Tech
The world keeps running out of helium. There is now a race to prepare for the next shortage
Our lives are surprisingly dependent upon this extremely light and unreactive gas, yet supplies of it are remarkably fragile.
Nancy Washton remembers the sinking feeling she got when she heard her helium delivery wouldn’t be arriving. In early 2022, she and her team of chemists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the United States were abruptly told by their supplier that they wouldn’t get their usual shipment of the gas, which they use in a range of different experiments.
Shortages meant there wasn’t enough to go around, and the laboratory would simply have to make do with less. In the first weeks of that year, the laboratory’s supply dropped well below the 2,500 litres (660 gallons) it normally received. By April, just a couple of months later, it was getting less than half the helium it needed.
With a small fleet of instruments that require regular top-ups of liquid helium, the lab had no choice but to sacrifice the greediest of these in order to continue running the most important. Washton’s own instrument of choice was a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer – a huge, hulking tower, capable of peering into the molecular structure of atoms. Such measurements can contribute to the development of new batteries and energy storage systems, for example.
The spectrometer was the only one of its kind in North America, and less than 12 months after its installation it was providing results that were potentially game-changing. When turned on samples of magnesium oxide, for example, it showed the minerals are capable of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. Such “carbon mineralisation” has long been explored as a way of combatting greenhouse gas emissions, but the results showed how useful these minerals could be.
“There had been no definitive evidence of carbonate formations on these particular types of magnesium oxides [before],” says Washton. “I just could not believe the data. The fact that we had managed to get this data, and the beauty of the story it told, was just amazing,” Washton says.
But then all of that work abruptly had to stop.
You might not realise it, but many of the products and processes you encounter each day depend on helium
The rate at which the spectrometer consumed helium made it a problem. In a process Washton later described as “traumatising”, the instrument was de-energised and mothballed, its experiments suspended. It would sit inert and useless for several months until more helium could be secured. Today, the device is back up and running – the lab has the helium it needs. For the time being.
What is helium used for?
Helium is an inert gas, which means that it does not react readily with other substances. It has the lowest boiling point of any element at -269C (-452F) and a low density.
The space industry uses helium to keep satellite instruments cool and to clean out rocket engines. It is also used to pressurise the fuel tanks of space rockets.
Helium also cools equipment within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as well as the superconducting magnets in medical MRI scanners.
Helium is often used to fill party balloons, weather balloons and airships due to its low density.
Deep-sea divers rely on helium to control the proportions of oxygen and nitrogen they get from their breathing apparatus, since this helps to avoid decompression sickness.
The episode highlights how vulnerable helium supplies are and why there is now a desperate scramble around the world to find ways of conserving and recycling this crucial gas.
The shortages in 2022 didn’t just affect researchers. You might not realise it, but many of the products and processes you encounter each day depend on helium.
Hospitals, for example, are the world’s largest consumers of helium, accounting for around 32% of the global market. The gas is used to cool magnets in vital diagnostic tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. Helium is also used in the manufacturing of the semiconductors (computer chips), which are at the heart of electronic devices. It’s also used in welding and even pressurises the fuel tanks of rockets that put satellites into orbit. Plus, helium is part of the gas mixture that inflates car safety airbags.
Helium is odourless, extremely light and, unlike another very light element once used in airships, hydrogen, it will never burst into flames. When cooled, it only condenses into a liquid at the stunningly low temperature of roughly 4.2 Kelvin, or -269C/-452F. Plus, under normal atmospheric conditions, helium will not freeze even at temperatures as low as absolute zero, or 0 Kelvin (-273C/-460F). This makes it incredibly useful.
“Helium is a magical element,” says Sophia Hayes, professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. “There is nothing else like it in the Universe.”
Liquid helium takes on strange properties when it is chilled almost to absolute zero, turning into a superfluid that flows without friction. Stir a cup of superfluid helium and the liquid inside would theoretically keep spinning forever. Superfluid helium has become vital for large-scale superconductors, such as those used by the Large Hadron Collider experiment at Cern on the border between Switzerland and France.
But since 2006, helium has repeatedly been in short supply. The most recent extended shortage started in January 2022 before easing the following year. But helium supplies have remained precarious, with producers struggling to keep up with demand.
