No, not the actual belief. The idea that AI will become a cartoon supervillain and wipe out humanity is as idiotic as it sounds. The danger is that the belief is getting credibility, is taken seriously and is a dangerous red hearing. The grifter economy of AI doom is a self-serving scam, but the consequences are real.

I personally find AI Doom to be more than a nuisance. Most do not realize this but, when you peel away the curtain, the movement is actually based on a strong cult-like belief and has spawned some extremely disturbing rhetoric. There have been threats against AI labs and ridiculous proposals for legislation to pause or stop AI research. There are all kinds of ridiculous claims being made and they are getting media attention> Almost nobody seems to be aware of the true nature of this ridiculous idea.

Most AI experts have disengaged from the nonsense of AI doom. After all, it’s not like it’s interesting and nobody wants to have to deal with their area of expertise being stepped on by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. However, this is dangerous. Doom movements have grown around other technologies: nano technology, vaccines, genetic engineering, nuclear energy and others. What we know is that these movements, unhinged and unsupported though they may be, do not go away and frequently lead to bad legislation and major problems for industries that do not fight back.

AI doom is an especially prevalent threat and it’s receiving mainstream legitimacy and attention, which should be seen as a major problem in and of itself.

What is AI Doom

AI Doom is the basic idea that there is some kind of unique and existential threat to humanity, based on the idea that AI systems and ML models might become “super intelligent” and therefore impossible to stop from causing harm. This is also predicated on the idea that in addition to intelligence being a scaler, which can be arrived at through increased compute, that the resulting intelligence would somehow achieve autonomy and become either hostile to humans or desire to eliminate humans to gain more resources.

It’s not an entirely new idea. It’s been a trope in science fiction for some time. It is based on a lot of universal fears, like not understanding technology, being replaced, dehumanization and the fact that people have been so conditioned by science fiction to expect such an outcome to be reasonable.

Doom literally refers to an “end of the world” scenario, but there are other doom adjacent beliefs and claims, such as the idea that AI will lead to a permanent dystopian society where employment is impossible and power is consolidated or that AI may enslave humanity.

Importantly, while there are absolutely risks of a variety of types that are associated with AI adoption, the idea of a species-level risk from the technology gaining self-motivation and setting its own goals is not plausible at all.