The threshold is “destroy or catastrophically harm humanity,” a threshold which one could argue the burning of coal, existence of nuclear weapons, social media for children and a good fraction of living world leaders have already reached [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/04/technology/openai-culture...

Agreed. In addition to sounding like spitballing, even the linked articles (from what I saw) don't show a clear way in which the former employee came to 70%. Overall this article comes across as fear-mongering but one of the linked sources was an interesting blog post (IMO) about why people should _stop_ providing specific estimations of p(doom).

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EwyviSHWrQcvicsry/stop-talki...

They are just spitballing. Nobody has any actual idea yet whether AGI is even possible. Nobody has a statistically valid sample of what AGIs have done to civilizations. Nobody actually knows anything. They're just spitballing.

That was my point. 70% is a made up number. If you're going to just make up a number, may as well throw some false precision in as well, lest you appear lazy.