The real risks of AI

AI is in headline after headline, most of which focus on the risks that are supposed to be keeping us up at night. The very people who developed these technologies and brought them to market are now warning us that their creations threaten to wreak….well, they can’t tell us what, exactly, but we should apparently be Very Very Scared.

Maybe they’re right! But it’s hard for me to get super excited about the unspecified, hypothetical risks of AI at a time when huge swaths of North America are choked by fire and smoke. The risks of climate change are no longer hypothetical: The best-case scenario now is that we somehow avert the very worst-case scenario.

Faced with this existential, certain and unavoidable terror, no wonder we prefer to focus on a risk that is less tangible, more distant, and that we’d like to believe is still within our power to avert. Preventing the robot takeover is a control fantasy: a place for us to put our hope that humanity can yet save itself.