A new brand of apocalyptic theories has dropped. The “AI will kill us all” narrative is curiously similar to the “global warming will kill everybody in 12 years.”
I remember back in the early 1990s there was a widespread obsession that machine translation would deprive translators of work. Last year, I ordered a textbook for my translation course with the publication date of 2021. Half of the textbook consisted of the same old horror stories about the imminent demise of translator work because of technology. And the funny thing is that the technology hasn’t changed much in these 30 years. What I was already doing in 1992 – because I had early access to technology – now everybody is doing. And making money.
But who cares about reality when it’s so much fun to titillate oneself with scary stories?
P.S. Now it looks like AI is going to kill democracy before proceeding to kill all of us:
God, what a yawn.
Clarissa's Blog 
I think AI will kill the internet as a useful tool. And it will be a net positive for everybody.
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“kill the internet as a useful tool”
That ship has already sailed… the destruction of one of the greatest information platforms in history is infuriating and heartbreaking (for those of us interested in knowledge).
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Yeah, there are already a lot of things I miss about the internet. Things that simply can’t be found anymore. AI is the Internet job application problem writ large, and if it cannot be fixed… maybe it is time for the thing to die before we have completely lost the knowledge base to do without it.
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Exactly correct! It seems like alarmists everywhere are predicting ridiculous doomsday fantasies of AI morphing into the Terminator and conquering the world.
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