n the field of artificial intelligence, doomerism is as natural as an echo. Every development in the field, or to be more precise every development that the public notices, immediately generates an apocalyptic reaction.
I have been working with and reporting on AI since 2017, which is prehistoric in this field. During that time, I have heard, from intelligent sources who were usually reliable, that the trucking industry was about to end, that China was in possession of a trillion-parameter natural language processing AI with superhuman intelligence. I have heard geniuses – bona fide geniuses – declare that medical schools should no longer teach radiology because it would all be automated soon.
Not that there aren’t real causes of worry when it comes to AI; it’s just that they’re almost always about something other than AI. The biggest anxiety – that an artificial general intelligence is about to take over the world – doesn’t even qualify as science fiction. That fear is religious. AI might well make it slightly easier to generate fake content, but the problem of misinformation has never been generation but dissemination. The political space is already saturated with fraud and it’s hard to see how AI could make it much worse. In the first quarter of 2019, Facebook had to remove 2.2bn fake profiles; AI had nothing to do with it.