Fear Porn About AI Dominance Follows The Covid Tyrants’ Playbook

I don’t know what the future of AI holds. But neither do any of the people using panic rhetoric to induce population-wide fear and dread.

Reading Matt Shumer’s viral essay about artificial intelligence was like stepping back in time to roughly six years ago, when the world started going insane over Covid-19.

It hits all the same beats as those viral essays from 2020, when we were told “something big was coming” and “life will never be the same.” It is written with the same insider tone, like the author is doing us a favor by telling us how horrible life is about to become. And the intent is clearly the same: to so unsettle a population that they will begin to feel powerless in the face of what is about to come.

Consider this passage from Shumer’s essay:

Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.

Does this sound familiar? It should. Early on in the Covid-19 panic, Americans were treated to breathless articles about Italy (which saw early spread of the disease) that sent a “chilling coronavirus warning to Americans” about what was soon to come. “A huge mess is about to happen,” according to one woman. “The worst-case scenario? That’s exactly what will happen,” another added. “We underestimated this,” the article reported a third Italian saying. “You don’t have to do the same.”

The similarities don’t end there. Shumer goes on to assert that everyone on the planet will be affected by the imminent dominance of AI, whether they like it or not. “These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely. And here’s why this matters to you, even if you don’t work in tech.”

Again, this should sound familiar because it is being written from the exact same template that was used to induce population-scale fear during Covid-19. Remember the daily charts of new Covid cases? Remember the state and local online “dashboards” that provided excruciating detail about how many people had tested positive, been hospitalized, and died? The impression was that a giant and unstoppable wave was about to crash over the entire planet.

Indeed, it turns out AI has its own dashboard, which documents how smart, powerful, and dangerous AI is becoming with each new iteration. As Shumer puts it, “If you extend the trend (and it’s held for years with no sign of flattening) we’re looking at AI that can work independently for days within the next year. Weeks within two. Month-long projects within three.”

He then delivers the knockout rhetorical blow by quoting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to claim that AI models will be “substantially smarter than almost all humans at almost all tasks” by 2026 or 2027.

Should you be worried? Of course! “If AI is smarter than most PhDs, do you really think it can’t do most office jobs? Think about what that means for your work.”

The final rhetorical trick is to introduce the notion of fundamental helplessness in the reader. But he’s doing it for your benefit because “you deserve honesty,” so you should be grateful.

How helpless are we? Very. “Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative.”

And what can you do about it? Nothing, really, according to Shumer:

AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.

I hope, by now, you can see how this works. It is an almost beat-for-beat replay from six years ago. No dissenting views are provided. No doubt is allowed to interfere with your conclusion that AI is coming for your job and your happiness. You are instructed to follow “the science” by your betters, people who are seeing things play out from the inside and are very, very concerned. And you most definitely do not get any say in the matter.

There is an actual playbook for this rhetorical style, and the U.K. deliberately used it during Covid-19. The government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) was explicit about its aims: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. … A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened[.]”

But threatening them was not enough. “People need to see self-protective actions in positive terms and feel confident that they will be effective. … Messaging about actions need to be framed positively in terms of protecting oneself and the community, and increase confidence that they will be effective.”

And here is the coup de grace of the Shumer essay. He closes by telling readers that the only way to be safe from what is coming is to stop resisting and comply by daily “experimenting with AI.” In other words, his advice is to submit and integrate AI into your life to maybe get ahead of the curve, much like we were told we needed to wear masks, socially distance, and get a vaccine during Covid-19 to “stay safe.”

I do not know what the future of AI holds. But neither does Matt Shumer nor any of the other people who are using this rhetorical style to induce population-wide fear and dread. Not really.

What I do know is that we should be suspicious of this style of writing, as we learned during the Covid panic. The disease did eventually come for all of us. It ultimately wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone predicted. And the population controls that were imposed on us did nearly nothing to stop it.

Powerful people know fear is a powerful motivator. Now is a good time to take a moment, take a breath, do your own research, and question why a sense of fear and powerlessness is once again spreading across the landscape.