No Fate But What We Make
Harvard and MIT face a rare dropout wave, with students leaving not for startups or sabbaticals but because they fear artificial general intelligence will arrive too soon for graduation to matter. MIT’s Alice Blair quit in 2024, telling Forbes she worried she “might not be alive to graduate,” and now writes for the Center for AI Safety. Harvard’s Adam Kaufman left physics and computer science to focus full-time on preventing “deceptive” AI behavior at Redwood Research. The mood recalls the early nuclear era, when scientists left prestigious posts for arms control, convinced existential risk outweighed academic timelines. Surveys echo the anxiety: half of Harvard undergraduates see AI extinction risk as urgent as pandemics or nuclear war, and many expect AI to surpass humans at most tasks within 30 years.