Moral panic is for everyone

What AI doomsday messaging and the anti-trans messaging have in common.

The roads down AI hysteria and the anti-trans movement are separated by endless miles of humanity, to be sure. While the former is an attempt by billionaires to stifle a mass redistribution of wealth, the latter's effects we measure in the loss of human life. The two share the same tactic, however— evoking moral panic in those who do not understand that which makes them afraid. Conservatives have cornered the trans-hate market, using religion and othering to wield fear into power. In liberal circles, you hear panicked whispers of AI sentience and parroting of sound bites overheard by billionaires like Elon Musk, whose intentions are suspect. My point is we on the left can identify the perils of moral panic in those on the right but have failed to recognize our own susceptibility to its allure. 

AI poses real threats, and there are genuine injustices with how corporations train their models. But who we listen to matters. Because the narrative that sticks today could be the prevailing wisdom tomorrow. 

Consider a world where most people believe in a fantastical threat that someday, AI could take over and enslave humanity. In such a world, we would happily give control over AI to a select few mega-corporations, so long as it meant we were shielded from its danger. Billionaire tech leaders, entrenched in their quasi-religious belief known as effective altruism, want you to be afraid of AI in a sci-fi sort of way because then they become our saviors. In other words, if a wealthy person tells you the sky is falling, it's almost always because they have umbrellas to sell. Even if they fancy themselves as liberals.

Émile P. Torres (they/them) @xriskology

I think we should stop talking about the "dangers of AI" and start talking about the "dangers of AI companies."

Few things accumulate power faster, for those with too much, than fear and panic. Our susceptibility to this tactic doesn’t always depend on which side of the aisle we’re on. Sure, we’re smart enough to recognize good ol’ fashioned xenophobia when we see it. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have blind spots. We on the left have led ourselves into a false sense of security, believing that our formal education or our desire for tolerance and empathy somehow shields us from fear-based decision-making. Such as religion often justifies it for the other side. And while the two paths—effective altruism and the anti-trans movement—are incompatible in their imminent dangers, perhaps we cannot afford any moral panic inflicted by those who control everything. Because no matter how fast moral panic makes us run, the end of the road is always the same- less for us and more for them.

Effective Altruism and the anti-trans / anti-lgbtq movements seem to have another thing in common: white supremacy undertones.

PS: As I write this post, Twitter suddenly disabled the ability to embed Tweets into Substack. I could embed the tweet above but not the one below for some reason—totally normal behavior from Elon. The tweet I wanted to show you was by Timnit Gebru. You should follow her. She is an expert in Artificial Intelligence and the author of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, where she explains why projecting sentience onto AI is bad.

Here’s that tweet: https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1642681623765471232?s=46&t=e2bUIxmzffQdW7oQTALzZw