The doomer narrative of an all-powerful AI is gaining ground in the halls of power.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The AI learns it is about to be switched off and goes rogue, disobeying commands and threatening its human operators.
It’s a well-worn trope in science fiction. We see it in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s the premise of the Terminator series, in which Skynet triggers a nuclear holocaust to stop scientists from shutting it down.
Those sci-fi roots go deep. AI doomerism, the idea that this technology—specifically its hypothetical upgrades, artificial general intelligence and super-intelligence—will crash civilizations, even kill us all, is now riding another wave.
