Yes, you should be worried about AI – but Matrix analogies hide a more insidious threat

theguardian.com:

A s the resident tech politics nerd among my friends, I spend a lot of time fielding questions. Help! I’ve been part of a data breach, what do I do? What on earth is crypto and should I care? And lately: should I be worried that AI is going to take over and kill us all?

There is so much hype around artificial intelligence that the concern is understandable but it’s important that we hang on to our critical faculties. The current AI frenzy ultimately serves those who stand to benefit from implementing these products the most but we don’t have to let them dictate the terms of the conversation.

If there is one thing that I try to impart to friends – and now you – it’s this: Yes, you should be concerned about AI. But let’s be clear about which boogeyman is actually lurking under the bed. It’s hard to fight a monster if you don’t know what it is. No one wants to be the fool using a wooden stake on a zombie to no avail.

Rather than fretting over some far-flung fear of an “existential threat” to humanity, we should be concerned about the material consequences of far less sophisticated AI technologies that are affecting people’s lives right now. And what’s more, we should be deeply troubled by the way AI is being leveraged to further concentrate power in a handful of companies.

So let’s sort the speculative fiction from reality.

Every other day a high profile figure peddles a doomsday prediction about AI development left unchecked. Will it lead to a Ministry of Truth a la George Orwell’s 1984? Or perhaps hostile killing machines fresh out of Terminator. Or perhaps it’ll be more like The Matrix.

This all acts as both a marketing exercise for anda diversion from the more pressing harms caused by AI.

First, it’s important to remember