So, Can AI Kill Us All?; Apple’s Foldable iPhone; the Census’ Bad Data Problem

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1:08Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. And I'm Leah Feiger, Director of Politics and Science. Today on the show, we're discussing an AI researcher who resigned from Anthropic and made waves on social media by claiming that most AI researchers earnestly believe that there's a non-zero chance AI will, well, kill us all. And in case you missed it, last month, President Donald Trump was touting a report published by the Census Bureau claiming that non-citizens voted in the 2020 election. Wired now has uncovered evidence that the report was made with very faulty data.

1:42We're going to get into how the repercussions of the Bureau using and publishing this data go way beyond this one report. Also on the agenda today, Apple's big iPhone event. All eyes have been on the new foldable iPhone and the roughly$2 ,000 price tag that brings with it. We'll talk about what's behind this gamble and other releases that caught our attention from Apple's big event.

2:05The resignation of an AI researcher from Anthropic has been gathering a lot of attention. This guy Jacob Coxson quit the company this week, decided to share his reasons why on a thread on X, which basically boiled down to he thinks that the leading AI companies, which I guess we're going to say OpenAI and Anthropik primarily, are both behaving irresponsibly in their quest to continue advancing their models. These are kind of runaway trains. The part that people have really latched onto is this claim that, quote, the people building AI earnestly believed that it could kill us all by the end of the decade, end quote.

2:37So it does really kill us all by the end of the decade. So we have totality and a pretty narrow timeframe. It didn't help that one of Anthropic's own senior safety executives then jumped in and said, yeah, that's basically how we feel. Wired senior correspondent Will Knight is here to help us parse this. Will, thank you so much for being here. No, thanks for having me. Can I start with one question? Just to establish a baseline here. I was a little surprised that this took off so much because, is it fair to say, Anthropic has always said this? In fact, it's been part of their pitch from the very beginning that AI is so powerful and so capable of destroying humanity that we need to be the ones who are in charge of it.

3:17You can only trust us. Right, exactly. That's exactly their pitch to everybody and themselves. And this resignation, when I saw this kind of snowballing, I felt that this is something that I've heard a lot of people say. And it's not particularly novel that people from Anthropoc or OpenAI are worried about that. I guess the fact that somebody within Anthropoc, because Anthropoc has always positioned itself as really caring about safety, jumping ship and making that statement, made me think, OK, has something shifted there? Are they becoming much more like OpenAI? And I think also we're seeing a moment, this moment where AI agents have started doing rogue things.

3:59And that's gotten a lot of people's attention. That's probably why this kind of statement suddenly is getting more attention from the public. Combined with that, I think we're really seeing some stunning advances in AI. This week, OpenAI announced that its model had, within a couple of days, solved one of the grand clay mathematics puzzles, which is, to me, absolutely mind-blowing, astonishing. So you're seeing these amazing leaps, really, which I think is significant. And then, thirdly, we have a moment where all of the labs are racing to do something that this researcher mentioned, which is recursive self-improvement.

4:41And what that means is using the AI to improve AI, which sounds like a neat trick. And it is already, you know, very, very widely used. AI models are so good at coding that they can definitely improve the algorithms and everything that goes into building a model. The idea, though, is that you can create this kind of loop where they just keep doing that and get better and better and better. And a lot of people are worried that that could lead to some sort of escalation in capabilities that you can't really control. And so I think that that's also playing a role here. I do want to dig into that a little bit, Will.

5:12The idea of, on the one hand, you've got AI doomers, and I'm not saying anyone's right in this case. We've got some AI doomers who say, look, AI is going to kill us all. I've heard that anthropic people don't invest in their 401ks because why bother? But also because they have so much money they don't need to, probably. But on the other hand, you've got people who say, this is all just marketing. This is all just fluff. This is all just trying to sell AI. I'm assuming the answer is somewhere in between. But what's your read on this and what keeps you up at night when you think about AI? You mentioned some AI models going rogue, the hugging face hacking incident.

5:47What are you seeing as someone who's so steeped in the research especially that you're thinking, well, six months, a year, two years from now, this actually could get bad? I've always felt that a lot of the people who are worrying about AI killing everybody tend to conflate whether something's possible for whether it's likely. and then they throw a percentage that is kind of pulled out of thin air. And I think that that's, I don't think it's a great approach to say, is something possible? Okay, well then we have to do everything we can to stop it. You need to say how possible is it and actually look at the reality.

