Fear Of AGI Is Driving Harvard And MIT Students To Drop Out
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriafeng/2025/08/06/fear-of-super-intelligent-ai-is-driving-harvard-and-mit-students-to-drop-out/
Fear Of AGI Is Driving Harvard And MIT Students To Drop Out
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriafeng/2025/08/06/fear-of-super-intelligent-ai-is-driving-harvard-and-mit-students-to-drop-out/
12 Comments
Submission statement: There’s no law of the universe saying that something will never be smarter than humans.
Other animals are intelligent. We are creating artificial intelligence.
Bay Area corporations are trying to make humanity obsolete, and this should worry everybody.
The most well educated people fear to be replaced, what else they gonna do? work at 7-11?
No surprise. Why would you get 200k debt to face replacement in the next 10 years?
That’s both the smartest and dumbest thing to do at the same time – and that pretty much describes the state of AI predictions we have regarding were things are heading for humanity.
Firstly, the reputation of Forbes has suffered significantly in my mind. Second: this seems like a silly idea driven by FUD, rather than by rational decisionmaking. A high quality education is its own toolset, and no university student should ever sacrifice their education based on predictions about some futuristic whiz-bang tech we don’t even believe we can make. Look at how dumb LLMs are and then ask yourself how soon AGI is going to come along. Answer: not soon. 90% of the Ai companies out there are trying to disuade competition, and that means targeting the “garage startups” that might threaten their future dominance, like LLMs did with Google Search, forcing Google to rush into the LLM game to protect its market.
These major companies fear the small startups of entrepreneurs and what they might build that the majors don’t get to own. The majors have your phones, your search, they want your homes, a constant stream of your health information… they want to control it all. To do that they need to scare away the next Larry and Sergei, the next Steve, the next Zuckerberg.
Clearly they weren’t very bright to begin with then. AGI is sci-fi and there’s no sign anything we have now will ever reach that. Look at GPT-5, dumb as a rock.
doubtful.
This is likely just more fear mongering to get people to respect AI long enough to keep the bubble open a little longer to get that investment cash.
I doubt this is actually true, and Forbes didn’t exactly document higher dropout rates – they found one or two people who used this fear as their rationale for dropping out.
I dropped out of school and I could have told you ten good reasons for doing so back then – but they’d all be post-fact rationalizations and not the true cause. Fear of AGI sounds a LOT like one of those.
> Blair’s not the only student afraid of the potentially devastating impact that AI will have on the future of humanity if it becomes sentient and decides that people are more trouble than they’re worth.
is this article trying to make hurt the image harvard and mit? i have a hard time accepts students at these schools are concerned about; “ai becoming sentiment” or artificial general intelligence becoming a reality in the “near-future”.
also, dropping out because of the “potential” for agi?
Adjusted Gross Income is a fear that has to be faced for sure.
AI companies are burning through electricity, water and money on 50% hype, 40% slop and 10% useful tech. The fear is completely unfounded.
Soooo…it’s mental to *like* AI somehow these days, but it’s *not* mental to be so afraid of AI that you drop out of a prestigious college program, because you’re “unsure” you’ll be alive to graduate??? Please make it make sense.