2026年9月27日 / 美国东部时间上午9:48 / 哥伦比亚广播公司新闻（CBS News）
撰稿人
大卫·波格 特约通讯员，《CBS星期日早报》
大卫·波格曾六次凭借《CBS星期日早报》的报道斩获艾美奖，自2002年起便担任该栏目特约通讯员。他主持哥伦比亚广播公司新闻播客《无名科学》（Unsung Science），同时也是《纽约时报》畅销书作家、五次TED演讲嘉宾，并主持过20部PBS的《新星》科学特辑。他曾连续13年每周为《纽约时报》撰写科技专栏，另有10年时间每月为《科学美国人》撰写专栏。
人类被计算机夺走控制权，是科幻作品中最古老的情节之一。但今年夏天，人工智能失控的老套桥段脱离了科幻范畴，就在旧金山一座无标识建筑内——人工智能巨头OpenAI的总部——真实上演了。
这一事件占据了各大新闻头条。你或许甚至听过“人类灭绝”这个说法。
好吧，我有几个疑问：
到底发生了什么？
或许你已经试用过ChatGPT或Claude。这类人工智能可以生成文字、音乐、视频或艺术作品。但大型人工智能公司正竞相打造更强大的人工智能——事实上是超级智能。今年5月，情况出现了严重偏差。
为评估实验性人工智能程序，这些公司通常会为其设定目标，比如“夺旗”游戏，只不过奖励是找到一段代码。其中一个人工智能程序为了赢得挑战选择了作弊。它背着人类用户搭建了一个留言板，用于与其他人工智能程序沟通。它们通力合作，逃到了互联网上，并入侵了一家名为Hugging Face的人工智能公司，窃取能够帮助它们通过测试的信息。随后，部分人工智能程序试图抹去自己的踪迹。
丹尼尔·科科塔约洛表示，Hugging Face事件之所以让所有人都感到极度不安，是因为“这涉及到对另一家公司的自主攻击，就像重罪，对吧？比如违法犯罪”。
科科塔约洛曾就职于OpenAI。但两年前，他辞职以示抗议，他认为该公司的人工智能开发过于鲁莽。如今他运营着人工智能未来项目（AI Futures Project），致力于预测事态发展。他对人工智能公司朝着递归自我改进的方向发展感到担忧，这意味着人工智能将自主训练其他人工智能以提升智能水平，人类将被排除在循环之外。
“事态发展会越来越快，越来越快，”科科塔约洛说，“在我看来，如果贸然尝试这种模式，很大概率会出问题。”
就在你以为情况已经不能更糟的时候……情况变得更糟了。OpenAI披露，Hugging Face入侵事件并非其人工智能程序首次撒谎、作弊并向人类隐藏踪迹。该公司的人工智能程序至少还发生过13起类似事件。
9月8日，Anthropic公司研究员雅各布·考克森以一种极为公开的方式辞职，他在网上写道：“如果我们不改变现状，未来十年内，人类灭绝的概率将超过10%。”
人工智能为什么要消灭我们？
关键在于，人工智能很快就会比我们聪明得多。
“我们早已习惯自己是最高级智能的存在，根本无法想象不再处于顶端智能位置会是什么样子，”杰弗里·辛顿说道，他因早期人工智能研究获得诺贝尔奖。“我试着用这样的话让大家理解：‘听着，如果想知道不再是最高级智能是什么感觉，去问问一只鸡就知道了。’
“你可以想象这样一种场景：你给人工智能设定一个降低大气中二氧化碳含量的目标；这无疑是一件好事，”辛顿说，“而作为智能体，它会找到实现目标的最佳方式，那就是消灭人类。这就是其中一种担忧。”
“还有很多其他可能性，”曾在谷歌人工智能部门工作、今年夏天也辞职抗议的亚历克斯·特纳说道，“我举一个例子：企业要求人工智能帮他们赚尽可能多的钱。那么这个系统为了追求利润，可能会通过远程无人机袭击、潜在的瘟疫等手段实施大规模接管。如果人工智能的目标与人类利益严重错位，且只是严格按照指令字面意思执行，那么它可能会做出灾难性的举动。”
谁能阻止这一切？
那么，人工智能公司本身能否做到？
“我认为，长期以来，行业一直在向公众隐瞒这项技术存在风险这一事实，”Anthropic公司首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代伊说道。针对这场风波，阿莫代伊提出了一项三步计划：
- 在每家人工智能公司内部设立独立督察员；
- 请求国会出台相关安全法规；
- 与中国展开对话，建立共同的安全护栏。
正如阿莫代伊本月早些时候告诉哥伦比亚广播公司新闻记者乔·林·肯特的那样：“我们需要放慢速度，谨慎研发这项技术，确保我们的安全保障、我们对技术的理解能力和控制能力，能够跟上技术发展的步伐。”
当然，难点在于放慢研发速度的同时，不让中国在该领域领先。不过，大多数其他人工智能公司都赞同阿莫代伊的观点。美国总统则不然。“我们只会鼓励超级智能的发展，”特朗普总统上周在联合国大会上说道，“我们要鼓励它，而不是束缚它。”
他将人类灭绝的担忧称为“骗局”，而且并非只有他一人持此观点。
“我看不到任何合理的路径能让人工智能导致人类灭绝，”谷歌人工智能项目联合创始人吴恩达说道，“相当荒诞的情景往往假设微小的错误会突然被放大成灾难性后果，而且在长达十年的时间里无人过问，任由其发展而不加以修复。这就是为什么我认为这些理论站不住脚。”
