Steven Pinker: AI Has No Inherent Incentive to Survive, Doomer Fear Overblown
sapinker · x · 2026-09-27
In the podcast Into The Machine, Steven Pinker tackles whether AI could be conscious and the doomer fear that AIs will do anything to perpetuate their existence at our expense. His key question: is self-preservation inherent to AIs, or are they merely emulating human behavior learned from training data? Unless programmed to mimic humans down to the last twitch, he argues, AIs would have no actual incentive to continue existing — a direct challenge to the survival-drive assumption common in AI safety discourse.
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