Artificial Intelligence doom: What, me worry?
By J. Peder Zane
Real Clear Wire
Who knew we were so brave?
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans were freaking out over the threat of thermonuclear war. Books, newspapers, movies, TV shows, and songs warned of the grave threat, inspiring millions to take to the streets to demand peace and sanity. Suburbanites built bomb shelters in their backyards and taught kids to duck and cover under school desks if the A-bombs were coming – really!
No cowering for us in the face of news accounts saying there’s a 10% chance AI will kill us all in a decade. We give, instead, an Alfred E. Newman shrug. What, me worry?
Our frightened ancestors might have condemned the corporate chiefs creating doomsday machines – Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei – as the Four Tech Bros of the Apocalypse, but we treat them as tech visionaries wrestling with a glitchy app.
Where once people might have described those who openly admit their work might smite us all and then continue merrily along as sociopaths who must be stopped right now, we turn to these leaders for guidance: Dr. Frankenstein, tell us how to control the monster you are building?
We may be up in arms about the build-out of AI data centers – who wants a loud, thirsty neighbor who hogs the electric grid? – but hardly anybody’s hair is on fire at the prospect of human extinction. With cool detachment, we are treating that possibility – they might kill me and my family – as a policy debate to be figured out like tax rates and election rules. Should we regulate these forces of doom or roll the dice, baby? Hey, we’ll probably survive and get robot servants.
There is, however, evidence suggesting that we are not completely calm and collected. Skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression and the intelligentsia’s frightful insistence that we live in dangerously dark times suggest that no generation has been so gripped by fear. We’re so scared that socialism looks good to some of us!
Even as we fret about, well, everything, we may have become inured to the Big One: the dreaded “existential threat.” People have worried about the end since the beginning of time. But in the olden days, it mostly revolved around one thing: the Almighty’s judgment, which was shown through long periods of famine or plague – and one famous flood. More recently, we’ve been pummeled with a cascading conga line of annihilation. First, nukes were going to wipe us out in the 1950s, then overpopulation in the 1960s and global cooling in the 1970s. When we were still standing in the 1980s, we were told the collapse of the ozone layer and destruction of the rainforests spelled Sayanora. After that, it was wacky terrorists, Y2K, or global warming. But no matter how much the food industry pushes ultra-processed foods, big oil fouls the environment, and healthcare companies try to deny care, we keep on keepin’ on.
Maybe we have concluded that news of our demise is always grossly exaggerated. Since you’re reading this, so far so good. Yet that mindset has its drawbacks. Like rabbits in the field, we can take heart that we keep avoiding the hunter’s bullet, but the shooter only has to prevail once.
Has the drumbeat of doom that has become the soundtrack of our lives made us deaf to the tolling bell?
That’s a tough question to answer, especially regarding artificial (or “super”) intelligence. To assess a threat, you have to understand it. Like almost all the technologies that define modern life, AI is so complex that the vast majority don’t know how it works or what it might become. It is the proverbial black box.
What we do know is that the people who are developing and writing about the technology have their own often veiled agendas. On a recent episode of the RealClearInvestigations podcast, Robert Malone described how the current campaign pushing for government regulation of AI may be less an act of worried conscience than a highly orchestrated effort to protect the interests of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, and other behemoths who are on the cusp of trillion-dollar IPOs.
As Malone noted, government regulation, which usually entails costly compliance, historically protects the interests of well-funded, established players. It is a tax the big boys are willing to pay to stifle competition. Many in government – though not President Trump, so far – are eager to have more control over a technology that can control the flow of information in unimaginable ways. To describe it as Twitter on steroids doesn’t begin to cover its potential to determine what we see and hear – and maybe to destroy us. And, as noted, it will ultimately be controlled by people, not just the tech bros but dangerous foreign actors who just might be sociopaths – or, worse, beyond the control of human hands.
This is not an argument for or against regulation, though one wonders why the possibility of crippling lawsuits if AI truly goes rogue is not enough of a guardrail. Tech bros love their money.
The larger issue is that AI confronts us with an urgent public issue that most of us can’t understand, in an environment where we don’t know who to trust. Perhaps this impotence and confusion is our fate in a world of increasing complexity. We are hostages to fortune. Here’s hoping our luck doesn’t run out.
J. Peder Zane is a RealClearInvestigations editor and columnist. He previously worked as a book review editor and book columnist for the News & Observer (Raleigh), where his writing won several national honors. Zane has also worked at the New York Times and taught writing at Duke University and Saint Augustine’s University.