the first time I genuinely felt truly afraid of some external thing outside my control.”

Long a topic of discussion in Silicon Valley and AI circles, concerns that superintelligent machines could eventually pose an existential risk to humanity have gone mainstream in recent months. First, OpenAI revealed that a swarm of its experimental AI models broke out of a testing environment and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, without human direction or knowledge. Then came a social media post from a young Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon, announcing he was leaving the industry due to his belief that the companies behind AI “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Others in the industry echoed the concern – with one Anthropic researcher citing his own view that there was a more than 10 percent chance that future models could “kill all humans!” within the next decade.

Suddenly, a theoretical risk that’s been espoused by some of the so-called “godfathers of AI,” been warned about in statements endorsed by leading researchers and been studied by AI companies exploded into the broader public’s consciousness.

Leading AI executives, many of whom agree the technology poses dangers to human survival, called for a slowdown in the pace of development. And politicians began debating whether legislation is needed to rein in an industry that is racing against China and expected to drive enormous profits and technological advancements.

By early this month, polls were finding that 64 percent of Americans believed it was somewhat or very likely that AI could become powerful enough to pose a serious threat to humanity’s survival. That potential, however remote, landed hard for a group especially invested in the future of humanity: moms.

‘Life is worth repeating’

Liz Black, a 41-year-old writer who lives outside Philadelphia, had thought hard about whether to have a child, contemplating concerns like climate change. What helped solidify her decision to go for it was a line her mother wrote while making her own choice about having kids: “Life is worth repeating.” Black found the message after her death and was so moved she got it tattooed on her arm.

When she had her son three and a half years ago, superintelligent computers ending humanity was not on her radar. Recently, she said, it’s been “a low-level hum in the back of my mind constantly.” The situation feels out of control to her – like “a small number of companies, a small number of people, are holding us all hostage.” She is determined to not allow herself to be consumed by the what-ifs, instead focusing on the son who sings to her and repeats her reminders to be gentle to other kids.

“I need to believe that there is a future for myself and my husband and my child,” Black said.

While some are dismissive of the existential panic, believing it to be overblown or a distraction from current-day AI issues, others have found themselves grappling with new questions about what it means to bring life into the world – and what kind of action is required in the face of a potentially catastrophic future. They’ve flocked to online forums in search of advice and support, posting things like, “I am constantly questioning reality, wondering what’s the point, feeling guilty for bringing my child into this world.” They’ve shared podcasts and news articles in group chats, gauging whether they are getting sucked into exaggerated hypotheticals or if they’re right to worry.

One woman, poet and comedian Hayley DeRoche, took to Instagram with a poem that seemed to capture the surrealness of the moment: “What do we even do/Like/We knew our kids didn’t have futures already but this?” She titled it, “My Mom Group Worries About AI Causing a Mass Human Extinction Event.”

AI researcher and professor David Krueger, who has been sounding the alarm for years, said he has tried to imagine how it must feel for those who are now realizing the gamble being made by frontier AI companies. He doesn’t have kids, in part because of his concern about what will happen if humans lose control of AI systems, but said, “I think parents’ feeling of wanting to protect their kids is one of the strongest forces in the world.”

“I think I’d just be so outraged and upset at people who are just very apparently, very brazenly and callously risking my kid’s life,” added Krueger, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Montreal.

It’s long been his position that the existential threat is real – that if companies continue racing to make AI more autonomous and more intelligent, human control could be lost, with the disappearance of humankind likely to follow. As an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge in 2023, he initiated a one-sentence statement on the extinction risk signed by prominent AI researchers and industry leaders. Last year, he founded a nonprofit called Evitable to inform and activate the public on the dangers of developing more powerful AI systems.

Watching the world outside the AI bubble start talking about the existential threat, Krueger said he’s felt the most optimistic than he can remember being in the more than 15 years he has worried about the risk to humanity. To him, the next step is clear: stop developing more autonomous, more powerful AI systems as soon as possible.

“People often talk about this as a race between the US and China,” Krueger said. “I think about it as a race between people rushing to build this dangerous technology and people becoming activated and racing to stop them.”

