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Let’s call this strategy “doom trolling.” It’s one of the defining and most arresting properties of our current A.I. moment, and I’ve come to believe that it’s morally indefensible. There are really only two options for the intentions of A.I. companies when they engage in doom trolling. The first is that they actually believe that the systems they’re building have a nontrivial chance of producing hugely disruptive events — from destroying the economy in the best case to wiping out our species in the worst. If this were true, every reasonable ethical system would argue that there is only one acceptable response: to immediately stop working on any product that might accelerate such a future, and lobby with all of your resources to help force other A.I. companies to do the same. From a moral perspective, any other reaction would be monstrous. The second option is that these A.I. companies aren’t really concerned about these risks, and that they’re injecting these doses of unresolvable doom for other reasons. They might want to amplify the perceived power of their technology at a time when they’re setting up their initial public offerings. Or they hope their performative reports and somber interviews will help them compete for top engineering talent coming from a Silicon Valley culture that’s steeped in this type of doomerism. The venture capitalist and A.I. adviser David Sacks recently suggested that Anthropic was using fear-mongering tactics as a method of “regulatory capture,” which can impede upstart competitors. Any of these reasons would mean that these companies are laundering the anxiety of millions to improve the financial fortunes of a vanishingly small number of major stockholders. This cynicism would be equally monstrous. When it comes to A.I., we’ve become so used to this tone of helpless, stress-inducing prognostication that we’ve lost sight of its strangeness. Imagine if Ford put out a report saying that it feared its popular F-150 trucks might soon start bursting into flames, but that there was nothing the company could do about it because automotive technology was too inevitable and important to slow down.

so many responses of “its nice that you’re privileged enough to be able to steal from Target willy nilly!” and that’s not at all what this is about. like, yeah, shoplifting and loitering and graffiti and breaking the rules is, obviously, part of “do crime”. but they’re not parts you have to do.

would you help someone get an abortion where it was illegal?

would you help a trans friend get healthcare that had been criminalized?

would you shelter someone fleeing persecution, even if the law said not to?

would you help a gay couple stay together when the state decided their relationship was unlawful?

instead, would you report someone else for breaking the law? will you snitch on your hungry neighbors for stealing food? on your homeless neighbors for sleeping where they’re able?

>Software engineering becomes more and more lucrative

>Men start taking over the field, kicking the women out

>The men become women

>Men becoming women is woke

>This means software engineering is now woke

>The tech companies fire all the woke women and replace them with AI