AI and fear

And now, all of a sudden, AI is going to kill us all. It has not even been four years since this gadget arrived in our lives, and there are already all sorts of voices within the very industry that powers it, warning us that those responsible for it are scared, and that in the face of the power they are setting in motion, they do not know whether to stop or ask to be stopped by law. This AI was quite different from what we had before: it writes, summarizes, translates, argues, and even programs, taking away the jobs, it seems, of the type of professionals who powered it in the first place. But if one informs oneself or does a little research, one sees that AI is already saving lives right now: in radiology and cancer detection, for example, or in ophthalmology, where AI examines retina photos and immediately detects retinopathies in primary care without having to go to the specialist. There are all sorts of systems that also find arrhythmias, cardiac images now treated with AI, data that the system can process in a more accelerated and efficient way than the doctor's intelligence, and it makes it more difficult for even the smallest anomalies to go unnoticed. Just in these last few years, since AI has started to act as a doctor, so to speak, it is estimated that almost 50,000 additional lives have been saved annually across the planet. But now it turns out that this technology is supposed to kill us...: there are people who are taking pills developed thanks to molecules that AI has structured and at the same time fear that, in some way, AI will also be responsible for some kind of apocalypse. AI seems like a threat to us because anything human or moderately conscious already seems like a threat to us. Our neighbors have consciousness and free will, but do they scare us? In the unlikely or difficult case that AI had its own consciousness: how would we differentiate it from an AI that simply simulates having it? And what difference can there be between having consciousness and having a simulation of it that may be more effective or profound than that of our fellow citizens? And why shouldn't it be possible to unplug it? Fears of technology are as old as technology itself: Plato's fear of writing, or more modernly the fear of the printing press, which would spread all kinds of heresies, false ideas, or information that could call into question the relationship one had with authority or with reality itself. Would the people in charge of these companies that are currently developing AI tools spread these fears if they knew that all of this could jeopardize their businesses? They are startups, which are being valued in the millions—in the hundreds of millions—of dollars, and curiously, every time they talk about these 'advances' while surrounding them with this aura of fear, they do nothing but attract larger investments. They are not sinking their businesses: the apocalypse they want to point to on the horizon is a form of lure, already infallible, moreover, because the more fear the more power, and the more power, the more capacity a tool will have to do the illegal things it might perhaps be doing now when it comes to appropriating the software of others.