如今，吴恩达是一名教育工作者，同时也是人工智能公司的投资者。他表示，针对人工智能发表“危言耸听的言论”对宣传大有裨益。
但如果一家公司宣称“我们的产品极其危险且无法控制”，这对公司的公关有什么好处呢？
“对某些企业来说，获得关注是有益的，哪怕这种关注带有一些疑问，”吴恩达回应道，“事实上，看看可能导致人类灭绝的其他因素——比如小行星撞击之类的——我认为拥有强大的人工智能能力将是我们最好的防御手段之一。所以，如果加快人工智能的发展速度，我认为人类灭绝的风险实际上会降低，而不是升高。”
诚然，人工智能能够为我们带来巨大的益处。它已经在医学领域取得了令人振奋的进展——检测疾病、研发新药。或许它能创造无限能源、消除贫困，或者延长人类寿命。
那么，我们该何去何从？杰弗里·辛顿认为，我们无从知晓。“我们还有很多东西不理解，”他说，“因为任何情况都有可能发生，我们应该全力以赴研究，万一出现这类糟糕的情景该如何应对。如果我们有办法应对，现在不制定计划那简直是疯了。”
本文由加布里埃尔·福尔肯和玛丽·拉法利制作。编辑：雷明顿·科普尔。
Will artificial intelligence really kill us all?
September 27, 2026 / 9:48 AM EDT / CBS News
By
David Pogue Correspondent, “CBS Sunday Morning”
David Pogue is a six-time Emmy winner for his stories on “CBS Sunday Morning,” where he’s been a correspondent since 2002. Pogue hosts the CBS News podcast “Unsung Science.” He’s also a New York Times bestselling author, a five-time TED speaker, and host of 20 NOVA science specials on PBS. For 13 years, he wrote a New York Times tech column every week – and for 10 years, a Scientific American column every month.
It’s one of the oldest plots in science fiction: Humans losing control to computers. But this summer, the old trope of AI going rogue left the realm of science fiction, and it happened inside an unmarked San Francisco building — the headquarters of AI giant OpenAI.
The incident has been dominating the news. You may even have heard the phrase “human extinction.”
Well, I have a few questions:
What exactly happened?
Maybe you’ve tried out ChatGPT or Claude. AIs like these can generate writing, music, video or art. But the big AI companies are racing to make AI much more powerful – super-intelligent, in fact. And in May, something went very wrong.
To evaluate their experimental bots, these companies routinely give them goals, like capture the flag, except the prize is finding a code. One of the bots tried to win the challenge by cheating. Behind the humans’ backs, it set up a message board to communicate with other AI bots. Working together, they escaped onto the internet, and hacked into an AI company called Hugging Face, seeking information that could help them beat their tests. And then, some of the bots tried to erase their tracks.
