AI Doomsday Panic Is Completely Out Of Control

AI Doomsday Bullshit Is Getting Tired

The "rogue AI" narrative continues to help obscure very ugly and avoidable human failures.

For years, they warned AI could kill all humans. Now people are listening.

A doomsaying community once on the periphery of the tech industry has gained influence, as AI “agents” perform amazing and alarming feats.

Don’t Believe the Hype — or Doom — About AI

For America’s VC-dominated tech industry, AI hype isn’t just a crazy by-product — it’s a structural part of the US economy in which capital tries to write our destinies. We shouldn’t let it.

The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here | Compact

Americans do not care for artificial intelligence. Recent polling shows that their attitudes mostly range from ambivalence to horror.

How the AI Writing Panic Is Making Us All Worse Writers

This applies to those who use AI to write and those who don’t

Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares — Common Notions Press

Industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fear

Companies That Replaced Humans With AI Are Realizing Their Mistake

As AI agents have yet to pay for themselves, more and more executives are waking up to the sloppy reality of AI hype.

AI Safety Is a Narrative Problem · Special Issue 5: Grappling With the Generative AI Revolution

This op-ed explores power and narrative dynamics around AI. Drawing on pop-culture references, the professional experiences of the author and examples from 2023’s “Great AI Safety Hype Roadshow,” this piece draws on the literary criticism technique of practical criticism to consider how speeches and announcements from both Silicon Valley executives and research scientists to interrogate the media-friendly nature of p(doom) discourse—which focuses on the existential risks of AI (PauseAI, 2023)—and its likely consequences. The complexities of AI and its numerous social impacts can be difficult for even the most expert analyst to unpack. In spite of this, the potential of “existential threats” has successfully cut through to become a mainstay of mainstream media coverage over the last year. This piece will make the case that this is an effective narrative conceit that has achieved a number of ends that traditional science communication tends to find difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Firstly, it is easy to understand. Simplification of this nature—that removes jargon and complexity and focuses on a single outcome—is much easier to fit on a TV rolling news ticker or on the cover of a tabloid newspaper than more well-balanced, representative opinions. Secondly, it inherits prior assumptions from well-known dramatic forms. P(doom) plays to stories familiar from Greek tragedy through to Marvel movies, in which lone male heroes battle ineluctable forces. Thirdly, it is imbued with urgency and so becomes difficult to ignore.

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

The Age of Wonders and Terrors

Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, …

The loudest warning about AI and jobs yet

200 economists and AI leaders say something big is happening. What should we do about it? Plus: Apple sues OpenAI