Lazy Journalism At The 'End Of The World'

(Just a quick reminder that if you like and appreciate my work, please consider signing up for a paid subscription tier. It genuinely helps keep the lights on. Consider it the equivalent of buying me a coffee every month. I very much appreciate your time and readership!) Last week I wrote about how the press spent the last few weeks falsely "informing" the public that software had gained human-level awareness and was poised to kill everybody on the planet. This was, just so we're clear, not true.Humanity's rushed adoption of undercooked AI has no shortage of potentially fatal outcomes at scale, but that's not really what this news cycle was about. Instead, the tech industry convinced the press to hyperventilate over hyperbolic doomsday gibberish that had the flimsiest tether to material reality.This doomsday rhetoric serves multiple overlapping purposes: it helps tech companies overstate the capabilities of their software; sets the stage for shitty protectionist new AI laws (something…