New Delhi, Sept. 29 -- Over the past decade, scholars and journalists have been writing about what the march of digital technology means for humanity with a mixture of hope and anxiety: hope because of the rise in living standards that the digital revolution has made possible, and anxiety because it has deepened social divisions and destabilized politics around the world.

But anxiety has recently taken an existential turn, as the industry's leaders have begun warning that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) could very well end humanity.

Most notably, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, said there's a greater than 10% chance that AI will kill all humans within the next decade. Similar, though somewhat less alarmist, w...