Introduction
In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the words "DON'T PANIC" are printed in large, friendly letters on the cover of a guide for navigating the enormous, confusing, and occasionally dangerous universe. It's remarkably good advice.
Panicking never makes a bad situation better, and it normally clouds our judgment.
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is a tactic used to influence decisions by making people anxious about what they don't know. When we're uncertain about the future, it's easy to imagine what might go wrong. Fear makes those possibilities feel more likely, and doubt makes us question whether we're doing enough to prevent them.
But this fear doesn't need to be manufactured. Real threats create genuine uncertainty, and uncertainty creates a demand for confident answers. Anyone who can explain the problem and offer a clear plan to solve it provides the certainty people are looking for.
Existential Threats
Threats presented as existential are particularly fertile ground for FUD. Buying a house, driving a car, or changing jobs all involve fear and uncertainty, but they're risks we encounter in everyday life. How do we evaluate a threat to the very way of life we take for granted? When the stakes are presented as the end of the world as we know it, normal questions about evidence, tradeoffs, and unintended consequences can start to look like distractions.
Nuclear Technology
Nuclear technology gave humanity the ability to destroy civilization, but it also offered a way to produce enormous amounts of reliable electricity with very low carbon emissions. Nuclear weapons established the technology's frightening reputation, and nuclear power plant accidents reinforced it. That combined fear probably led us to overestimate nuclear power's risks while underestimating the costs of going without it.
September 11
The September 11 attacks shattered Americans' sense of security. The resulting fear created an immediate demand for protection, and the public became willing to accept expansions of government surveillance and security powers that would have been politically unacceptable just a month earlier. More than two decades later, the fear has faded, but the security apparatus has only grown.
Climate Change
Al Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar and helped make climate change a mainstream political issue. Its persuasive power came partly from presenting a complicated scientific problem as an urgent, comprehensible story about a frightening future. But when a threat becomes a moral emergency, questioning a particular prediction or proposed solution can be mistaken for denying the problem itself.
COVID-19
COVID-19 brought this dynamic into everyday life. Public debates often collapsed several distinct questions into one: Was the virus dangerous? How would a particular restriction reduce that danger? Could a less restrictive policy have achieved similar benefits at a lower cost? Proponents often equated questioning their policies' costs or effectiveness with downplaying the danger of the virus itself.
The Politics of Fear and Uncertainty
These examples share a pattern. A threat creates uncertainty, uncertainty generates fear, and fear creates demand for someone to take control. That someone might be a government, a regulator, a company, or an institution claiming special expertise. Once authority has been granted, the people and organizations holding it often have little incentive to give it back.
No conspiracy is required. Politicians benefit from appearing decisive, news organizations benefit from attention, institutions benefit from funding and influence, and companies benefit from new moats. These incentives don't mean the people involved are lying about the threat. But fear and uncertainty make us less critical of the solutions they propose.
The Fear of Artificial Intelligence
AI is repeating this pattern. The technology is advancing rapidly, its capabilities are difficult to predict, and its potential impact on society is enormous. That uncertainty creates an opening for anyone offering confident answers, while fear makes us eager to accept them.
Consider the prediction that AI will leave millions of people permanently unemployed. That's one possible future. AI will eliminate some jobs, but it will also create new opportunities we can't yet imagine. The uncertainty is how many displaced workers won't find new employment. Why commit to economic interventions before we know the scale of the problem?
Don't Panic
The more uncertain we are about AI's future, the more possibilities we ought to consider. Existential fear encourages the opposite: imagining a frightening possibility and demanding sweeping changes to prevent it. That's panic.
Douglas Adams' advice wasn't a promise that everything would turn out fine. It was a reminder of how to behave when you don't know whether it will.
Take AI seriously enough not to panic about it.