“Nobody knows anything,” the screenwriter William Goldman famously said of the movie business. Much the same can be said today for artificial intelligence, a technology that’s moving fast, destination unknown. Unlike movies, though, the bots may one day rise up and exterminate humanity, according to some in the industry. It’s fair to say that people are worried. In just the past few weeks, OpenAI withheld its latest model due to safety concerns; Anthropic PBC conceded that its products may pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” in a regulatory filing; and a former industry researcher warned that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” and some of his former colleagues agreed. It’s understandable, then, that the public is alarmed. Yet a bit of perspective is in order. For one thing, such grim scenarios are far from an expert consensus, as shown by studies like the International AI Safety Report, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Presidential Panel and the Stanford AI Index. Numerous technical analyses have likewise con