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Will Artificial Intelligence Radically Change The World?

Why all the fear and all the hype is just our standard human reaction to every single new technology we’ve ever invented

Allan Milne Lees
12 min readApr 10, 2024
Image credit (including the unnecessary dentition): Marketwatch

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI) there are three generic reactions.

The first is that AI will take over the world and humans will be eradicated because either we’ll be seen as unnecessary to our machine overlords or the AI will in some manner trigger nuclear armageddon.

The second is that AI will be an amazing do-everything boon that will cure all health problems, make work redundant, and generally usher in Utopia.

The third, and presently the most common, is ignorance. Most people may have heard of ChatGPT but aside from it helping them search for even more bizarre variants of porn and letting them watch deepfakes of well-known celebrities marketing weight-reduction pills, it’s largely being ignored.

The first two postures are promoted by supposed experts and the usual batch of attention-seeking armchair philosophers whose job security depends on a desperate attempt to seem relevant now that empirically-based science has largely eliminated the any-idea-you-like-no-proof-needed playground in which philosophers used to roam so blithely.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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