Researcher Konstantine Arkoudas returns to dissect the "recent AI panic" in new essay
kevinnbass · x · 2026-10-02
After a two-year hiatus, AI researcher Konstantine Arkoudas published "The Recent AI Panic," arguing that mainstream coverage of AI's supposed existential risks has gone into overdrive. Using recent NYT doom headlines and editorials as case studies, he identifies "doom creep": mundane but legitimate policy concerns (provenance, disclosure) framed under sci-fi extinction tropes of superintelligence to manufacture urgency. He contends AI's real policy questions don't qualitatively differ from those raised by past horizontal technologies like the internet, and have nothing to do with recursive self-improvement or existential risk.
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