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AI poses existential, economic risks

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Prominent AI researchers and technologists warned that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence could pose existential risks and destabilize economies, investors and workers.

Reposted by Amy W. Ando, Kristina McElheran, Els Torreele , and 4 more

18%
nick-pettigrew.bsky.social
I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.
dancow.bsky.social Dan Nguyen @dancow.bsky.social · 12h
VC, founder, dumbass
@Nick_Davidov Asked Claude Cowork organize my wife's desktop, it stated doing it, asked for a permission to delete temp office files, I granted it, and then it goes "ooops" Turns out it tried renaming and accidentally deleted a folder with all of the photos my wife made on her camera for the last 15 years. All photos of kids, their illustrations, friends' weddings, travel, everything. It's not in trash, it was done via terminal It's not in iCloud, it already synced the new file structure. She didn't have Time Machine. Disc recovery tools can't see anything. I called Apple and they pointed me to a feature in iCloud allowing to retrieve files that were saved before but are no longer on iCloud Drive (they keep them for 30 days). I'm now watching it load tens of thousands of files. I nearly had a heart attack. Nick Davidov • @Nick_Davidov VC, founder, DVC.ai - backing repeat founders with a community of 200 engineers. e/acc/OSS. Perplexity, Higgsfield, Animation, Etched. Husband to @msdavidova
February 8, 2026 at 10:23 PM

by Richard Baldwin

74%

by Justin Wolfers Reposted by Kevin Milligan, Kim L. Scheppele

50%
justinwolfers.bsky.social
“If you remember when the ATM was first invented… you would think we fire a lot of bank tellers… But… the number of bank tellers didn't fall. That's because people in those jobs adapted.” And perhaps there's a lesson in this story for how we adapt to AI.
February 8, 2026 at 9:20 PM

by International Monetary Fund

50%

Reposted by Daniel W. Drezner, Mark Rice, Jacob T. Levy

15%
lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com
i worry that a 5-year stretch of nothing but ads for NFTs, bitcoin, and AI is a long enough gap that this nation's once-great advertising industry will forget how to sell a product people actually want
February 9, 2026 at 12:45 AM

by Justin Wolfers Reposted by Robert C. Richards

45%
justinwolfers.bsky.social
If AI is a substitute, it’s the intern who never sleeps. If it’s a complement, it’s the intern who makes you look like a genius. Same software, wildly different workplace vibes. We're going to see each of these very different stories play out in different parts of the labor market.
February 8, 2026 at 5:47 PM

by International Monetary Fund

50%

Reposted by Greg Linden, Mark Rice, R. M. Wilson

16%
faineg.bsky.social
people who say that all creative endeavor can be replaced with AI probably need to reckon with the fact that all televised sports events with human athletes could easily be replicated by high-definition computer-animated simulations….and yet we don’t do this and no one seems to want to.
February 8, 2026 at 7:26 PM

Reposted by Mark Rice, David R. Shumway

7%
kashana.blacksky.app
The point of the AI project is to provoke despair in creative people. They haven’t produced profits or anything anyone wants, just a steady stream of articles about how us artistic types can’t do the thing we’re already doing, making art. Jokes on them, we’re even better at despair than they are.
February 8, 2026 at 6:24 PM

by Rafael Doménech

31%

by Kristina McElheran

18%
kmcelheran.bsky.social
This is a great analogy.
nick-pettigrew.bsky.social Nick Pettigrew @nick-pettigrew.bsky.social · 12h
I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.
dancow.bsky.social Dan Nguyen @dancow.bsky.social · 12h
VC, founder, dumbass
February 9, 2026 at 5:48 AM

by Brendan Nyhan Reposted by David R. Miller

19%
brendannyhan.bsky.social
the chaos that agents are about to unleash as they are increasingly used by people with diminishing technical competence is going to be incredible. will be car crashes everywhere. this guy is a VC!
dancow.bsky.social Dan Nguyen @dancow.bsky.social · 12h
VC, founder, dumbass
@Nick_Davidov Asked Claude Cowork organize my wife's desktop, it stated doing it, asked for a permission to delete temp office files, I granted it, and then it goes "ooops" Turns out it tried renaming and accidentally deleted a folder with all of the photos my wife made on her camera for the last 15 years. All photos of kids, their illustrations, friends' weddings, travel, everything. It's not in trash, it was done via terminal It's not in iCloud, it already synced the new file structure. She didn't have Time Machine. Disc recovery tools can't see anything. I called Apple and they pointed me to a feature in iCloud allowing to retrieve files that were saved before but are no longer on iCloud Drive (they keep them for 30 days). I'm now watching it load tens of thousands of files. I nearly had a heart attack. Nick Davidov • @Nick_Davidov VC, founder, DVC.ai - backing repeat founders with a community of 200 engineers. e/acc/OSS. Perplexity, Higgsfield, Animation, Etched. Husband to @msdavidova
February 9, 2026 at 3:14 AM

Reposted by Suresh Venkatasubramanian

31%
lowd.cc
"Machine Learning Researchers and AI Scientists."

Accurate!
Tiny subset of a map of Bluesky, showing each account as a star in a vast galaxy. The galaxy is loosely clustered into subgroups. The account "lowd.cc" is in an area labeled "Machine Learning Researchers and AI Scientists."
February 9, 2026 at 4:54 AM

Reposted by Aric Rindfleisch

9%

by Diane Watt

1%
dianewatt.bsky.social
AI generated! (Only kidding)
nick-pettigrew.bsky.social Nick Pettigrew @nick-pettigrew.bsky.social · 12h
I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.
dancow.bsky.social Dan Nguyen @dancow.bsky.social · 12h
VC, founder, dumbass
February 9, 2026 at 8:46 AM

by Gernot Wagner

18%
gwagner.com
Here's the rest I have so far:

FT front page on how AI researchers are hit by flood of ‘slop’¹

Nature on AI expanding scientists’ impact but contracting science’s focus²

"Lobotomised by AI"³

¹ www.ft.com/content/54e2...
² www.nature.com/articles/s41...
³ www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-aust...
AI impact slides, plus Anthropic hiring
February 9, 2026 at 3:37 AM

Reposted by Kevin J. Anchukaitis

0%
meadekrosby.bsky.social
AI ads should come with warnings similar to those for pharmaceuticals, e.g., may cause loss of critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity; may contribute to high energy costs, rising temperatures, and depletion of water resources; you may experience threats to democracy with use of AI…
February 9, 2026 at 3:06 AM

by Amy W. Ando

19%
awando.bsky.social
On AI:

I may use it as a tool.

I will never use it to think or create.

I never want to read books, listen to music, or look at art produced by AI.
February 9, 2026 at 12:20 AM

by David S. Cohen

4%
dsc250.bsky.social
These commercials make me want to use AI even less. Which I didn’t know was possible.
February 9, 2026 at 1:55 AM

by Hilary J. Allen

20%
profhilaryallen.bsky.social
I noticed this too - I wondered if they're being bombarded by AI scrapers, but I don't know enough to know whether that's a plausible explanation
February 9, 2026 at 3:22 AM
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