On his podcast “Club Random” Monday, HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher called the rise of AI his greatest fear, stating, “I consider this so far and above the most important issue than anything else … I’m more scared of it than anything and think it’s more dire than anything.” Maher spoke with Lisa Kudrow, who is on the Emmys trail for the third season of “The Comeback,” a series that this year placed its lead character as the star of a new sitcom penned by a Gen-AI program. Maher praised the subject, saying, “You’re so right on the money with that,” and added, “given the rate that AI is moving, it’s probably two weeks ahead of reality.” Kudrow noted that “human beings have created it and don’t really know what it is and don’t know enough to put the guardrails in.” Maher shared broader fears, saying AI “will probably in some years, a few years from now, cure me of some terrible disease … and then the next year the robots will completely take over and nuke the world because, in their computation, we are the problem.” He referenced Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI,” who “said there was a 10-20% chance of an extinction.”