Fox’s Hannity Presses AI Doomsdayer on Whether He’s Just Peddling the Next Y2K ‘Alarmism’: ‘I Get the Same Feeling’
Fox News’ Sean Hannity isn’t buying into the AI doomsday scenarios, and he made that clear in his interview with the AI whistleblower who predicted AI could “kill us all” within a decade.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon joined Hannity on Tuesday evening, where he pushed for President Donald Trump to make a deal with China and create a global body to police AI. Hannity doubted any such deal could ever happen, considering China is our “number one geopolitical foe.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not an expert on geopolitics. All I know is the alternative could be catastrophic. And I do think that there’s a great opportunity here. What’s needed is essentially a deal, like a big change, and I think President Trump could be a great person to make a deal in the immediate future, like a good, solid deal with China,” Coxon said.
Hannity pressed back harder.
He said:
What you said is you don’t know the details of our foreign policy and I do appreciate your honesty. You do understand that the communist Chinese are not fond of America? You do know that they spy on us? You do that the amount of intellectual property theft is incalculable? You do now that there are geopolitical foe and not to be trusted? And if you’re talking about some type of international coalition, even, you know, I don’t even have confidence in western European countries, because I think they have lost sight of the principles that built their countries.
Hannity argued the warnings he hears about AI remind him of “alarmism” about climate change and even Y2K.
He said:
The snow in Mount Kilimanjaro, according to Al Gore, should be melted by now. We should all be, the sea should be, you know, drowning Manhattan Island. Those were predictions that he made. And I get the same feeling about it, or Y2K and the predictions for Y2k. And I feel there’s a certain amount of alarmism here. Why are you saying that a man-made machine is gonna be taken over by the machine? Because it sounds like a sci-fi nightmare scenario that I have a hard time envisioning?
“I wish it was alarmism, honestly,” Coxon said, then agreeing that there was plenty of “alarmism” surrounding climate change.
The difference with AI, he argued, is that it “is moving so incredibly quickly, we won’t have time to respond to it before it’s too late.”
“Unless I see more evidence that this is creating a threat and that these that AI is out of control, I think America should dominate,” Hannity said.
Coxon noted that tech leaders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk have given warnings about AI’s progress needing to slow.
“None of these guys are climate change alarmists. This is a unique technology in that guys like Elon Musk have been scared of it for a long time. Because if you just think about it, you know, superintelligence, things smarter than us in every respect are intrinsically quite terrifying, even to titans of industry like Musk,” he said.
Coxon shared his concerns about the rapid growth of AI after resigning from Anthropic. Following that resignation and his 10-year doomsday scenario, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a separate statement declaring “we must slow the pace of AI.”
“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails,” he wrote.
Watch above via Fox News.
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