A critique of the growing hysteria around AI, likening it to past technological fears. I highlights sensational predictions about job loss and societal collapse, questioning their validity and motivation.
Something’s changed since ChatGPT’s blockbuster rollout in 2022. Gone is the sense of amazement, even awe, that you could have a satisfying conversation with a machine on nearly any subject. Three years later, why have the sales pitches, TED-like talks, and cable news talking heads in my social media feeds taken up a more urgent, almost frenzied tone? What’s fueling this AI panic on YouTube?
In recent days, LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer Aneesh Raman declared the traditional career ladder “broken,” saying AI will hurt new college grad’s prospects for their first job. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, a leading AI developer, predicted an unemployment rate as high as 20 percent in the next five years, adding that AI will kill half of entry-level jobs. Investment giant Goldman-Sachs foresees 300 million jobs will be “lost or degraded” by AI. And then there’s AI 2027, a clumsy work of speculative fiction masquerading as an industry forecast predicting the end of civilization at the virtual hands of a “superintelligence”.
An apocalyptic dystopia
YouTubers glory in painting a picture of an apocalyptic dystopia. I spend far too many hours watching YouTube videos on this or that AI or AI-adjacent tool. I feel like every thumbnail uses inflammatory words, such as “insane,” “forbidden,” “game changer,” or “threat.” Titles use gut-punch phrases: “catastrophic risk,” “extremely harmful,” and my favorite, “the government knows.” In the case of AI 2027, one YouTuber called it “Humanity’s Last Warning”. AI panic on YouTube makes for traffic in the attention economy, but it seems to me the shrillness has reached new levels of mad. Even the tone of videos positioned as tutorials or reviews have the feel of a fire-and-brimstone preacher warning you to come to Jesus or you’ll burn in hell forever.
Then it hit me: I’ve heard all this before, but maybe in a different way, like listening to the same genre of music on a different radio station.
Sometime in 1994, I logged on to the internet for the first time. Access was still primarily text-based; the browser as we know it didn’t really exist. On August 9, 1995, a browser company, Netscape, had an initial public offering. It soared. Some describe it as the internet’s “Big Bang,” launching the digital economy into public consciousness. Phrases such as “venture capital,” “Silicon Valley,” and “IPO” became water-cooler talk.
Soon came the predictions, driven mostly by specialized journalists and cable TV shows. Economist Jeremy Rifkin forecast “the end of work” as information technology made tens of millions of jobs obsolete, while leaving economic power in the hands of a managerial elite and a cadre of knowledge workers. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman predicted the number of jobs for IT specialists would fall after the internet died “by 2005 or so.”
From there, the forecasts veered into horror-fantasy. Ken Goffman, aka R.U. Sirius, editor of Mondo 2000, wondered if we’d all have brain implants playing commercials. Wired magazine columnist Bruce Sterling predicted war would become virtualized, though real blood would still spill. MIT computer scientist William Mitchell prophesied, “Telemolesters will lurk. Telethugs will reach out and punch someone.”
Remember Y2K?
And who can forget (unless you weren’t born yet) the Y2K bug. Up through the 1990s, several widely used computer languages didn’t understand that 1999 would become 2000, and techno-Cassandras predicted the failure of everything from traffic lights to national electric grids. It didn’t happen.
I’m less interested in the specific content than who gets attention and why. It’s always the people who say the craziest things, especially if they can fit it in a headline, a YouTube title, or a thumbnail. The predictions often contain a nut of truth, but those bits are usually extensions of universal truths. A “telemolester” is just an old-school abuser who’s found a new way to act out his evil fantasy. Twenty percent unemployment is just another manifestation of the end of work, as we know it.
The history of digital technology since the advent of the home and small office computer in the early 1980s is covered with a thick varnish of hyperbole. It’s a feature, not a bug. The veneer of excitement has to be injected with steroids to gain attention, get taken seriously, and make money. Some predictions turn out right, most are wrong, and most importantly, the sun still rises every morning.
(ChatGPT assisted with my AI panic on YouTube research. I checked all referenced articles for veracity. Image generated by WordPress AI.)
What do you think? Is every YouTube video about AI just clickbait?