MIT Student Drops Out: She Says AGI Will Kill Everyone

Sunday, August 17, 2025

We're all probably feeling a little anxious about AI. It's horrible for the environment, is used as an excuse to fire workers, floods the internet with misinformation and slop, entrenches government surveillance, and appears to be driving people into psychosis.

And so, at a time when many college students are dropping out to join AI startups, one former MIT student says she called it quits because she's afraid of something altogether more catastrophic:

that an artificial general intelligence (AGI), or superhuman AI, will completely wipe out the human race, Forbes reports.

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"I was concerned I might not be alive to graduate because of AGI," Alice Blair, who enrolled at the university in 2023, told the publication.

"I think in a large majority of the scenarios, because of the way we are working towards AGI, we get human extinction."

"Nikola Jurkovi, a Harvard alum who served at his school's AI safety club, is sympathetic to the idea.

"If your career is about to be automated by the end of the decade, then every year spent in college is one year subtracted from your short career," he told Forbes.

"I personally think AGI is maybe four years away and full automation of the economy is maybe five or six years away."

Building an AGI, a system that matches or surpasses human intelligence, is much of the AI industry's endgame. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the recent launch of its poorly-received AI model GPT-5 a major stepping stone towards AGI, even going as far as to call it "generally intelligent."

#1 | Posted by Corky at 2025-08-17 04:47 PM | Reply