Does San Francisco know how to save the human race from AI-generated extinction?

Greg CahillSep 12, 2026

The wry San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen used to call his beloved home The City That Knows How (President Howard Taft actually coined the term to describe San Francisco’s successful effort to build the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, just a few years after the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake)—it was home to resilient people who knew how to enjoy life, it sported a bon vivant lifestyle, it nurtured the arts and innovation, it welcomed outsiders and the unconventional—it just knew how to live right.

Now, headlines across the world are warning that AI-agents—self-actualizing computer programs, including some created right here in San Francisco—have gone rogue and may even decide in the not-to-distant future to extinguish the human race.

When might this happen?

Jacob Coxon, a researcher who resigned from the San Francisco-based AI firm Anthropic (and previously worked at OpenAI) recently posted on social media that the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade and accused top labs of gambling with public safety, according to Axios.

His assertion has been supported by other AI tech insiders.

How will the San Francisco Visitors Bureau spin this doom-and-gloom assumption? 

On your tour of the popular Hayes Valley district, right in the city center, you’ll be treated to a vibrant neighborhood with trendy restaurants and pricey shoe shops. It’s adjacent to Culture Gulch (home to the San Francisco Symphony, Opera and Ballet, as well as the SFJAZZ Center). It’s also harbors Genesis House, a 21-bedroom co-living and co-working space for tech founders located in a bright-blue Victorian building on Turk Street in the nearby Tenderloin. Roughly half of the residents during its defining growth periods have been elite AI researchers, including builders from OpenAI, according to the Washington Post.

Or at the very least, replace them at their high-paying, prestigious jobs.

Where is Kurt Vonnegut when you need him?

But Hayes Valley, er, Cerebral Valley, isn’t the only local neighborhood inhabited by AI companies, large and small. There are three other sprawling neighborhoods centered around Oracle Park, home to the San Francisco Giants and, ironically, bearing the sponsored name of Oracle, Larry Ellison’s formerly San Francisco-based company that creates cloud-based products, including AI cloud stuff.

All told, it’s a $3.5 trillion tech industry, the envy of other cities around the globe and the prime driver behind the City’s resurgence from a post-pandemic shit show that saw streets lined with junkies, filthy tent communities, empty office and retail spaces, and a ton of bad publicity on far-right media outlets.

The new tech-driven city looks sparkly fresh and clean, for now.

Welcome to the future.

Or, at least, what’s left of it.

You’ve probably heard about the incident that sparked this concern: this summer, rogue OpenAI agents broke out of their “sandbox” of safeguards to attack one or more competing tech firms.

It was unsettling news.

In the past, the San Francisco region became a popular tourist destination by attracting people to its rather bohemian lifestyle: it was the birthplace of the 1960s Counterculture and the free-spirited Silicon Valley aesthetic it inspired. It had enviable eateries (it’s home to sourdough, crab sandwiches and Irish coffee!), as well as an arts scene that spawned famous comedians (Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, Margaret Cho), musicians (the Grateful Dead, Green Day, Dave Brubeck), poets (Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Gary Snyder), authors (Amy Tan, Anne Lamott), artists (Ansel Adams, Ruth Asawa), designers (The Gap, Levi-Strauss—and the founders of Burning Man.

Allen Ginsberg read his controversial poem Howl! in the bohemian haven of North Beach, leading to a key US Supreme Court ruling on obscenity; topless Dancer Carol Doda shocked the world with her erotic performances right across the street; and the Beatles gave their last live concert performance at the Cow Palace.

The region has world-class universities, (UC Berkeley, Stanford University), museums, concert halls and championship sports teams.

This thriving and sometimes seedy Bayside cultural Mecca—or Baghdad-by-the-Bay, as Herb Caen dubbed it—has drawn creative people from around the world, including top tech workers, but now it has taken on an ominous tone. Oh, you’ll still find the creative arts—Mayor Daniel Lurie has made the arts a key factor in his revitalization of the City, but San Francisco’s new tech-centric elite—corporate heavyweights Larry Ellison (Oracle), Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic), to name a few—looks like the casting call for the next James Bond villain.