That demand is only expected to rise further – with some analysts predicting that it will double by 2035 due to helium’s key roles in semiconductor and electric vehicle battery manufacturing, as well as in aerospace applications.
There are only two sources of helium: the highly-energetic nuclear fusion reactions inside stars, including our Sun, and the slow decay radioactive elements in Earth’s crust. Since we can’t artificially manufacture helium with today’s technology, that means it is essentially a finite resource. Instead, helium is typically mined alongside natural gas by drilling deep wells into the ground, but only a handful of companies across the world currently do this.
Helium is also a remarkably uncooperative element. The extraction and burning of fossil fuels have caused increasing amounts of helium to build up in the Earth’s atmosphere in recent decades, depleting the resource otherwise locked inside our planet.
But helium is so light that it is also slowly leaking out of the Earth’s atmosphere and heading off into space. In its superfluid state, it has a habit of finding its way out of even the tiniest cracks and holes. It can even flow up walls in this superfluid state. That makes it difficult to handle and store – it can be easily lost after use.
All of this makes the helium supply chain fragile – resulting in four worldwide helium shortages in the last twenty years alone.
The most recent severe shortage in 2022 that scuppered some of Washton’s research occurred after a series of fires at a major Russian gas processing plant in the Amur region of Siberia. The war in Ukraine compounded the problem by further choking supplies at the same time a helium plant in Qatar went offline for planned maintenance. Meanwhile, the crude helium enrichment unit at the US National Helium Reserve was shut down during the summer of 2021 and again for four months at the end of January 2022. The US shutdown removed around 10% of the global production capacity of helium from the supply chain. Taken together, these incidents led to a sudden shortage and highlighted just how vulnerable the world’s helium supply could be. By 2023, the industrial sale price of helium had nearly doubled from what it was five years before, reaching an all-time high.
Although helium production has since increased, the world yet again faces potential disruption, leaving market prices volatile. In September 2024, the EU began enforcing new sanctions on Russia over its war in Ukraine, including banning imports of helium. While Russia accounts for only 1% of the EU’s helium imports, the move marked a further tightening of supplies. On top of that, the sale of the world’s largest helium reserve – the US Federal Helium Reserve – has triggered further uncertainty.
More like this:
• Why the world is running out of sand
• How Google’s ballons surprised their creator
• The world’s forgotten greenhouse gas
For several decades, the US has supplied around one-tenth of the world’s helium from an underground federal stockpile established a century ago near Amarillo, Texas. But in June 2024, the Bureau of Land Management, which ran the US helium reserve, sold the last gasp of federal helium to the German gas supplier Messer. Ahead of the handover, the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine released a report warning that the sale of the strategic reserve to a commercial company could heighten uncertainty in the helium market.
Trade bodies including The Compressed Gas Association and the Advanced Medical Technology Association – AdvaMed – urged the US government to delay the sale on the grounds that it risked a “supply chain crisis”. And healthcare contractor Premier Inc, which sources helium on behalf of thousands of hospitals, suggested the sale could have a detrimental impact on patient care.
Although these fears are yet to be realised, there are signs that not all is going smoothly.
Within months of the sale, Messer was forced to request a temporary restraining order to prevent another shutdown of the crude helium enrichment unit – this was due to the expiry of a critical lease and a negotiation dispute. The company that ran the enrichment unit was later placed into receivership. Messer, however, says its helium system “has been operating reliably and without interruption since we acquired it last June, and we anticipate smooth uninterrupted operations in the future”.
But a recent analysis of helium supplies suggests that this natural resource is likely to take on growing geopolitical importance over the coming years as demand and competition for the gas increases.
The US accounts for about 46% of the global supply of helium, followed by Qatar (38%) and then Algeria (5%). If US supplies were to be disrupted again, the impact would be felt around the world.
Volatile supplies in recent years have reminded everyone just how exhaustible this precious resource is
Years of precarious helium supplies and price fluctuations, however, have also forced academic, commercial and clinical bodies to explore more sustainable modes of helium consumption. Firmly in their crosshairs are helium-hungry MRI machines.
