What Should We Actually Be Afraid of in AI? | Blog<br>I wrote this in Russian in late 2021, months before ChatGPT shipped. The English below is a recent translation of the original — voice and argument unchanged. I’m reposting it because I’d rather you grade the predictions than have me grade them for you.

One thing that wasn’t visible from 2021 and probably should have been: corporate AI adoption now runs as top-down mandate stacked on bottom-up cargo-culting. Juniors with no programming background are handed the keys and told to “automate everything,” codebases drift into a kind of complexity no human reads end-to-end, and the AI-cleanup consulting market that will eventually rescue them is going to look a lot like the security-breach recovery industry of the 2010s. I missed that specific shape. I did see the broader one, which was the easy bit — we were always going to outsource choice before we outsourced thinking.

The piece is below. Tell me what it missed.

A long time ago, in a city far, far away — Kharkiv — I was 7 years old. That’s when I first laid eyes on a miraculous new piece of technology — a VHS player. In my hands was my very first cassette tape. I didn’t really care what I was about to watch. What mattered was the sheer fact that I’d get to watch something recorded. Oblivious to what fate had in store for me, I shoved a cassette with a hand-scrawled label reading “Terminator 2” into the player.

They say kids have wild imaginations — that children picture things more vividly than adults do. I don’t know why, but the scene I remember most clearly is Los Angeles getting bombed with nuclear warheads. I sat in absolute panic in front of the VCR, rewinding the tape to watch those terrifying frames over and over.

After I came to my senses, I started asking the adults what I’d just seen — when it would happen and whose fault it would be. They scoffed and told me not to worry.

And they were right. I grew up. Terminator 2 stopped being just a scary movie and became a masterpiece I’ve remembered since childhood. And the fear of artificial intelligence stopped bothering me, replaced by a fear of human intelligence.

And really, what’s there to be afraid of? Automated nuclear bombardments? Killer drones from dystopian YouTube videos? Another spin-off of the same Terminator? Or, even worse, that awful RoboCop reboot? No — the future isn’t populated by walking killer cyborgs, despite all the efforts of Keanu Reeves and Harrison Ford to show us November 2019 in Blade Runner.

And come to think of it — how is it that a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was no artificial intelligence whatsoever, except for droids stuffed with gears? And in the distant future twenty thousand years from now, if you believe Frank Herbert, creating artificial intelligence carries the death penalty.

But life goes on. Life is right here, right now. And people are quietly starting to lose it, because there’s just too much of this AI stuff. And we can’t seem to agree on what to do with it. Some say it needs to be eradicated; Mark Zuckerberg insists the answer is simply to teach AI to work even harder.

Here’s a different take. When I asked my friends about this perspective, I found that most people somehow vaguely sense it, but rarely say it out loud.

Your biggest mistake is thinking that computers can think

There’s a useful word for what happened next: misnomer — using the wrong word or name for something. Way back when the first vacuum tubes were warming up inside ENIAC and UNIVAC, the American military men who built those machines in 1945 decided to call their creations “electronic brains.”

And that’s where all hell broke loose. Nobody back then had the faintest clue how the brain actually works. Frankly, nobody can properly explain it even now. We have neurons, they weave together, and out comes you — John Doe. Well, that’s what we think. When you think, electricity runs through your brain. When you don’t think, it doesn’t. Here’s the kicker: you store memories in your brain. But we don’t know how. Probably something to do with neurons weaving together. If you actually count the neurons, it turns out we can’t account for how we manage to remember anything at all. Oh, and one more thing. Some people take a bump on the head and forget who they are. Others can have half their brain removed by a surgeon and walk away fine.

No, seriously. Let’s not pretend we fully understand how the brain works. “Understand” in the same way we understand how the heart works. We have four chambers. Blood enters here, flows from here to there, here’s your systolic pressure, here’s your diastolic. If things go really bad, we can install a pacemaker. We generally get how it works. But the commands to the heart come from the brain, and that part we’re not touching. That’s the part of the brain beyond human control. You can’t control it. Unless you’re some kind of Indian mystic. They can, but they get a pass on a lot of things.

Sure,...