Kurt Cobb
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has also appeared in The Christian Science…
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By Kurt Cobb – Mar 02, 2026, 2:00 PM CST
- The current development of AI and ASI carries a catastrophic systemic risk, with industry insiders estimating a 10 to 25 percent chance of civilization destruction.
- Current AI, based on large language models, is prone to errors, or “hallucinations,” which become dangerously critical when used in fields like surgery and could compromise essential infrastructure such as the food supply chain.
- The very structure of these complex systems, which produce unexpected “emergent properties,” makes it impossible to guarantee their alignment with human values or safety laws, even those like Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.
When it comes to the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and now artificial superintelligence (ASI) (sometimes called artificial general intelligence), I feel as if we’ve been transported onto the set of the 1983 film “WarGames.”
In the film teenage hacker David Lightman stumbles onto the military’s most sensitive war scenario planning computer while believing he has simply found a soon-to-be-released game called “Global Thermonuclear War” on the server of a computer game company. Lightman activates the game which ultimately makes personnel at the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) mistakenly believe that the Soviet Union is preparing for an attack. On big screens throughout the war room, Soviet movements and preparations become ever more threatening by the hour. As we are told later, the object of the game is to win and so the computer sets out to win a thermonuclear war.
When Lightman realizes what he’s done, he seeks out the one person he believes can stop the madness. (I’m skipping a lot of steps here.) He catches up with the architect of that war planning computer system, Stephen Falken. Falken is living a solitary, anonymous existence (under a different name) in a home that Falken says is near a primary nuclear target. He explains to the young hacker: “A millisecond of brilliant light and we’re vaporized. Much more fortunate than the millions who’ll wander sightless through the smouldering aftermath. We’ll be spared the horror of survival.”
Lightman pleads with Falken to call his former associates at NORAD to tell them what is happening. Falken refuses saying that the world might gain a few years if he makes the call, “but humanity planning its own destruction, that a phone call won’t stop.”
Like the fictional Stephen Falken, the computer industry’s geniuses are now playing games with very complex systems (with literally trillions of inputs) called AI, systems that have emergent properties. Emergent properties are ones you don’t program in and that you don’t expect—not unlike the computer in “WarGames” making its users think that a simulation is the real thing.