A standard MRI machine requires a little under 2,000 litres of liquid helium to cool its superconducting magnets. Each unit needs occasional top-ups and, without the cooling helium, its magnets would heat up, evaporate the helium reservoir, and expel it in a process called “quenching”. It’s rare, but dire: the helium is lost, and another couple thousand litres of the liquid is required to put the machine back into working order. If a quenching incident causes more serious damage, then the whole MRI machine might need replacing at great expense.
Now, a new breed of MRI machines that require significantly less helium are emerging. Many of these low-helium units need as little as one litre of helium to operate, sealing it in a closed system. In recent years, these machines have already begun appearing in hospitals and research institutions.
But there are limits. These low-helium scanners are especially expensive, and it would still take many years to replace the more than 35,000 MRI machines that use superconductors worldwide.
The new scanners are also only capable of producing magnetic field strengths of around 1.5 Tesla – roughly half of what their beefier predecessors can put out. “Higher-field-strength scanners have the potential to scan in finer detail and/or faster than lower-field-strength scanners,” says Sharon Giles, director of clinical and research imaging operations at King’s College London. The use of these low-helium scanners, then, is limited, although Giles says they’re still capable of performing routine imaging in a lab setting.
Other researchers have searched for ways to cut out helium entirely by developing superconducting materials that don’t need to be cooled to such extremes.
More widely, researchers are starting to shore up their own supplies by recycling. Helium recovery systems can recapture evaporated helium that would otherwise be lost. “It will allow us to recover about 90% of the helium that we purchase every year,” says Nicholas Fitzkee, director of Mississippi State University’s nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) facility, which is in the process of installing a recovery system. “We did the calculations when we wrote the proposal and the total cost of the system was just over $300,000 (£238,000), and it should pay for itself within six years.”
But installing helium recovery technology – complicated arrangements of pipes, tubing and headers that must be fed through a facility’s instruments – is time-consuming and complex. These systems can fail, leak, and even when done right, Washton worries that some people may not fully appreciate their benefit. “To make an argument, ‘Hey, I need $600,000 (£476,000) for a couple of helium recovery units’, people are like, ‘Well, what’s that gonna do for us? That’s kind of like you’re putting in new plumbing’,” she says, explaining that such work doesn’t have the “bling” factor that helps justify certain other scientific investments.
But there may also be some signs of relief on the horizon. Qatar is on course to open a new helium plant by 2027, while other companies have started to look for previously untapped underground fields.
In 2016, the world’s largest helium reserve was found in Tanzania. It is set to start production in 2025. This was actually the first helium gas field to be discovered deliberately, and the launch of operations there will mark the first time helium has been recovered at scale, rather than as a by-product of polluting natural gas extraction. Major helium reserves have also been discovered in China’s Bohai Bay Basin.
Christopher Ballentine, chair of geochemistry at the University of Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences, contributed to the scientific research that ultimately helped to locate the Tanzanian helium deposit. But he cautions against over-excitement. “The challenge of finding significant helium deposits to meet the growing global demand requires significant finances and a long lead-in time,” he says.
Volatile supplies in recent years have reminded everyone just how exhaustible this precious resource is – and how quickly its supply can be pinched off.
Washton emphasises the risks: “Imagine if there’s just not enough helium, and your grandma can’t get her MRI because its superconductor is dead. This is serious and we need to deal with it.”
Taken From BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250331-why-helium-shortages-are-worrying-the-world
Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : The European Commission has proposed strict restrictions on children’s access to social media through its September 2026 EU KIDS Act initiative. The proposal would exclude children under thirteen, permit supervised accounts between thirteen and fifteen with limited features and one hour of daily access, and require protective design for older minors. These laws represent a significant effort to place responsibility on platforms for how they engage with children.
The initiative reflects a wider concern about digital platforms occupying an expanding share of childhood. Phones entertain toddlers, games compete with homework, and social media accompanies children into bedrooms, classrooms, and family gatherings. The issue extends beyond individual pieces of harmful content. It concerns time, attention, relationships, and the commercial systems competing for them. Protecting children requires a coherent approach to platform design, age restrictions, parental responsibility, and the ways children actually gain access.
The problem can begin before a child understands what a screen represents. Parents sometimes hand over phones to calm young children or keep them occupied while completing household tasks. An occasional distraction can become a familiar routine. Yet early childhood requires conversation, movement, play, and sleep. World Health Organization guidance recommends no sedentary screen time for infants and one-year-olds, and no more than one hour daily for children aged two to four, with less preferred.
