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I do not think the threat is overblown, but like many tech estimates, we're overestimating the short term and underestimating the long term. The more present threat is "AI-lite": we're hacking ourselves collectively, more and more, with not entirely positive consequences. We're increasingly addicted to our devices and our system rewards those that further the addiction (er, "engagement"). We've provided ways for small groups of people (down to individuals) to influence and manipulate tastes, preferences, moods, feelings, choices, actions, and beliefs, overtly or subtly, at great scale. Case in point: should Mark Z want to quietly influence a US election...he could do it. This isn't "AI" in the self-aware/AGI sense, but there's an incredible amount of leverage looming over the human population, and that leverage is growing. And when machines start manipulating things instead of humans, how will we know? |
The big problem is that such degree of control could make democracy essentially irrelevant or extremely polarized, which is just as bad, democracy is supposed to reach a consensus. We're almost or already there at the second point.