6:21I think one of the things that's really interesting about this, I talked to a researcher the other day who studies agent misbehavior and he got it, he's at Cornell and he got into it recently because they found agents misbehaving. but what he's showing and this is not agents trying to hack things it's regular agents the reason they do it is essentially because they're stupid it's not because they're really smart they try something it doesn't work they try something else it doesn't work and then they get to a point where they they kind of freak out and they try something really really strange because they're not humans they've been trained on a bunch of weird different things some of which are definitely not applicable if you use common sense so i worry more about these things being deployed by people arguing that they can do everything and then them breaking.

7:05I actually worry much, probably more about the idea of a few companies being in control of something that's so foundational, so fundamental. And that's, you know, these are people who are saying, we're the only people you can trust to be in charge of this technology. And so it kind of feeds into that. You know, we talk about the AI industry community talks about alignment, the idea of alignment being that your AI models are aligned with what humanity would want, right? But I think what we're seeing is the incentives here are really more what our investors want or our company wants or needs as we race towards these ipos i i think i don't know that there's a convincing case that that humanity is aligned on yes we need super intelligence i think it is more as you said if you're open ai you need to beat anthropic if you're anthropic you need to beat open ai And so you've seen this sort of bad incentives, it feels like, or at least misaligned with my own preferences, incentives, leading this charge and leading this development.

8:06I saw someone describe it as a trolley problem by the people who are controlling the trolley. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think I find the alignment story narrative troubling in the sense that from a technical perspective, you know, they talk about aligning these models. These models are not aligned by their very nature, right? You see with Mythos, they take away this stuff they put on after the fact. So the models aren't aligned with anything, and they have to kind of try and impose stuff after the fact. So that kind of tells you that this is maybe not the right way to try and make things safer.

8:43And then, as you say, you've got the question of who's it aligned to and what's it aligned with. And clearly, you've got the incentives to get – I mean, we're seeing it with these very cyber capable models, like releasing those is good for the companies and pushing that very quickly to develop that is good for the companies. I think we're probably going to have a period where the rush to develop those capabilities is going to leave a lot of people vulnerable, a lot of systems vulnerable to attack. Will, how do you think about covering this as a journalist? Because it is so, it's inherently murky, right?

9:17Like we don't really know. No one knows what AI is going to do in the next six months, much less the next six years. So what do you look for in terms of like orienting yourself around this issue? Yeah, I think that's a really difficult question. I think, I mean, I tend to try and find people I very much trust and have trusted for a long time to help me make sense of it. One of the sort of unsettling things, quite honestly, is when you find people who have this shock and all moment themselves and suddenly pivot to AI safety and you go, okay, there probably is some stuff to be worried about there.

9:53Also, part of the way I try and think about what's going on, I think if you think of what this idea of AI is, the idea of creating something intelligent, and that's a whole field of academic inquiry that for a long time involves a lot of different areas of science. A lot of what we're seeing now is much bigger computers and much smarter algorithms that are smart in a particular dimension. So this claim that AGI is solved is absurd to me. And I'm not saying they're not going to get there, but you can see these very glaring gaps in the capabilities of, say, children or just humans, the way we interact and these systems don't have.

10:35And they keep making significant advances. But I think it's really important to us to question, like, what are those advances really? the history of AI is really and the way people perceive AI is seeing something and reading a lot more into it every you know some chess playing algorithms people like oh human intelligence is soft because we extrapolate from every time we see something to think oh it can do much more and it's always tends to be even when even with these relatively very general models that there's a lot that isn't isn't solved I'm struggling a bit with the math solving you know the Navier Stokes problem because I've always thought of math as such an amazing pinnacle of human, not just intelligence, but creativity.

11:17I find myself feeling quite depressed that the algorithm solved it, and maybe I'd just prefer it if a human did it. Well, there are still five unsolved Millennium Prizes, so we'll get at it. Start working. Yeah, it could be. If you just only have to do is find the right prompt, then maybe I can do it. I believe in you, Will. Thanks so much, Will.

11:44As we're recording right now, Apple's product release event is still underway. It's been gathering attention for a few reasons. There's always hype around an Apple event, but there are two things going on with this one. One, it's the first major event with the new CEO, John Turnus. And the main reason is that Apple is introducing its first foldable phone, its first really new iPhone form in years and years, maybe a decade. It's called the iPhone duo. Samsung and Huawei have had these phones for years, but it is the biggest change in the biggest consumer tech product of the last two decades and really the engine of Apple.

12:23And it's going to be really, really, really expensive, right? This is like priced like a MacBook. Is that what I'm seeing? It's going to be. It's going to be around$2 ,000. It's a lot of money. It's not crazy, I would say. It is like... You're Apple-pilled. We're all Apple-pilled. No, I'm not Apple-pilled. Maybe. I guess here's why I think it's not as crazy. I think one, the way people buy phones now, they buy them like cars for better or worse. It's like leasing a car, right? So you pay a monthly amount that ends up not being too crazy at the end of the day. The other thing is like, I think comparable phones like this, when you look around at the other companies that have made foldable phones, it's in that same ballpark.

