Driverless trucks show how to keep AI from killing us

A senior manager with Baidu's automotive robot department gives a presentation during the company's Apollo Day in Wuhan, China, in May 2024. Baidu’s ride-hailing platform Apollo Go, has since deployed driverless cars in major cities including Shanghai and Beijing. | Bloomberg

By Thomas Black
Bloomberg

Oct 26, 2026

The most bothersome aspect of the warning that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity is that there are few details about how a rogue computer model could actually accomplish it.

The top scenarios, and it’s by no means an exhaustive list, involve nuclear missiles, biological weapons and killer robots.

We have long been familiar with the first one. A maverick AI takes over the nuclear-launch codes and sends the world down the path to doomsday. (See the 1983 movie “War Games.“) The second involves AI tricking a human into releasing a deadly virus, which is a new twist on the old concerns of lab leaks by mistake (“Outbreak” in 1995), terrorist plots (“12 Monkeys” in 1995) or profit-making schemes (“Mission: Impossible 2“).

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