Artificial intelligence (AI) has in 2023 quickly eclipsed social media and smartphones as the technology du jour for secular doomsday preachers.
Concerns about content-ranking algorithms and “dark patterns” suddenly felt quaint compared to sentient AI exterminating (or displacing) every human on the planet. Mark Zuckerberg, once an unyielding digital titan, now feels like MySpace Tom reigning over an uncool, increasingly irrelevant virtual realm.
This sudden narrative shift posed a dilemma for a cottage industry of self-styled “tech-ethicists” who once effortlessly garnered book deals, headlines, and interviews on the topic of social media-induced societal collapse. Now, they find themselves outcompeted in the attention economy by the likes of AI safety researchers like Elizer Yudkowsky, who called for theoretical nuclear strikes on server farms in Time magazine, and Connor Leahy, who went on CNN to warn Christine Amanpour about the extinction of the human race. So, they hastily adjusted their messaging to compete.
Source: The Daily Beast
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