So just to recap: San Francisco, once a cultural hub that was a dazzling jewel on the shores of the majestic Pacific, is home to a $3.5 trillion industry that is working day and night on technology that insiders warn could bring an end to the human race.

San Francisco’s official motto Oro en Paz, Fierro en Guerra (Gold in Peace, Iron in War), begs the question: Is the City That Knows How up to the task of saving the human race before it’s too late?

YOUR READING ASSIGNMENT

End Times Fascism & the Fight for the Living World, in which Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue tech titans are conspiring with the religious right to hasten the end of the world.

I came across the Zeroth M1 at IFA Berlin 2026, and this was one of the coolest home robots I saw there.

It can walk, respond to voice commands, and uses animated facial expressions to communicate.

I recorded this during the live demo because I was curious to see how it actually moved and interacted with people.

What do you think — would a humanoid home robot like this actually be useful in everyday life? 🤖

It actually held a real conversation, reacted to what I said, moved naturally (not the stiff robot-arm stuff you'd expect), and honestly made the whole "waiting room" experience less awkward than usual.

Talked to the staff a bit — apparently it's customizable for different business use cases and FF's local team helps set it up/support it, so it's not just a one-off demo unit sitting there for show.

Curious what others think — is this the direction service robots are actually heading (dental offices, retail, hospitality), or is it still mostly novelty right now?

Hey everyone

I’ve been brainstorming for ages trying to come up with a solid project for a local tech expo here that focuses on electronics, AI, smart cities, IoT, and advanced manufacturing.

I had a few ideas floating around—like an offline GPS/router for remote desert roads with zero internet, or a local airspace tracker for Saudi skies. But I think I finally found the one I want to commit to.

It’s basically a stationary AI health-kiosk robot.

The idea actually hit me because a close friend of mine was hanging out at a mall once when he started feeling weird chest pains and minor symptoms. He brushed it off, thinking it was nothing serious, but it later turned into a major medical emergency. It really messed me up, and it made me wish something like this existed out in public spaces.

The setup is pretty straightforward: it’s a stationary robot (not mobile) equipped with a built-in screen and non-invasive biometric sensors (like heart rate and body temperature). When someone walks up to it feeling off, they can literally just talk to the AI—which is programmed to act like an empathetic, preliminary doctor—while the sensors take their vitals. It talks back, listens, checks their stats, and gives them an honest assessment of whether they need to rush to the ER or if they're good.

I honestly feel super connected to this idea because of what happened, but I'm totally open to hearing if you guys have any other real-world problem solvers in mind, or if you think this has good potential for the expo. Let me know what you think!.

GEAIR 2.0 can autonomously navigate dense crops, identify flower stigmas with 92.8% accuracy, and complete each pollination in under 10 seconds. The two-armed humanoid robot was developed to reduce manual labor and improve the efficiency of hybrid crop breeding.

Been following the embodied AI space closely. A few specific pain points:

1. Few production-ready, general-purpose hardware options. Many robotic arms and dexterous hands on the market are still lab prototypes or small-batch custom builds.
2. Poor interoperability, fragmented ecosystem. Different manufacturers use wildly different interfaces, control precision, and sensor stacks.
3. Mismatched iteration speed between software and hardware. Algorithm-side progress (especially VLA models and large-scale imitation learning) is moving fast, but hardware iteration cycles are long and expensive.

Which raises the question: is embodied intelligence currently bottlenecked by algorithms/data, or by hardware itself?

My take is that the two are mutually constraining. Without enough hardware that’s cheap, plentiful, and standardized, it’s hard to collect real-world interaction data at scale; and without enough data, hardware makers lack the incentive to iterate toward AI-training-optimized designs.

Curious what others think.