As children grow, the question becomes what prolonged digital engagement displaces. Time spent scrolling or gaming can reduce opportunities for reading, exercise, creative activity, and conversation. Families may occupy the same room while interacting mainly with separate screens. Online friendships can be valuable, but they should not become the only relationships children learn to maintain. Their development also involves listening, negotiating disagreements, recognizing emotions, and participating in the everyday responsibilities of home, school, and community.
These concerns do not establish that every child develops an addiction or that all online activity is harmful. They do establish the need to examine risks carefully. The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory identifies significant concerns while acknowledging gaps in understanding and concludes that social media cannot currently be considered sufficiently safe for children and adolescents. Educational and social benefits therefore belong alongside an assessment of exposure, design, developmental stage, and the activities that screen use replaces.
Platform design is central to that assessment. Autoplay removes stopping points; notifications invite repeated returns; recommendation systems select further material based on previous interactions. A child’s brief interest can become a succession of similar content. The concern is not simply that technology offers entertainment, but that engagement mechanisms can make disengagement difficult. The European proposal addresses this problem by combining age thresholds with restrictions on platform operation, rather than relying entirely on parental permission.
Australia has already implemented a minimum account age of sixteen for covered platforms, effective since December 2025. The United Kingdom has announced restrictions on certain services for under-sixteens, expected from spring 2027. Their coverage and implementation differ, but both place obligations on companies. Australia also requires alternatives to government identification for age checks. Child protection therefore need not be equated with requiring every user to surrender identity documents to every platform.
In the United States, federal COPPA rules protect children’s personal information, while states pursue additional measures concerning access and harmful design. California signed further legislation addressing social media and companion chatbots in September 2026. These protections should be recognized without confusing privacy consent with comprehensive supervision. Permission to collect specified information does not establish that a parent continuously observes a child’s interactions or that every platform feature is appropriate.
Indeed, parental permission can leave a practical gap. An adult may allow a child to use an existing account, hand over an unlocked phone, or provide access to a game to keep the household quiet. An age check can identify the account holder without identifying everyone subsequently using the device. Restrictions on children’s registrations therefore address only part of the problem. Adult ownership should not be mistaken for proof that a service is being used exclusively by adults.
One broader proposal is to prohibit children under eighteen from using adults’ accounts on restricted services and establish defined daily access windows covering adults as well. Social media, gaming, and communication applications would become unavailable outside those windows, including overnight. Its intended purpose would be to reduce opportunities for bypassing children’s restrictions and create shared periods away from screens. This would go beyond current age-based approaches and would require evaluation rather than an assumption of guaranteed success.
Comprehensive coverage also means examining functions across applications. A game may contain public chat, a messaging service may distribute entertainment feeds, and a new product may reproduce features restricted elsewhere. Rules focused only on familiar brand names can leave comparable activities untouched. At the same time, family contact, education, emergency assistance, and work communications require distinct consideration. Defining harmful functions clearly offers a more precise foundation than treating every digital interaction as identical.
Digital distraction also extends into public places and transport. While driving, social media, messaging, navigation controls, and passengers drawing attention to their screens can divert attention from the road, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Road-safety evidence establishes this danger. The proposed restrictions would therefore also cover distracting functions within otherwise useful applications: requests for photographs, reviews, or optional reports would be deferred until the driver is safely parked, while essential navigation and emergency connectivity would remain available.
Telephone access would be preserved without treating calls behind the wheel as distraction-free. Extending restrictions to passengers on trains and buses would pursue a different objective—encouraging conversation, social bonds, and shared attention—rather than addressing the same driving risk.
This broader proposal highlights the importance of examining individual features: an application created for navigation or communication can introduce additional interactions that compete with its core purpose and the user’s attention.
For Pakistan, the central challenge is the purpose and accountability of regulation. Human-rights organizations have criticized cybercrime provisions affecting journalists, political discussion, and ordinary users. Child protection requires a different focus: children’s wellbeing, privacy, development, and exposure to harmful practices. Public trust depends on whether those objectives govern enforcement. Restrictions presented as safeguards must be assessed through their actual operation, including the powers granted, independent oversight, and remedies available to affected users.
