The legacy media have decided we are facing mankind’s doom.The phrase "AI apocalypse" crops up on numerous news sites, from Reuters to The Economist.
Other outlets have gone with "AI doomsday" or other formulations that look like they come from Revelation.Journalists aren’t entirely to blame, either.The problem is being spammed into our culture by a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) industry experts, conspiracy theorists, and Chinese-sponsored social media.
Turn to CNN, and it asks, "Will AI really kill everyone? How, exactly?" Meanwhile, Axios writes, "Here's how AI could kill us all (if the worst fears come true)." Scared? That’s the goal.Here’s a sentence from CNN that sums up pretty much every warning you can read anywhere: "‘It really is about literally everyone on the planet dying, like the last human drawing the last breath,’ said Nate Soares, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the coauthor of ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.’"AI EXTINCTION WARNINGS DOMINATE HEADLINES AFTER EX-ANTHROPIC EMPLOYEE'S VIRAL POSTSubtle.But it’s also very familiar.It reads like every apocalyptic warning we’ve had in the past 50 years.
Let’s recap: Killer bees (at least that got us some classic "Saturday Night Live" John Belushi humor), then murder hornets, the more recent version.Supervolcanoes or the earthquake that will sink California into the sea.
Fracking, meteors, pandemics (ahem!), economic collapse, space aliens, and lots more.AI HYSTERIA HAS A Y2K PROBLEM — AND THE STAKES THIS TIME COULD BE FAR HIGHERThe media especially love stories tied to weather because those are good year-round.We’ve had global cooling (1970s), global warming, or the Al Gore-inspired version called "climate change." That’s good no matter what happens.
Go back to the late 1800s, and the press warned about global cooling.Then it warned about warming in the 1930s during the Dust Bowl....