AI Safety Practitioner: Cheap Extinction Talk Has Turned the Public Anti-AI
Dr_Atoosa · x · 2026-09-11
An AI safety practitioner reflects on the field's communication failures. OpenAI and Anthropic were founded to check Google, yet now race each other; her non-AI friends in climate and indie film have turned anti-AI after years of "AI researchers say humanity will go extinct" headlines, losing any imagination of AI helping their goals.
She argues some loud EA/rationalist voices conflate cheap AI risk with extinction risk, turning "real risk" into a catch-all for everything from bioterror to sandbox escapes — one of the field's worst disservices. Wrong fear, she concludes, corrodes clear thinking and correct action long before any AGI could; the task is to stay grounded and correct the public imagination.
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