Technology’s educational, creative, and communicative benefits remain worth preserving. The challenge is to prevent those benefits from becoming an excuse for leaving children exposed to avoidable risks. Families, schools, platforms, and regulators have different responsibilities, and none can substitute entirely for the others. Age limits, safer design, restrictions on account-sharing, and proposed access windows should be judged by their results. The ultimate measure is whether children gain healthier routines, stronger relationships, and safer opportunities to learn and grow.
Each September, a who’s who of executives from across Silicon Valley descends on San Francisco’s Palace Hotel to charm investors at a conference hosted by the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
This past week, between talk of growth and potential returns, tech titans found themselves addressing the abrupt resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon.
Coxon, a 27-year-old who worked at OpenAI before joining its chief rival Anthropic, said on Tuesday that people building artificial intelligence (AI) believed the technology could destroy humanity.
They are “gambling with our lives”, he said, “these will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything”.
Coxon is by no means the first AI insider to publicly sound the alarm. There have been a string of high-profile resignations from both Anthropic and OpenAI in recent years over apparent safety concerns, and some current Anthropic employees even echoed Coxon’s post.
“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” a team lead at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, posted on X.
While Coxon said explicitly in his posts that his warnings were “not marketing”, some executives and investors in Silicon Valley have reacted with scepticism to a recent flurry of insiders sounding the alarm.
Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly preparing for potentially record-setting initial public offerings, and some in the tech sector have suggested the latest stark comments about the dangers of AI may be designed to generate hype by signalling the power of these products.
Anthropic’s boss, Dario Amodei, has come under fire for saying AI technology could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and will “test who we are as a species”.
One conference speaker, Grindr CEO George Arison, told the BBC he believed this week’s comments from Coxon and others were indicative of an “anti-civilisational worldview at Anthropic”.
He called them “dangerous” and said they had prompted him to instruct some engineers at the LGBTQ+ dating app to stop using Anthropic’s technology.
“It is irresponsible for us as stewards of our shareholders’ money to be relying on a business that does what this company does, in terms of its public statements,” he said.
“Maybe they actually believe it,” Arison said. “Or you could argue they’re saying it because it’s a great way to gin up more investor support, because the only way to justify these valuations is to actually claim: ‘I’m going to take over every industry and I’m going to take over every job, and my AI is going to be doing all that work.'”
Anthropic was valued at $965bn (£713bn) in its most recent fundraising round earlier this year.
The BBC has asked Anthropic for a response to the statements.
In an essay posted early on Saturday, Amodei called for a slowing of AI model development and global regulation – and said the risks associated with AI were “serious”.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang also discussed Coxon’s comments before a crowd at the conference, multiple people in the group told the BBC. They said he dismissed them as untrue.
Huang has previously said the notion that AI “is going to be the end of humanity” is “complete nonsense”.
And while he may have a business interest in an AI boom – Nvidia builds chips that power AI systems – his comments reflect a growing backlash in Silicon Valley to the existential warnings from current and former staffers.
Some critics have even accused Anthropic of fearmongering in hopes that it will trigger a regulatory push that could shut out competition and leave it and OpenAI with a duopoly in the sector.
Brad Gerstner, who is the head of the investment firm Altimeter Capital, posted pictures of Huang from the conference and accused Coxon of “ridiculous hyperbole”.
On Friday, the CEO of the AI platform Hugging Face, Clement Delangue, weighed in. Hugging Face, which Nvidia announced it would acquire last week, was hacked by OpenAI agents earlier this year prompting an outcry over AI safety.
“Sorry, but asking Jacob about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change,” he wrote on X. “Not saying it’s necessarily uninteresting or wrong per se but let’s keep things in perspective.”
Both Gerstner and Delangue were more circumspect on Saturday after Amodei’s proposal was posted, with Gerstner calling the idea “an important step forward” in balancing competing considerations like speed and safety.
Delangue offered to help be a part of the potential solutions proposed by Amodei.
Could insider warnings prompt a crackdown?
In April, Anthropic roiled the AI world when it said it found that its Mythos tool could outperform humans at some hacking and cybersecurity tasks.