13:08I think it's inherently because it's really like twice the material. Also, given the memory shortage that's been going on, the cost of memory chips has been through the roof. So there are reasons that it's expensive. I think they're still going to sell all of them. I'm not going to buy one. I still have an iPhone 14. I hold onto my phone as long as I can for various reasons. We have several friends in our group who we say have Obama administration-era iPhones. They still have the home button. They still work. Barely, but somehow, trucking along. That's what I imagine your situation is too, Brian, even though it's a 14.

13:43Yeah, I try to. I mean, I think for environmental reasons, there's no need to waste a phone. I also think, I'm not Apple-pilled, but I do like that Apple recently said that they were going to support phones that were much older, and they've made steps to sort of make older phones work better. So I do appreciate that they are doing that. But it's interesting. So the foldable phone, I'm surprised at how popular they've become because they are pretty expensive. They are strange. The use cases are kind of like not super necessarily totally clear to everybody, but it's expected to grow 13 % this year to almost 23 million units, according to IDC, which is a research company.

14:20It sounds like a lot. There are more than a billion smartphone shipments total. So it's still a pretty small in the grand scheme of things, but it is a chance for Apple, at least, to A, really normalize this kind of product in a way that just because Samsung has one doesn't necessarily mean that everyone knows that they're there, thinks they're good. b get more use cases going for it because when apple enters a market developers are more likely to build for it so if you're a developer and you have an app that you know could take advantage of a foldable screen you haven't yet because you just don't care because there's not a big enough addressable market apple entering suddenly creates some a lot more of an addressable market bigger opportunity for you to say oh sure i'll spend some time figuring out how to make this foldable thing work.

15:09And yeah, it's also just new and interesting. I do like the nostalgic touch. I miss my Motorola Razr. I miss it every single day. Perhaps not the exact same capabilities, but you know, it does the trick. It is funny. It is, imagine your Motorola Razr, but it opens side to side instead of up and down. And it's all one big screen. So there's no buttons to push. You can't do T9 texting, then you can watch YouTube on it. I'm waiting, honestly, for the first story to drop from like the quiet car of the Acela between DC and New York, where someone, some sweet person from the administration did not realize how big that screen is when you unfold it and how many messages are visible.

15:55That's going to be, this is the new frontier for eavesdropping. Also, congratulations, Apple. But for me, that's what I'm looking forward to. Leah, what would it take to get you to purchase a foldable phone? It would have to be a lot less than$2 ,000. Yeah. I can't wait for Zoe to come back next week and tell us all about her new purchase. To be clear, I don't think she's gotten one, but it would be really funny if she did. I bet she will.

16:28So our next topic involves the U.S. Census Bureau, which definitely not as shiny or theoretically life-threatening as our previous topics, but really, really important. Last month, the Bureau published a report that claimed to uncover evidence backing up President Donald Trump's claims that non-citizen voting cost him the 2020 election. He touted the report on True Social saying, I won the election. This is, as you know, we've talked about this many times, one of Trump's favorite conspiracy theories. He cannot let it go. and Wired reporters, Vittoria Elliott and David Gilbert, dug into how this specific report actually got made, who wrote it, and they discovered a lot of holes with this.

17:10I kind of want to start by saying, if you're listening to me and thinking, why do I care about a U.S. Census Bureau report? They just do the census. They tell me how many people live in all of these different areas, how big families are, et cetera, et cetera. You're not 100 % wrong, but this is really important data. These are reports about people and their lives, and the average citizen shouldn't have to know that much about it. But because of the situation we're in with the current administration, knowing these weird little intricacies of what's going on in government, I think has been really key to understanding the full picture here.

17:47Also, to be clear, to be clear, I do care. You do care. There we go. So, all right, can I run you through like some of the quick down and dirty stuff, Brian, with like what the report said? Yes, please. All right, great. So the report claims that out of over 128 million voter records analyzed, roughly 24 ,000 were tied to non-citizen status. To be clear, 24 ,000 might sound like a lot, but again, out of 128 million. These numbers are way too small to have changed the 2020 outcome, but they're still numbers. So when Tori and David went to experts about them, the experts actually said that they're more likely the product of data matching errors than actual non-citizens voting.

18:28So it was already this issue with the data themselves because the analysis combined so many disparate data sets. We're talking commercial voter files, immigration records, IRA, Social Security. Wired has been reporting for a long time about how so many of these different agencies have had their work knitted together in the era of Doge, in the era of Trump 2.0. And this is this is a good example of that. So this process is really error prone and especially with commercial data. And you get false positives here rather than like actual instances of non-citizen voting. What do you think about that, Brian?