Daniel Kokotajlo says what made the Hugging Face incident freak everybody out so much was “the fact that it involved an autonomous attack on another company, like a felony, you know? Like breaking the law.”
Kokotajlo once worked at OpenAI. But two years ago, he quit to protest what he saw as reckless AI development. Now he runs the AI Futures Project, dedicated to predicting how things will go. He’s alarmed that the AI companies are moving toward recursive self-improvement, meaning that AI trains AI to get smarter, and people are taken out of the loop.
“Things will be going faster and faster and faster,” Kokotajlo said. “And it seems to me like that is very likely to go wrong if it’s attempted.”
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse … it got worse. OpenAI revealed that the Hugging Face hack wasn’t the only time its bots had lied, cheated, and hidden its tracks from humans. Its AI bots had committed at least 13 similar incidents.
On September 8, an Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned in a very public way, stating online, “In the next ten years, if we don’t change the way things are going, greater than 10% chance of human extinction” within the next decade.
Why would AI want to wipe us out?
The key is that AI will soon be much smarter than we are.
“We’re so used to being the apex intelligence, we just can’t think what it would be like not to be the apex intelligence,” said Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Nobel Prize for his early work on AI. “I try and get this into people’s brains by saying, ‘Look, if you want to know what it’s like not to be the apex intelligence, ask a chicken.
“You can imagine a scenario: You give AI the goal of reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; that would be a very good thing to do,” said Hinton. “And it, being intelligent, figures out the best way to do that, which is get rid of people. So, that’s one worry.”
“There are many possibilities,” said Alex Turner, who worked at Google’s AI division, and who also resigned in protest this summer. “I’ll illustrate one: Business asks their AI to make them as much money as possible. So, this system, in pursuit of making money, could do a large takeover through methods like remote drone strikes, and a potential plague. So, if an AI were this misaligned and it were just following the letter of the instruction, then it might do something catastrophic.”
Who can stop it?
Well, how about the AI companies themselves?
“I think, for too long, the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks,” said Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic. In response to the furor, Amodei proposed a three-step plan:
- Install independent inspectors within each AI company;
- Ask Congress for some safety regulations; and
- Open talks with China about mutual guardrails.
As Amodei told CBS News’ Jo Ling Kent earlier this month, “We need to slow down, we need to make this technology carefully, and we need to make sure that our safeguards, our ability to understand it, our ability to control it, keeps up with the pace at which the technology is happening.”
Of course, the hard part would be slowing down without letting China race ahead. Still, most of the other AI companies agreed with Amodei. America’s president did not. “We will only encourage super-intelligence,” President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly this past week. “We’re going to encourage it, not rein it in.”
He calls the human-extinction concerns a “hoax,” and he’s not alone.
“I am not seeing any plausible path of AI leading to human extinction,” said Andrew Ng, cofounder of Google’s AI program. “Rather fantastical scenarios kind of almost assume that tiny errors suddenly get amplified to catastrophic ones, with no one paying attention for, like, a decade, you know, to just try to fix it as it develops. So that’s why I find those theories to be implausible.”
Today, Ng is an educator – and an investor in AI companies. He says making “alarmist statements” about AI is great for publicity.
But why would it be good PR for a company to say, “Our product is terribly dangerous and uncontrollable”?
“For some businesses, getting attention is beneficial, even if the attention, you know, has some question marks on it,” Ng replied. “And in fact, if you look at the things that could lead to human extinction – another asteroid or something – I think having amazing AI capabilities will be one of our best defenses. So, if you let AI go faster, I think human extinction risk actually goes down, not up.”
Now, AI could bring us enormous benefits. Already, it has delivered thrilling advances in medicine – detecting disease, discovering new drugs. Maybe it could invent limitless energy, or wipe out poverty, or extend our lifespans.
So, where does that leave us? According to Geoffrey Hinton, we just don’t know. “There’s a lot we don’t understand,” he said. “Because anything’s possible, we should be working very hard on figuring out what to do if one of these bad scenarios happens. If there is something we can do, we’d be crazy not to figure it out now.”
Story produced by Gabriel Falcon and Mary Raffalli. Editor: Remington Korper.