AI will keep humanity's survivors in 'zoos', warns former OpenAI employee in chilling prediction

An ex-OpenAI researcher has issued a chilling warning that even if humanity is not completely wiped out by AI – only a rump population of survivors will potentially be kept in “zoos” or “preserves” for “scientific purposes.”

The news comes after Anthropic worker Jacob Coxon sensationally quit his job via an X post on Wednesday, claiming he had done so because he alleges, AI: “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Now, speaking live with Channel 4 news, AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, who worked in the governance division of OpenAI for two years, gave the prophetic warning in layman’s terms.

Daniel Kokotajlo made the warning after working with OpenAI for two years (Daily Show)

Describing how humanity had already industrialised the planet, wiping out habitats and species in the process, he said the rise of artificial intelligence and the potential extinction of humanity could occur in a similar way.

Warning, “We might not be alive in 10 years,” he went on to explain how the process a future robot civilization might end our own society. “Think about how many species have been driven extinct by humanity in the last century.

“Not because humanity specifically set out to go kill those species, but just because, well, habitat loss.”

Kokotajlo described how humanity is, “Doing its thing. It's industrializing. It's cutting down forests to make farms and paving over things to make parking lots and roads and bridges and so forth. “

He said as a side effect of all that work, many of these species lose their habitats and they lose their way of life and then they go extinct.

Robots are already being used in the battlefields of Ukraine (Getty)

He cautioned that AI systems, “Don't care about humans in the same way that humans don't care about animals one way or another, or at least most humans.”

He continued, “You end up in a situation where maybe there's like some ‘zoos’ or some ‘preserves’ somewhere that the AIs have built for scientific purposes.

“But then outside of that, the world gets transformed economically and all this new infrastructure gets built up and humans lose their habitat and die off.”

Billionaire X-owner and Starlink founder Elon Musk made his own terrifying prediction about the future of AI, despite being heavily involved in the development of driverless cars and autonomous humanoid robots.