Broadcast news often has a problem telling us what happened yesterday, or earlier in the day. These shows want to scare viewers about some dark and desperate future. Forecasts, not facts. The newest eruption of doom came over artificial intelligence, and how it could end up causing the destruction of all humanity within a decade. So much for soft-pedaling it.
Coming out of the weekend, on the Sept. 14 “Today,” NBC co-host Savannah Guthrie sounded the alarm in the first seconds of the program: “Doomsday warning! The country’s leading developers of AI coming forward to call for a slowdown in the technology, saying humanity itself is at risk.”
Guthrie interviewed Josh Tyrangiel of The Atlantic magazine, asking: “How worried should we be?” He said, “Extremely worried,” and laid out OpenAI’s “Hugging Face incident” from July, when AI bots independently engaged in a cyberattack on the AI startup called Hugging Face. That led Guthrie to play up the possibility of “apocalyptic outcomes.”
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On Sept. 15, on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” anchor David Muir sounded like a TV news snippet from a disaster movie. “We do begin tonight with President Trump rejecting the new and dire warnings about AI, even as three of the top AI rivals agree now that it’s time to slow it down, alarmed by what they’re seeing and how quickly this is all moving.”
It was President Donald Trump versus the big brains: “And tonight, even after that warning from a former AI researcher that there’s a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans in a decade, tonight, President Trump saying the only guardrail AI needs is a high-IQ president, calling it a ‘hoax.’”
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You can sense the elitist sarcasm against Trump between the lines.
A similar spin led “NBC Nightly News,” as anchor Tom Llamas echoed: “We begin with President Trump thundering into the debate today over AI regulation and perhaps the fate of humanity, saying that any predictions that artificial intelligence could destroy the human race are, quote, ‘a hoax.’ It comes as some of the country’s top AI leaders say the opposite, that the danger is real and must be regulated.”
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To their credit, the “CBS Evening News” at least allowed an expert to challenge this new doomsaying trend, Trump’s former AI czar David Sacks. “I think we are in a political season right now. It feels like a panic is being ginned up. And so, I do think that the threat here has been exaggerated.” CBS reporter Jo Ling Kent pushed back with the president’s “hoax” language, to which Sacks replied: “The hoax is that somehow we’re going to be extinct as a species within a few years because of AI, and therefore we have to stop completely.”
It can be hard to listen to all of this very sudden panic-mongering and not think back on all the apocalyptic predictions we have heard about global warming since 1988 – and the left never wants anyone to remember them.
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In 1990, a PBS documentary series titled “Race to Save the Planet” featured narrator Meryl Streep forecasting the future weather: “By the year 2000 – that’s less than 10 years away – the earth’s climate will be warmer than it’s been in over 100,000 years. If we don’t do something, there’ll be enormous calamities in a very short time.”
Streep and her ideological allies despise anyone calling this kind of prediction a “hoax” – because the leftist elites always think they have a monopoly on facts and truth, and because it suggests that they are insincere, spinning doom to achieve more government control over our lives.
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If we’re going to gin up frightening forecasts, there’s always the conspiracy theory that the left wants to keep a dominant share of the AI environment, just as they always want a dominant share over our media environment. In the same spirit in which the left pushed around Big Tech to shut down conservative “misinformation,” they might use AI to spread their information dominance.
For most Americans who do not have a deep understanding of computer science – as well as climatology – it’s hard to dismiss the scariest of forecasts when the media marshals the capital-E experts.
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In this case, the AI panic is being driven by the makers of AI themselves. Does that make them more credible? Or should it raise suspicions about precisely how they want to “pace the frontier”?
We can observe the media trends over the years and be skeptical of wild talk about how “we may all perish if we don’t take a drastic course of action immediately.” It can feel like a high-pressure sales pitch insisting we’re suicidal fools if we don’t submit to Experts. The global-warming example is not encouraging.
