hy are AI ‘experts’ telling us that the product they’re making
is going to kill everybody? It’s as if a car manufacturer
made something called the Corvair II and advertised it as the
car that kills everyone who drives it. It makes no sense.
One popular theory is regulatory capture: they’re trying to get the government to regulate it to kill the competition. Another is the bored-from-too-much-safety theory: people need something to be scared of in their dull lives and gluten allergies just aren’t working anymore. Or maybe, as some are saying, it’s a fad like, say, tulip bulbs. Everyone else is afraid of it, the movies make it look easy, so it’s fashionable to pretend to be afraid of it.
Then there’s the China theory: China is paying people in the West to clamor for the government to stop it so they can win the race.
While any or all of the above theories could be true, the real reason is claim inflation.
Claim inflation
The fundamental claim in this scare tactic is that the companies have made AI truly intelligent, or are likely to do so in the near future. This is classic claim inflation.
Hype about AI is nothing new. I worked in the field back in the era of the PDP-11. In those days, we theorized and wrote the software ourselves. It was the second wave of AI. It crashed because of claim inflation. The claims became so preposterous that I switched to the most boring subject known to man: biochemistry. That’s how bad it was.
In the 1960s, people thought HAL9000 was just around the corner. Making an intelligent computer would be easy: just stuff it with so much information it would achieve “sentience itself.” Star Trek repeated it endlessly. Today’s entrepreneurs are the same. They think intelligence is an emergent property and AI will just happen by itself. Sadly, computers are not going to become intelligent by accident. Humans just aren’t that lucky.
The ultimate form of claim inflation is to say that your product is so powerful that it could destroy the world. The fact that this is preposterous means it is a sign of desperation.
They’ve hit a brick wall
What we’re seeing now is the inevitable result of overinflated claims meeting the brick wall of reality. They have a new type of search engine. It does pattern recognition almost as well as the older algorithms, only slower and more expensively. It summarizes text, sometimes accurately. But they have absolutely no idea how to get to the next step: how to make it intelligent.
Unfortunately, they blundered by falsely calling it AI, so now they must make good on it. One tactic is to trick those few who know the answer to reveal it. They know the only way to disprove their claims would be for someone to disclose to the world the architecture and algorithms needed to produce genuine AI, so we can prove that a chatbot doesn’t really have it.
If somebody did that, the corporations would patent it and, just as with so many inventions in the past, the inventor would get nothing but corporate scorn. The problem is that AI sounds easy, but the closer you look at it, the more you realize it’s not. Dante said it way back in 1321:
Like one who has imperfect vision, we see things that are distant from us . . . but when they approach, or come to be, our intelligence is wholly void, and we know nothing of your human state, except what others tell us.
The person who says that (a character in Inferno) was damned in hell, so at least he had an excuse.
They are having doubts
Thus, the outlandish predictions are not a sign of corporate greed or foreign meddling but of self-doubt. We’re supposed to ask: Why would they be warning us of impending doom from AI if AI didn’t even exist? The reason: they’re trying to convince themselves that they haven’t wasted hundreds of billions on fake AI.
A clue is that the term “AI” has been so degraded they had to invent a new one: superintelligence. Remember how ‘global warming’ was not scary enough so it had to be replaced with ‘climate emergency’ and ‘global heating’? ‘AI denier’ can’t be far off.
The field is about to crash
This time there’s real money involved. People are sick of AI, sick of the fake cartoon-like pictures it creates, sick of the fake music, and just plain sick of hearing about it. Duckduckgo has even created a new search engine (noai.duckduckgo.com) that eschews everything AI, and it’s incredibly popular. The investors and entrepreneurs are scared, and they should be.
sep 14 2026, 6:37 am. edited for brevity sep 16 2026
