Why Do We Keep Blaming AI For Society's Ethical Concerns?

Not a week goes by that I don't see dozens of headlines blaming "AI" or "deep learning" for yet another ethical conundrum that will doom human society. Whether it is predictive policing or facial recognition or autonomous weapons, it seems nearly every facet of society is facing an "AI revolution" that will destroy humankind. If one peels back the breathless hype and viral buzzwords, however, is it really AI that we are worried about or is it the shift towards a data-centric society with or without deep learning advances? To the general public, "big data" and "deep learning" are increasingly becoming synonymous, fueled by the never-ending hype machine of Silicon Valley and the very legitimate advances occurring in deep learning powered largely by the massive availability of large datasets and the unique abilities of those models to make sense of all that data. From a technical standpoint, however, these are two entirely distinct concepts.