AI-doomerism is following the Covid-Talibanism pattern, of the Smart set working each other up into a tizzy, a self-organizing and self-sustaining Smart Spiral. The ‘discourse’ has a life of its own that is largely independent of reality, and cooks up ‘solutions’ that primarily exist as and are justified by (sometimes literal) cartoons and similar fantasy constructions/thought experiments. Policy-proposals are rapidly generated and mimetically transferred that make no real attempt to touch reality let alone weigh costs/benefits (or when they do, one side of the ledger is conveniently marked up to Infinity to make the answer ‘obvious’), nor to speak about/contemplate real lives of real people. With AI-doomerism it’s currently still occurring and being fueled primarily Online (most normies still probably have no idea about any of this) but we now see more and more signs of its breaking containment, so I assume it’s only a matter of time before it has real effects (over and above the data-center thing) & generates top-down ‘measures’ that are totally retarded, unless this Smart Spiral is arrested and dissipated somehow. The pattern is too consistent to ignore. That this is simply how our ‘Smart’ class cooks up and spirals themselves into manias. It’s an egregore-genre your wealthy-enough (bored-enough?) and Internet-parallelized Smart Technocratic society will evidently just keep spontaneously producing, serially. Thus, as with Covid, to argue against them rationally with ‘facts and science’ is futile, because they just aren’t that kind of thing. They weren’t derived that way. Instead, to understand and reverse the dynamic you probably need the tools of ‘Elite Theory’, ethnography, sociology, Girardian analysis, new-religion (‘cult’) studies and so forth. As of now, it’s still basically coded Smart to talk about “p(doom)” and “alignment” with a straight face, and so Smart People will. It’s a way of signaling they’re on Team Smart, it allows virtually anyone to instantly and with little intellectual effort to Sign Up For Being Smart Too. People just love anything like that, particularly when there’s nothing all that noteworthy or all that smart about them. None of this is to say of course that there aren’t legitimate concerns about the risk of AI. (Just like, to identify and oppose Covid Talibanism wasn’t to deny the existence of the Wuhan Virus or that it could cause a deadly syndrome for some.) Just that the *manias* about these things have a way of being unmoored from their ostensible underlying realities, in a way that is transmitted socially rather than due to any ‘facts’. To combat AI-doomerism then, it just won’t work to make ‘arguments’ against it. You’re going to have to make it seem dumb and lame and retarded. You have to make fun of it and take it down socially, with ridicule, making it ‘uncool’, and similar tools. Good luck everyone.