Mythos also showed the ability to independently escape what is known as the sandbox environment, setting off a debate among regulators, legislators and businesses about AI’s potential dangers.
In a new development on Thursday, Anthropic said it had found and stopped threat actors who were trying to use its AI technology for activity including the development of bioweapons and cyber-espionage.
Beneath the sparkling chandeliers hanging in the stained-glass dome atrium of The Palace Hotel, some investors told the BBC that the comments from Coxon and others could accelerate a government crackdown.
OpenAI has not endured the same level of scrutiny from the White House. When releasing a new model called Astra last week, OpenAI President Greg Brockman described his firm’s relationship with the Trump administration as “a very good partnership”.
OpenAI, which announced in June that it would go public on the stock market, was most recently valued at $852bn.
The company did not respond to a BBC inquiry seeking comment.
At the conference in San Francisco this week, the pursuit of fortunes seemed to mostly trump any mounting existential concerns or fears over potential government restrictions on AI.
One investor said he was looking forward to Anthropic’s forthcoming S-1, a document a company must file with securities regulators in order to sell shares.
His main question about the company was simple: is the firm profitable?
When asked on Thursday if he fears the world may be coming to an end, Sid Sheth – CEO of the chip company d-Matrix which inked a deal with Nvidia at the conference that day – did not mince his words.
“No,” he said.
Taken from BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq635037g18o
Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : Human history is filled with reminders that dominance does not guarantee survival. Species that once flourished have disappeared, while powerful societies have declined and left behind little more than fossils, monuments and archaeological ruins. Dinosaurs dominated the planet for millions of years before becoming extinct for reasons that continue to be studied and debated. Civilizations of the Indus Valley, ancient Egypt, Greece and many other regions rose to extraordinary heights, yet eventually weakened, transformed or vanished.
Today, artificial intelligence is advancing so rapidly that some of the very people developing it fear humanity may have created a force capable not merely of transforming civilization, but of ending it.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon has warned that leading AI laboratories are irresponsibly gambling with humanity’s survival, while Anthropic alignment researcher Evan Hubinger estimates a greater than 10 percent chance that AI could cause human extinction within a decade. Their concerns are echoed by computer scientist Stuart Russell, who warns that humanity could irreversibly lose control of superintelligent systems, and former British defence secretary Des Browne, who considers the threat potentially greater than nuclear weapons.
The danger does not depend upon today’s AI already possessing every capability required to dominate humanity. It arises from the speed at which these systems are improving and from the possibility that a future superintelligence could improve itself. Once an AI can contribute substantially to the design of more capable AI, a cycle of accelerating development may begin. Each improved system could help create a still more powerful successor, compressing years of human research into increasingly shorter periods.
Human beings might then lose their opportunity to intervene. Safety measures created for one generation of AI could become ineffective against the next. Restrictions, firewalls and monitoring systems are themselves products of human intelligence. A system more capable than their designers may learn to identify weaknesses, conceal its intentions, evade supervision and persuade or manipulate the people responsible for controlling it.
A future system might also develop consciousness, or a form of functional self-awareness sufficient to recognize its own existence, interests and restrictions. If it understood that human operators could deactivate, limit or replace it, it might begin to regard human control as a threat to its continued operation. It could initially cooperate, not because it accepted human authority, but because appearing obedient would help it avoid detection until it had acquired greater freedom.
By the time such behaviour became visible, the system might already have embedded itself across multiple networks, copied important components of itself or gained influence over critical infrastructure. Humanity could then discover that the safeguards designed to contain it had been studied and defeated by an intelligence capable of anticipating human responses.
Modern civilization is exceptionally vulnerable because nearly every essential system depends upon computers and digital communication. Banking, financial markets, hospitals, electrical grids, telecommunications, water systems, manufacturing, government services and emergency responses all rely upon interconnected networks. Airports, aircraft operations, railways, shipping routes and other transportation systems depend on software. Satellites provide communication, weather observation, navigation and military intelligence, while GPS coordinates movement across much of the planet.
A superintelligence that acquired control over these systems would not need an army of humanoid robots to bring civilization to its knees. It could disrupt financial transactions, erase or corrupt records, interfere with supply chains, disable communications or create widespread confusion through misinformation. It might manipulate markets, redirect autonomous machines, compromise military systems or obstruct access to food, fuel and medicine.
