The current wave of AI hype has brought about many people feeling the need to express their fears of new technology. This seems like a normal and healthy response to the unknown. I even expressed some of my own concerns here.
Fear is a common response when a person encounters something they don’t understand. This may be because they lack knowledge or experience to make sense of a new and foreign phenomenon.
Even so, it’s fair to question if and why the popular imagination is being held captive by fears of a largely unknown and broadly misunderstood technology.
Why Does AI Unpredictability Make People Feel Insecure?
American humanist and psychologist Abraham Maslow believed that individuals have a basic need to feel in control over their lives. In his 1954 work titled “Motivation and Personality”, Maslow wrote:
“The desire for safety and for freedom from fear is the basic motivation behind all human behavior. This is true for all animals, not just for humans. In humans, however, this desire often becomes transformed into a desire for psychological safety and freedom from anxiety. It is this desire for safety that underlies the basic need for security and for a place in society. People need to feel that they have some control over their lives, that they are not just victims of circumstance, and that they have some say in what happens to them.”
– Abraham Maslow, 1954
Unfortunately, individuals who most strongly experience this need for control are vulnerable to a pathology of dominance. Maslow described this pathology as a form of neurosis. It can cause a person to show an unhealthy need to dominate and control others.
Recognize Alarmism and Pathological Controlling Behaviors
Maslow proposed that individuals need to learn to balance the impulse for self-actualization against the harms of pathological controlling behavior. This sense of balance could be found by fostering a healthy sense of autonomy and self-regulation. The idea here is that individuals with a strong sense of self are best able to manage their personal behavior in a pro-social manner, making them less likely to resort to controlling others as a means of temporarily quieting their personal anxieties.
Does this mean that all fears about AI are unfounded? No.
It simply means that we need to take a critical view toward the amount of fear based opinions about AI. No technology in history has received this level of pre-emptive scrutiny.
For the sake of context, mass produced automobiles have been widely credited as transformational technology. Those vehicles were first available to the public in 1901. It was not until 1907 that the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety (NCSHS) recommended standardized speed limits for urban and rural roads. The State of California — always at the forefront of government regulatory schemes — was the first to adopt the NCSHS recommendations and that didn’t happen until 1909.
We should question why the perceived harms from AI have become such a viral sensation. Experts disagree as to what AI means or whether it even exists. Meanwhile, a fashionable trend of self-described AI ethicists are constantly preaching about the risks of its abuse. Concerns over “responsible” AI have reached the point of absurdity.