Lifeboat Foundation

The notoriously pessimistic AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky is back with a new prediction about the future of humankind.

“If you put me to a wall,” he told The Guardian in a fascinating new interview, “and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.”

If you’re wondering what “remaining timeline” means in this context, The Guardian’s Tom Lamont interpreted it as the “machine-wrought end of all things,” a “Terminator-like apocalypse,” or a “Matrix hellscape.”