No Room for AI Doom
As a former IT consultant among other things, I've been quite surprised by all the AI doom being circulated. Of course, a lot of it is being promulgated by Chinese agitators, bot farms, and what-have-you. Communist China really wants to win the AI race, so naturally they want to sabotage America's efforts.
As we know from "Terminator", Skynet became sentient on August 29, 1997 and immediately decided to eliminate humanity. I would have settled for a sentient President in 1997.
The presumptive fear is that AI will develop agency - that is, a goal-seeking will of its own - and that the chosen goal will be to the detriment of humanity.
In the 18 September 2026 article, The case against AI doom, New Neo summarizes key points from Eric S. Raymond's 17 September 2026 X article: "This is the case against AI doom", with the excerpt:
Here are the main counterarguments:
* Intelligence does not imply agency: A system can be extraordinarily capable at prediction, theorem proving, engineering, programming, etc. without having persistent goals, self-preservation drives, or an independent desire to act...
* Agency does not imply a single, stable utility function: Much alignment theory reasons about agents as expected-utility maximizers with coherent preferences. Actual AIs systems need not resemble that abstraction, and currently do not...
* Capability and motivation are being conflated: Being able to formulate a plan for escaping a sandbox doesn't entail wanting to escape it...
* Recursive self-improvement doesn't entail an intelligence explosion …
Intelligence may have sharply diminishing returns: There may be no meaningful scalar quantity corresponding to arbitrarily large "general intelligence." Even if there is, going from IQ-equivalent 150 to 1,500 need not produce the sort of qualitative advantage that separates humans from chimpanzees...
* Superintelligence isn't omnipotence: Intelligence cannot repeal physics or eliminate uncertainty. A brilliant AI still needs processors, electricity, network access, money, factories, robots and people willing or tricked into doing things...
* Humans retain numerous intervention points: The doom narrative sometimes jumps from "AI behaves dangerously" to "humanity is helpless."
Those points certainly make sense to me. In other words, just because AI is smart, doesn't make it evil.
We already have AI, and we're going to get a lot more of it. If we don't develop it, China will. So saddle up, Luddites, and get ready for a great ride!
Note: AI data centers offer the perfect opportunity for nuclear microreactors, also known as Small Modular Reactors. Although nuclear power has been deliberately memory-holed by the radical Left, nuclear power is cleaner, cheaper, and safer than coal or gas.
