Artificial Intelligence: AI doomsday scenarios are gaining traction in Silicon Valley

"This kind of talk is dangerous because it's become such a dominant part of the discourse," Sasha Luccioni, a research scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, said in an interview. "Companies who are adding fuel to the fire are using this as a way to duck out of their responsibility. It’s an echo chamber that's fueling panic and a real risk is that it leads to regulation that focuses on extinction scenarios and as opposed to addressing concrete, present-day harms. "It’s also a continuation of a historic trend for transformative technologies sparking fear, uncertainty and doubt about the risk to health and humanity. Ahead of the year 2000, society had an expensive, collective panic about the so-called millennium bug.