Collection

It is easy to see why the C.E.O.s of A.I. companies might promote this theory. Mistrust is a familiar force in American public life. Both A.I. populism and A.I. doomerism are, in their own ways, politics as usual. They correspond to two well-established modes of discourse—the one of white papers and probability distributions, the other of spirited (and justified) calls for redistribution. But if people hate A.I. because it is at odds with their vision of the good life—because they see it as fundamentally anti-human—then the existing categories won’t suffice. A new vocabulary is required to describe what is shaping up to be an unprecedented political movement, one focussed on questions outside the bounds of traditional public discourse.

Others voiced fears about A.I.’s effects on creativity, about the way it might etiolate the visual and artistic landscape. A lanky thirty-year-old novelist, filmmaker, and practicing clown who went by Red Lamb (he had been to clown school in France, he said) told me that he was “not a big policy-head” but that he dreaded the “slopification of the arts.” “No clanker has ever actually told a joke that I found amusing,” he said. “And I don’t think they ever will.”