How to Worry About AI

Catastrophism abhors a vacuum. As the volume fades on “corporate policies and consumer habits that hasten the destruction of the earth,” it has been cranked to 11 on “AI could kill all humans.” The echoes from 2015 are eerie. “No challenge—no challenge—poses a greater threat to future generations,” intoned President Barack Obama that year in his State of the Union address. At the Paris Climate Conference a few months later, French President François Hollande opened the proceedings by declaring, “never have the stakes of an international meeting been so high. For the future of the planet, and the future of life, are at stake.” Pope Francis released an encyclical.

A decade later, we are doing it all again with artificial intelligence. We have the demands for aggressive regulation, the imperative of global coordination, and the obstacle of an untrustworthy Chinese Communist Party. Pope Leo released an encyclical. And Donald Trump is insisting that predictions of AI doom, like predictions of climate doom, are a “HOAX.”

Of course, neither climate risk nor AI risk is a hoax. But in each case the pitched battle between catastrophism and complacency has left too little room for the pragmatism with which we humans might manage to muddle through, as we typically do. Much of my own early policy work addressed this dynamic in the climate context, analyzing the underlying causes of overheated rhetoric and making the case that one could, and should, accept the physical science of rising temperatures while rejecting the poorly constructed causal chains that led toward “Hell on Earth.”

So my engagement with AI issues over the past couple of years has come with a strong sense of déjà vu. I am wary, going back around this circle again, that perhaps my own habits of mind lead me to reject a prediction of cataclysm wherever it emerges, always constructing elaborate explanation for why things aren’t so bad. This would serve me poorly if cataclysm were indeed imminent. But insofar as a more pragmatic approach to climate change is winning the day, the lessons seem worth applying to our present panic. Yes, we should worry about AI, but how?