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.’"
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Subtle.
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.
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The 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. Then the Cold War brought us cooling, and so on. A 1975 New York Times piece cautioned, "Scientists Ponder Why World's Climate Is Changing: A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable." I guess it was pretty evitable, and, yes, that’s a word. (Thank you, Susie Dent.)
We even had pollution, DDT, and the hole in the ozone layer, as well. None of those make the news much now because we have moved on to other timely crises.
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Those of us who follow the media are used to all this. It all comes from the Fear Industrial Complex. That’s a mixture of governments, NGOs, politicians, activists, journalists, and business people who want us all scared. Because scared people don’t do what we want. We do what they want. And they don’t want us to ask questions while we do it.
Fund the cause! Support the issue! Don’t you care about ______? How dare you?
Oh, wait, I know where I heard that last line before.
"Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg," as she is sometimes described, popularized it. No one embodies the flexible nature of the fear freakout better than she does. She broke onto the scene in her native land protesting climate change. She famously rebuked the UN Climate Summit with the scolding quote, "How dare you?" Then, when that drifted from the news, she took up "Free Palestine," even appearing on one of the phony boat flotillas to Gaza and bashing Israel and anyone who doesn’t agree with her. Mark my words, she’ll be whining about AI soon enough. If you are a leftist activist, you need to keep your name in the news on whatever the protest du jour is.
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It doesn’t even matter whether the cause of the day is real or not. Look at our ever-changing climate. The press is so convinced it is right about global warming that it doesn’t report when it is wrong. Former CBS News anchor Scott Pelley, who used to cover the environment, actually compared climate change skeptics to Holocaust deniers and claimed, "There comes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible." That’s from 2006, around the time of former Vice President Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth." Twenty years later, we are still alive … inconveniently.
For those in the Fear Industrial Complex, that lack of balance is an everyday occurrence, moving from one fear-inducing cataclysm to another. And if you don’t go along, you are, as Pelley put it, a "denier." Yet, back in May, even the New York Times ended up reporting, "Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for Over a Decade." Turns out, the claims were overblown. I’m not surprised.
All of this is reminiscent of the Michael Crichton book "State of Fear." I say "book" because it was politically incorrect, so it never got a movie treatment, even though adaptations of his works have brought in billions of dollars, including "Jurassic Park," "Westworld," and "The Andromeda Strain." In "State of Fear," environmental extremists cause disasters and blame them on climate change.
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One character in the book made a point I will never forget: "Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them."
Sure, some of this can be blamed on a media tendency to go with, "If it bleeds, it leads." But it’s a bad day when our science—on AI, climate, robots, and more—is being decided by science fiction. Speaking as a sci-fi author, leave that territory to us. You buy our books, so we can thrill, entertain, and, yes, even scare you. That’s not the job of journalism.
Remember that the next time you read about the end of the world.
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