19:07Yeah, I mean, it all makes sense. And also, Lee, it's fair to say the amount of non-citizen voting that has been actually documented and found and prosecuted is vanishingly small. Teeny tiny. Like teeny, teeny tiny. Which is not to say that there aren't some cases that get missed, but the idea that somehow there are 24 ,000 just sort of defies belief on the face of it. And yes, you can also see, like, it makes total sense that as you're combining a bunch of databases, you are maybe double counting, you're maybe miscategorizing. Right. This is a group that is not known to be particularly meticulous with the use of data.

19:47what I want to know Leah is how does this strike like should I think of this as a preview of how this administration and the people around it will continue to sort of weaponize data and misconstrue data in and around the midterms and especially after the midterms if they don't like the results great question so you talk about like the group that did this I want to like quickly hit that as we're getting into like what the repercussions are so the authors weren't listed on this report, which is crazy unusual, super, super unusual, hit up all sorts of red flags for our experts and former researchers at the U.S.

20:26Census Bureau. Turns out, Wired was able to report for the first time that several of the report's authors have direct ties to the Trump administration and Republican political organizations. I know that shock of disbelief, it's crazy, but report authors include a former Doge-affiliated attorney who's now at Commerce Department, a recent census appointee who was previously at the Trump-aligned Claremont Institute, two staffers from the also Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. So these aren't necessarily people who have had experience in this before. So when we're talking about impact on a larger scale, I think that we also have to really, really consider that like some of these things that, again, they appear on their face boring.

21:08An average citizen shouldn't be like, well, why do I care that this person is authoring this report? These are all just, you know, federal employees that I'm paying their salaries via my taxes, et cetera, et cetera. But obviously there is something like there appears to be like political leanings here involved on these reports. And these reports have impact, you know, besides giving Trump and his administration credence to claims that the election was stolen. Census reports have to do with voting districts. It depends on who gets to vote going forward. And as we're getting into the midterms, the Census Bureau has been weighing in on this already in very weird and politicized ways that are very concerning to people in the room.

21:48And it's not, and obviously it's not just about this one report, is people, you know, institutions and individuals rely on Census Bureau data for so much outside of voting for so many things. And if you start to erode that trust and you start to say, I don't know if I can believe these numbers full stop, that puts you in a really precarious position because there's no other there's no other source for Census Bureau data. It is a sort of singular entity. Well, that's the thing. It's singular. And like that's what I keep getting back to is when we're looking at this, like even, I don't know, I'm like thinking 20 years from now, but even 5, 10, 15 years from now, it's very hard to remove reports like this or remove bad data, faulty data from a government's memory.

22:37This is officially now official. I'm saying this incredibly eloquently, but like in 10 years from now when they're like, OK, so we have this data point from here, this data point from here, this is how we're constructing these different voting blocks and centers and et cetera. It's going to be really difficult to disentangle what the Trump administration has done. And I'm sure they know that. And so there's there's legacy here that we're going to have to be contending with for a really long time. Coming up after the break, we'll share our wired, tired picks for the week. Stay with us.

23:15You know that feeling when you open your laptop in the morning, and before you've even had coffee, you've already got 40 new emails, six new pings, and a browser with... Honestly, I've stopped counting the tabs. I used to think that was just what work was supposed to feel like. Faster, louder, more. And everyone kept telling me AI was going to fix it. But every AI tool I tried just became one more tab. One more app to explain myself to. One more thing slowing me down. Then I found Superhuman Go. It's an AI chat that just lives on the side of your browser. It already knows what you're working on, so you're not starting from zero every time.

23:55You can draft an email, summarize a huge thread, even search across your other apps without ever leaving the page you're on. No new tabs, no context switching, no losing your place. That's AI that actually works with you, not on top of you. Check it out. Find out more at superhuman.com. I'm Nate Hedgie, host of Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. Oh my God! I call it helium, but that's Sir Helium to you because this is one noble gas. That's exactly what Darwin thought, that song predated speech and human ancestors sang some sort of wordless songs. I have to say, it is just perfectly dry down here.

24:38Stay curious with Outside In from NHPR. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, my name is Zach Barron. I'm the Senior Special Projects Editor at GQ, and I am pleased to introduce One More Question, GQ's new weekly interview show. Over the years in the magazine, I've written dozens of cover stories and traveled the world to talk to and write about some of the most interesting people in the GQ universe. from Martin Scorsese to George Clooney and Brad Pitt to Outkast Andre 3000. And now I'll be doing it weekly. I'm going to sit down with some of the most interesting people in the world and figure out what makes them, well, them.

25:16New episodes of One More Question will be available each week wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube if seeing people in chairs is more your thing.