Our recommendations for the anxious and perplexed

By: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna and Decca Muldowney

There’s a subculture within the “AI” industry that fervently believes they are building a machine god, possibly a malevolent one, and it’s been stirred up recently, either because of yet another “whistleblower” or weird Bannon-to-Bernie coalitions, both talking about an AI apocalypse. Unfortunately, this Doomerist tempest has escaped its teacup and the anxiety is spreading. Not only are we seeing policymakers who should know better falling for what is ultimately the narrative of Big Tech (and its most inhumane inclinations), we also all have friends, neighbors, and family members turning to us to parse what’s going on and maybe get some reassurance.

But no worries, we’ve got you!

Here are some things to read and/or watch that will help you stay grounded through this hype hurricane and the next. We’ve included a fairly long (but still not exhaustive!) list here, to let you know that there are a lot of options and to lift up many important voices in this space, but this isn’t a homework assignment: find your own starting point on this list and read/watch/listen as much as you find helpful.

TO READ:

• Our book, The AI Con. Chapter Six specifically addresses the “AI Doomer” narrative:

  “[Doomers and Boosters are], counterintuitively, two sides of the same coin: the substance of the coin is the belief that the development of AI is inevitable and that that resulting technology will be both autonomous and powerful, and ultimately beneficial, if we play our cards right. It’s only the faces of the coin that differ.” (p.138)
  “Despite all the noise the AI Doomers are making, the evidence is thin— we’d say even nonexistent— for the scenarios they are raising the alarm about.” (p. 156) - More Everything Forever, by Adam Becker. This book includes an entertaining and accessible (if depressing because of the subject matter) background into the ideology driving all of this. - The TESCREAL Bundle.  A collection of resources on the ideologies underlying AI doomerism, including Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres’s paper, “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence”, which traces the same interconnected ideologies. Related/shorter presentations:

  • Torres on “The Dangerous Ideas of ‘Longtermism’ and ‘Existential Risk’”  
  • Gebru on “Effective Altruism Is Pushing a Dangerous Brand of ‘AI Safety’” 
  • Eryk Salvaggio’s article, “Models Don’t Go Rogue”, dispels the idea that OpenAI had models that “escaped containment.”
  • Timnit Gebru’s recent interview with Wired where she sets the record straight: “One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’”.
  • Brian Merchant’s description of his experience at a conference for AI doomers in 2024.
  • Empire of AI by Karen Hao. This book is a deeply reported (and grounded in reality) inside story of OpenAI.
  • Emily’s recent encyclopedia article on “AI” is a relatively short presentation of the history of the notion of artificial intelligence and the various ways that the idea has been used to organize how we understand our world, allocate resources, and relate to each other. [Open-access preprint]
  • Imagination: A Manifesto and Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin, for inspiration on how to resist.
  • Against Tech Oligarchy by JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine, for a history and the future of tech worker organizing. 
  • Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence by Dan McQuilian and The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran, for deep dives into how “AI” is tied up with fascism.
  • … and finally, it’s not out yet, but this is a GREAT time to pre-order Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist by Timnit Gebru.

TO WATCH OR LISTEN TO:

• Ghost in the Machine, a richly informative deep dive into the history of “AI” from director Valerie Veatch, now streaming via PBS’s YouTube in the US & Korea. Outside those locations, it can be viewed for $5 on Kinema. See the movie’s website for info on how to host a screening.
• Heidi Khlaaf on Channel 4 about Anthropic’s Mythos model and security concerns: Concerns about Mythos lie in its ‘purposely vague language’ (Channel 4).
• “Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through AGI”, Timnit Gebru’s 2023 SATML keynote, related to the TESCREAL bundle of ideologies paper mentioned above.

• Multiple different episodes of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 where we apply ridicule as praxis to “AGI” and related notions. As you can see, we’ve been on this beat for a while…:

  • Rumors of a Singularity Have Been Grossly Exaggerated: In the wake of OpenAI's announcement that its products caused a "cyber incident," Sam Altman is now claiming that we're already in the Singularity. And some media outlets are only too happy to help him advance that narrative! Alex and Emily tear up the AI boosters' latest claims of mathy maths combusting into consciousness.  [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
  • Bernie Goes Down the X-Risk Rabbithole (with Dr. Nathalie Maréchal): Senator Bernie Sanders recently hosted a panel on "The Existential Threat of AI," featuring Future of Life Institute co-founder Max Tegmark and other x-riskers. Dr. Nathalie Maréchal joins Emily and Alex to unpack this latest stop on Bernie's descent into doomerism. We return to the MST3k model with a rare video artifact! [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
  • Defining AGI: Oops! All Eugenics: There's a new definition of artificial general intelligence in town, and unsurprisingly... it's bad! Alex and Emily rip up the tissue-paper-thin premises behind this latest attempt to define "intelligence." Plus, we discover that AI hypers love using logos that look like buttholes. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
  • AGI: "Imminent", "Inevitable", and Inane: Emily and Alex pore through an elaborate science fiction scenario about the "inevitability" of Artificial General Intelligence or AGI by the year 2027 - which rests atop a foundation of TESCREAL nonsense, and Sinophobia to boot. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
  • Sam Altman's Fever Dream: Not only is OpenAI's new o3 model allegedly breaking records for how close an LLM can get to the mythical "human-like thinking" of AGI, but Sam Altman has some, uh, reflections for us as he marks two years since the official launch of ChatGPT. Emily and Alex kick off the new year unraveling these truly fantastical stories. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
  • About That 'Dangerous Capabilities' Fanfiction (feat. Ali Alkhatib): When is a research paper not a research paper? When a big tech company uses a preprint server as a means to dodge peer review -- in this case, of their wild speculations on the 'dangerous capabilities' of large language models. Ali Alkhatib joins Emily to explain why a recent Google DeepMind document about the hunt for evidence that LLMs might intentionally deceive us was bad science, and yet is still influencing the public conversation about AI. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
  • Much Ado About 'AI' 'Deception': Will the LLMs somehow become so advanced that they learn to lie to us in order to achieve their own ends? It's the stuff of science fiction, and in science fiction these claims should remain. Emily and guest host Margaret Mitchell, machine learning researcher and chief ethics scientist at HuggingFace, break down why 'AI deception' is firmly a feature of human hype [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]