Ryan Broderick writes about a long, apocalyptic post by an AI CEO named Matt Shumer:

the “artificial general intelligence will destroy the world” narrative is a marketing strategy. It’s the same thing we heard about crypto and metaverse, both of which were meant to mimic how we think the release of the iPhone felt….

The opening of Shumer’s big AI essay is actually not about AI at all. It’s actually about COVID, specifically the creeping fear that, well, something big was happening. “Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention,” he wrote. “I think we’re in the ‘this seems overblown’ phase of something much, much bigger than COVID.” Which is, beyond AI, the defining philosophy of Silicon Valley — or, even, America — in the 2020s. That you are, simply, not aware of something important that is about to happen, a sort of COVID phantom pain. And once you see it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. “You are running out time,” “you will be left behind,” “you are not noticing what’s happening.” The only thing Big Tech is selling us is their own unprocessed trauma back to us. It’s not a revolution. It’s a comfort blanket for a managerial class that still can’t fathom that all their tech and wealth couldn’t protect them from the pandemic.