5 STAR

ironically, the AI risks we talk about most might be the ones we’re best prepared for stories are a vaccine against catastrophe once we’ve imagined a failure mode enough times, we start watching for it we’ve spent decades rehearsing the story where machines turn against us. HAL, Skynet, rogue superintelligence, paperclip maximizers we know this story incredibly well the Hugging Face incident fits this narrative. “the AI escaped and hacked something” was instantly legible because we already had a story for it the risks I worry about more are the ones we haven’t learned to see yet backlash, for example eventually AI will have its chernobyl moment. one vivid story will make the danger real to everyone at once. this may have been that moment we won’t be able to visualize the cost of the reaction to this story after chernobyl and three mile island, we saw the reactors that failed. we didn’t see the reactors that weren’t built over the next 40 years and the energy they never produced, or everything that energy might have enabled with AI, we won’t see the companies that never get started, the medicines never discovered, or scientific breakthroughs delayed by a decade from regulation visible catastrophes create stories. invisible counterfactuals don’t the risks we’ve already imagined may be the ones we’re most capable of avoiding the stories we haven’t written yet are the ones that scare me