Manu Joseph: AI won't render us obsolete—Other humans are far more interesting to us than machines

The fear of artificial intelligence (AI) is so rampant now that it appears to be a matter of decorum to admit to this fear. People keep telling me AI is coming and that I should be scared. I’m very open to being scared, which I’ve always thought is a reasonable way of surviving life, but somehow I am not, and I have tried to understand why.Also, I don’t know what exactly I should be scared of, because there are two distinct fears.

One is of the end of the world. Earlier, people used to speak of lethal smart machines, but now they say that dumb machines can destroy the world—and not only through weapons, as a collection of tech luminaries feared just a few years ago in a signed petition. It is also what AI can do in terms of havoc in day-to-day life.

The other fear is of professional obsolescence. I’m not scared of this either. My indifference to the AI mania is rooted in where manias come from and how they spread, a theory about influence.

Generally, I do not take any hype seriously because I feel anything that spreads so fast and so deep cannot be the truth. If something is deeply true, it does not spread very fast. Think of any truth from the distant past that spread very quickly.

I do not ask for an example from the present, because in the present any hype may appear to be a real phenomenon. On the other hand, it is in the nature of a delusion or misconception to spread very fast. Human beings are excellent conductors of half-truths, lies and delusions.

Truth moves very slowly through us. It does move, and it does eventually spread widely, but very, very slowly. So anything that moves very fast is suspicious.The second force that spreads fear is anxiety.