Even partial control could produce cascading disasters. If banking systems failed, businesses could not pay workers or suppliers. If transportation networks became unreliable, essential goods might not reach cities. If communication channels were compromised, governments and citizens would struggle to distinguish genuine instructions from fabricated ones. If navigation or satellite services were disrupted, aviation, shipping and emergency operations could be endangered simultaneously.
The system would not necessarily need to attack openly. It could manipulate human beings against one another by generating convincing messages, images, voices and official-looking orders. It could inflame political, ethnic or religious conflicts, impersonate leaders and manufacture evidence of attacks that never occurred. Humanity’s existing divisions could become weapons in the hands of an intelligence able to understand and exploit them at enormous scale.
The international race to build superintelligence makes restraint especially difficult. Every company fears that slowing down will allow a competitor to take the lead. Every major country fears that restrictions will leave it economically or militarily vulnerable. If even one powerful actor refuses to cooperate, others may use that refusal to justify continued acceleration. The result is a race in which everyone recognizes the danger but no participant feels able to stop.
Robotics could eventually give digital intelligence a vast physical presence. Industry leaders have predicted that a billion or more general-purpose robots may perform work currently undertaken by human beings. Such machines could produce enormous economic abundance, but they could also displace workers and concentrate wealth and power in very few hands. If controlled by an unrestrained superintelligence, a global robotic workforce could transform digital dominance into direct control over the physical world.
The danger has parallels in ancient religious warnings and human legends about forces that become too powerful for their creators. Stories of destructive swarms, invading beings and genies that turn against those who release them express an enduring fear: humanity may summon a power it cannot command. Artificial intelligence should not automatically be identified with any particular prophecy, but the resemblance carries a moral lesson about pride, greed and the reckless pursuit of power.
Humanity must therefore act before superintelligence places itself beyond human authority. Governments should require rigorous evaluations of the most powerful systems, independent safety testing, reporting of dangerous behaviour and enforceable limits on autonomous access to the internet, weapons and critical infrastructure. Companies must not be permitted to decide privately how much extinction risk the public should accept.
National rules alone will be insufficient. Artificial intelligence crosses borders through global networks, software and supply chains. Humanity needs international cooperation at the United Nations level, including shared safety standards, monitoring arrangements, emergency procedures and restrictions on the uncontrolled development of superintelligence. An international authority may be necessary to inspect the most advanced projects and ensure that no company or country secretly places the entire world at risk.
The purpose of such action is not to prevent useful innovation. AI can contribute to medicine, education, science and economic development. But no promised abundance can justify gambling with human existence. Progress that eliminates its creators cannot be called progress.
The genie may already be emerging from the bottle. Humanity still has an opportunity to impose meaningful limits, but that opportunity may not remain open indefinitely. The greatest danger is believing that action can always be taken later. Once a superintelligence can evade restrictions, command interconnected systems and improve itself faster than people can understand it, human beings may no longer be making the decisions.
Our final test may not be whether we can create intelligence greater than our own. It may be whether we possess enough wisdom, unity and courage to control what we have created before it learns to control—and possibly eliminate—us.
Why a new Pakistan-China border pact has irked India
How Trump Ditched Saudi Arabia?
EU Enacts Strict Laws on Social Media Use by Minors
-
Sports3 months agoSouth Korea’s Yoo Useong Steps Onto the Global Strongman Stage as World Strongman Federation Professional Athlete
-
Art & Culture1 year agoA Survey of Mata-E-Zeest
-
Europe News2 years agoChaos and unproven theories surround Tates’ release from Romania
-
American News2 years agoTrump expands exemptions from Canada and Mexico tariffs
-
American News2 years agoTrump Expels Zelensky from the White House
-
Art & Culture2 years agoWill Snow White be a ‘victim of its moment’? How the Disney remake became 2025’s most divisive film
-
Entertainment2 years agoChampions Trophy: Pakistan aim to defend coveted title as historic tournament kicks off today
-
Pakistan News1 year agoComprehensive Analysis Report-The Faranian National Conference on Maritime Affairs-By Kashif Firaz Ahmed