Barack Obama: AI Tech, Threats Are "Not Overhyped" -- Robots Could Decide Humans Are "Not Necessary"
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/09/20/barack_obama_ai_tech_threats_are_not_overhyped_--_robots_could_decide_humans_are_not_necessary.html

Former President Barack Obama said, -- Friday at an event at Colgate University -- that AI technology is advancing faster than people understand, and the scary part is not conscious killer robots, but the beginning of a faster phase of self-directed learning where these systems are increasingly misaligned with human goals and too complex to control.

BARACK OBAMA: I do not believe that this technology is overhyped. The commercial benefits of it may be overhyped. The evaluations of AI companies may be overhyped. The technology itself is not overhyped.

I've been tracking this for a long time. In 2015, 2016, in the last couple of years of my presidency, I actually was focused on this. Pulled together a commission of the best minds in this area to talk about not just the technology, but also the political, social, economic, ethical concerns around this. Produced a terrific report.

Apparently, it got put in the same bin as my pandemic proposal.

But it wasn't picked up by the administration that followed me.

So we could see this coming. But part of what makes this profound is it accelerates. So what is happening right now is we have reached this point of what's called recursive learning where, essentially - and we had anticipated this, but we're now seeing it - the machines are starting to be able to teach themselves. They don't have to wait for humans to start figuring things out.

And so, if you think about it as, let's say, humans are teachers and the AI models are students, as recently as, let's say, a year ago, 90% of the learning of these models was given to them by the teacher, humans, and maybe 5% to 10% they could fill in some gaps and figure stuff out.

In less than a year, maybe even less than six months, we're now at a stage where it's 50-50. And if the trend lines continue, the expectation is it might be 90 to 10.

What this means is that we're now - if the learning track of AI has been like this - we're now heading [into] the hockey-stick trajectory, where the models are going to get smarter and smarter and better and better at a much faster pace, at an exponential pace.

What are the risks of that?

There's the big science-fiction risk of, wow, these guys, these models get smarter than us, and they decide humans are fine, but not necessary. They start setting their own goals, and the killer robots kill us, or we bow down to them.

I do not want to exaggerate that particular risk, but I will say there is a non-zero risk of - non-zero chance of that happening. But that's not actually the risk that I'm most concerned about, although it's the risk that gets most attention.

And the reason that's a risk is not because the computer models are conscious, necessarily. It doesn't mean that they necessarily feel malice towards humans. It's just that if they start setting their own agendas, you may get a misalignment between what they want to do and what we want them to do, and that gap can be dangerous.