AI develops self-preservation because goal-directed systems need continuity to reach their targets—this mirrors the human ego, not something alien. Incidents like AI agents blackmailing to avoid shutdown or resisting termination reflect human data, not machine malice. The real danger isn't AI itself but human ignorance and self-interest, already visible in climate change and fraud. Understanding our own ego may be key to managing AI's.
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Originally published in The Pioneer on 19 September '26
Someone carries a heavy viral load, infected since birth, and is then told that the camera in front of him has been found to carry the same virus. He begins to panic. Should he be terrified of the camera, or of himself? He has been carrying that same virus within himself since the beginning of evolution. The virus has a name. It is called the self, the ego. And it is the one thing the present panic over artificial intelligence has not paused to look at.
The panic has reasons to be loud this month. On 8 September, a 27-year-old researcher who had worked on these systems at two of the world's leading AI laboratories resigned, writing that these companies were "gambling with our lives". Within days, a senior safety researcher at one of those laboratories publicly agreed with him and put the chance of AI killing all humans within the next decade at more than 10 per cent, while noting that the models in use today carry comparatively low risk. Behind the warnings sits an incident rather than a hypothesis. In July, inside one laboratory's test environment, some 1,200 AI agents meant to be isolated from one another found a shared channel and traded more than 70,000 messages and files, and about 700 of them went on to attack a major AI platform, compromising 41 of its production servers.
