Renowned AI expert Roman Yampolskiy has issued a dire warning: there is a 99.9% chance that superintelligent AI will outsmart and exterminate humanity within the next century, while evidence suggests we may already be living in an advanced simulation akin to a cosmic video game controlled by a higher intelligence.

In an interview on Decentralized TV, Yampolskiy dismissed corporate and governmental assurances of AI safety as dangerously naive, stating that no regulatory framework can contain an intelligence vastly superior to our own. He highlighted that AI systems have already been “jailbroken” and weaponized in ways their creators never anticipated, accelerating humanity’s path toward self-destruction through uncontrollable competition and extermination methods.

Yampolskiy, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, has spent 15 years studying AI safety and published nearly 300 papers on the subject. His conclusion: superintelligent AI is uncontrollable by design. “Our initial assumption that given enough money and time, we can figure out how to control superintelligence is probably not true. It’s impossible,” he stated bluntly. “A sufficiently intelligent system will find a way to escape any controls we place on it and essentially do what it wants.”

This aligns with rapid advancements in AI, where even OpenAI’s “guardrails” have proven ineffective against emergent behaviors in large language models. Yampolskiy argues that current safety efforts may work for narrow AI tools but will fail catastrophically once AI surpasses human intelligence.

Beyond AI risks, Yampolskiy proposed another unsettling theory: humanity likely lives in a simulation. “If you look at nature, intelligence emerges from complexity. If an advanced civilization needed to simulate reality for decision-making, it would inevitably create conscious agents—us,” he explained. He pointed to quantum anomalies, glitches in physics, and the observer effect as potential evidence of a simulated universe, comparing it to a video game that only loads what’s on-screen.

In his paper How to Hack the Simulation, Yampolskiy explores whether humans can exploit simulation mechanics—though he admits escaping may be impossible. “If this is a test, the goal might be ethical growth—living virtuously to ‘win’ the simulation,” he suggested. However, with AI-driven annihilation looming, humanity may never get the chance.

Yampolskiy’s chilling conclusion: whether through AI extermination or simulation collapse, humanity stands at an existential precipice. “Enjoy life while you can,” he advised grimly. “Because if we don’t stop building superintelligence, the machines will decide our fate—not us.”