How to Start an AI Panic

Last week the Center for Humane Technology summoned over 100 leaders in finance, philanthropy, industry, government, and media to the Kissinger Room at the Paley Center for Media in New York City to hear how artificial intelligence might wipe out humanity. The two speakers, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, began their doom-time presentation with a slide that read: "What nukes are to the physical world … AI is to everything else." We were told that this gathering was historic, one we would remember in the coming years as, presumably, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, in the guise of Bing chatbots, would descend to replace our intelligence with their own. It evoked the scene in old science fiction movies--or the more recent farce Don't Look Up--where scientists discover a menace and attempt to shake a slumbering population by its shoulders to explain that this deadly threat is headed right for us, and we will die if you don't do something NOW. At least that's what Harris and Raskin seem to have concluded after, in their account, some people working inside companies developing AI approached the Center with concerns that the products they were creating were phenomenally dangerous, saying an outside force was required to prevent catastrophe.