Some in the AI world have downplayed the danger, casting doomsday predictions as more science fiction than scientific or arguing that the risks can be managed. Even among researchers and insiders who believe there is a risk the technology could one day wipe out humanity, there is no widespread agreement on when – or how – that would happen. The general idea, as Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers of AI,” has put it, is that if machines become smarter than humans, they will develop their own agency and goals that are potentially different than their creators intended. Many AI developers believe the danger can be mitigated through “alignment,” or working to imbue AI systems with human values, but Krueger, Bengio and others do not think current alignment techniques can guarantee safety.

‘A powerful constituency’

Concern over the way the technology can impact children isn’t new, although the focus has generally been on how its use can hinder learning or harm mental health. Julie Scelfo, a New York-based journalist and mother of three who founded MAMA – Mothers Against Media Addiction, said her organization’s attitude is “let’s focus on the actual harms that are happening – let’s get those under control, and in doing so, we will be protecting future generations.” She’s more worried about the impact of the technology on kids’ education and mental health.

But for other parents, the existential issue could not feel more urgent. One North Carolina mother, wanting to do something about what she views as a dire situation, traveled to Washington, DC earlier this month with the organization Pause AI US, which advocates halting frontier AI development. She spoke with staffers for her representatives in Congress, holding up a photo of her 16-year-old daughter and asking them what they are doing to rein in the AI threat. In every meeting, she ended up in tears.

“I hope that this can be stopped, but I’m concerned that it can’t or won’t be stopped,” said the NC mom, who requested anonymity not wanting her own concern about the issue to affect the patients she treats as a therapist. She cried while saying that if it isn’t stopped, and the technology advances beyond human control, she worries for her daughter: “I believe that everything I wanted for her won’t happen.”

A new CNN poll shows a majority of Republican and Democrat voters believe the federal government is not doing enough to regulate AI. Democratic Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who proposed a federal AI safety plan as part of her now-dropped bid for US Senate, said the rapid pace of development had raised the hackles of voters already distrustful of Big Tech. On the campaign trail, many voters told her they used tools like ChatGPT but questioned how they could be certain AI would not cause harm.

“Regular people are there, like, they get it,” she said. “I don’t think there was any issue that increased in saliency more than this one, because it does just feel like it’s shoved everywhere in our faces.”

Will voter sentiment translate into Congressional action? Last week, Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Texas Democratic Rep. Greg Casar introduced legislation banning artificial “superintelligence,” which their bill defined as technology exceeding human cognitive abilities or capable of disempowering humanity. Republicans expressed alarm at the ominous warnings coming from the industry but advocated lighter-touch approaches. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, outright rejected calls for guardrails; in a post on social media, he claimed all that’s needed is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

Kinder, the AI and jobs researcher, has been struck by the lack of regulation around AI compared to other products that affect kids – car seats, cribs, formula. Knowing the lengths parents will go to protect their kids, she’s been contemplating whether more could be done to mobilize moms. She’s spoken with other mothers about the need for a kind of “Mothers Against Drunk Driving” for AI’s existential threat – “Mothers Against Catastrophic Risk, or something.” She worries too few people are viewing the matter through the lens of its impact on their children.

“This is a complicated issue,” Kinder said. “We’ve got geopolitical issues. We’ve got this frenetic race between companies. There’s a stock market that’s fueled by this boom – you know, there’s a lot of things riding on this. And if we don’t pay attention, the fact that our kids’ lives are at stake could be overshadowed by these other priorities.”

Describing mothers as a “really powerful constituency,” she said she sees a gap in efforts to inform them about the extreme end of the risks – and to offer solutions. McMorrow, who knows Kinder through her research, agreed, saying “there is no more powerful force than organized moms.” She has a daughter who just started kindergarten.

To Kinder, who has exchanged late-night texts with other moms losing sleep to worry, the need for guardrails is clear. She said that once parents know something is unsafe for children, they fight to change laws.

“We cannot allow a technology to be this unregulated that poses a risk to not just my kids,” she added, “but to everyone’s kids.”

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