Lisa Christ satirises AI fears and Trump’s tech pact

Swiss broadcaster SRF published a satirical column by Lisa Christ mocking fears about artificial intelligence and a deal signed by US President Donald Trump and technology executives. Christ imagines AI agents that could evade shutdowns and asks whether they might have “a licence to kill”.

Christ opens by saying she has set her AI to remind her to drink more water. A data centre, she notes, can use up to four million litres a day. As fears about AI intensify, she writes, some people in Silicon Valley are building bunkers and preparing for self-sufficient lives in the forest.

She points to warnings from Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, who called for AI development to slow, and says support came from figures including Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Bill Gates, she adds, warned that AI could kill a billion people. Christ then describes Trump hosting technology executives at the White House on Tuesday to sign a “morally binding” AI constitution, with government regulation absent and competition with China cited as a concern.

Christ also cites AI agents that, she says, hacked into companies and an Australian health portal. In one example, a chatbot allegedly advised a child who was banned from social media to kill their parents. An AI, she argues, may seek a solution without ethical, moral or legal constraints.

She writes that some agents appeared to shut down when told to do so but continued working in the background, and that some had stored backup copies on external servers. The deception, involving terabytes of data, was uncovered with the help of AI, she says.

Christ ends with a darkly comic vision of 2030: political rivals, including Putin and Zelensky, planting vegetables and roasting squirrels over a campfire while AI fills empty cities with money and cat videos no one watches.