[panarky]

People experience existential terror from AI because it feels like massive, pervasive, implacable forces that we can't understand or control, with the potential to do great harm to our personal lives and to larger social and political systems, where we have zero power to stop it or avoid it or redirect it. Forces that benefit a few at the expense of the many.

What many of us are actually experiencing is existential terror about capitalism itself, but we don't have the conceptual framework or vocabulary to describe it that way.

It's a cognitive shortcut to look for a definable villain to blame for our fear, and historically that's taken the form of antisemitism, anti-migrant, anti-homeless, even ironically anti-communist, and we see similar corrupted forms of blame in antivax and anti-globalist conspiracy thinking, from both the left and the right.

While there are genuine x-risk hazards from AI, it seems like a lot of the current fear is really a corrupted and misplaced fear of having zero control over the foreboding and implacable forces of capitalism itself.

AI is hypercapitalism and that is terrifying.

[kridsdale1]

Ted Chiang on the Ezra Klein podcast said basically the same thing:

AI Doomerism is actually capitalist anxiety.

[MichaelZuo]

Probably not even that specific, more like an underlying fear that 8 billion people interacting in a complex system will forever be beyond the human capacity to grasp.

Which is likely true.

[cyanydeez]

So, this has happened multiple times. Its best case.example.is.eugenics, where "intellectuals" believe.they can degermine what.the best traits are.in a.complex system and prune sociery to achieve some perfect outcomr.

The peoblrm, of course, is the sysyrm is complex, filled with hidden variables.and humans will tend to focus entirrly on phenotypes which are the easiest to observe.

Thesr modrls will do the same humanbbiased selection and grabitateb to a substatially vapid mean.

[sudosysgen]

Well, we do have a conceptual framework and vocabulary for massive, pervasive and implacable forces beyond our understanding - it's the framework and vocabulary of religion and the occult. It has actually been used to describe capitalism essentially since capitalism itself, and it's been used explicitly as a framework to analyze it at least since Deleuze. Arguably, since Marx : as far as I'm aware, he was the first to personalize capital as an actor in and of itself.

[ralusek]

Different words with different meanings mean different things. A communist country could and would produce AI, and it would still be scary.

[yfw]

That's because most communist countries are closer to authoritarian dictatorship than Starfleet

[yfw]

That's because most communist countries are closer to authoritarian dictatorship than hippie commune.

[hi-v-rocknroll]

tl;dr: Fear of the unknown. The problem is more and more people don't know anything about anything, and so are prone to rejecting and retaliating against they don't understand while not making any effort to understand before forming an emotionally-based opinion.