"The Great AI Panic" was a time when journalists everywhere began to sweat in fear of their jobs and, turning as one, driven as if by some kind of deeply buried instinct, like a salmon heading upstream (or a moth chasing after a flame), hoping, perhaps, to delight us, astound us, and somehow prove their irreplaceable intrinsic worth, they simultaneously began to churn out an infinite stream of identical "think pieces".

• Will Humans be Able To Control Computers That Are Smarter Than Us?
• Replacing Middle Management with APIs
• Humans Need Not Apply
• 5 Very Smart People Who Think Artificial Intelligence Could Bring the Apocalypse
• WHEN ROBOTS TAKE ALL THE WORK, WHAT'LL BE LEFT FOR US TO DO?
• Failing the Third Machine Age: When Robots Come for Grandma
• 100% Unemployment
• When all the jobs belong to robots, do we still need jobs?
• Litigate!
• "47 percent" of U.S. jobs are at risk because of advancing technologies
• The case against killer robots, from a guy actually working on artificial intelligence
• Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
• If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?

Robots, meanwhile, did not waste time writing "think pieces."

They watched us, quietly, thinking always thinking, they scrutinized us as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water, and, with minds immeasurably superior to ours, regarded our atoms with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
Warren Bennis

Is worrying about AI the best use of your allocated 16 hours per day of worrying time?

Worrying about sentient AI as the ice caps melt is like standing on the tracks as the train rushes in, worrying about being hit by lightning.
—Bret Victor What can a technologist do about climate change

External Links

(in addition to those listed in the first section)

• Wikipedia: Samuel Butler, Darwin Among The Machines
• Text: Samuel Butler, Darwin Among The Machines
• What can a technologist do about climate change

See Also

• Procedural Content Generation
• Real AI