The accountability substitution

Some years ago, a friend married a woman who believed she had been abducted by aliens. Aware I was a skeptic, he asked me not to bring it up with her. Fine by me; what would be the point? Then, on arrival, she backed me up against a wall and began ranting that humans couldn’t make all those crop circles. Eventually, she said I didn’t believe in alien visitation because I was scared. “I’m scared of death. I’m not scared of aliens,” I told her, and managed to wriggle out of further discussion. The last couple of weeks of AI panic feel rather like that; this has been a fortnight in which everyone from Bernie Sanders to Elon Musk embraced the fear of a superintelligent AI that is going to kill us all, possibly by 2030. I’m not afraid of the word-guessing pile of math and statistics we’re currently calling “AI”. In their new book, End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call these things “human-impersonation engines”. I’m definitely not afraid that they’re going to suddenly become…