Term of the Moment
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Definition: AI anxiety
(Artificial Intelligence anxiety) The fear that AI will replace people and jobs in the future. This form of automation anxiety dates back to the late 1700s when mechanical looms replaced workers in the textile industry (see Jacquard loom). Today, people fear AI will take away jobs as it replicates human functions and decision making. However, not all professions are susceptible (see AI-proof jobs).
According to an AI Expert
In 2025, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, a major AI company, told the Axios news site that the technology he and other companies are building today could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next couple of years. Amodei admitted that it "sounds crazy and people just don't believe it!" Amodei is no lightweight. In 2025, he was one of the Time 100, Time Magazine's hundred most influential people in the world. See Anthropic and AI programming.
An Existential Anxiety
More than just jobs disappearing, many people fear that AI is a threat to humanity. Many celebrities, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and the "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton have all expressed concern that society might be irreparably damaged as AI-based systems increasingly replace human judgment. One hopes the decision to launch a war would never be made by an algorithm. However, under the rationale of "eliminating human emotion," this might eventually seem plausible.
The More Immediate Problem
In the meantime, military drones are being developed in the U.S., China, Russia and many other countries around the world with increasing amounts of autonomy. It is conceivable that if both sides in a conflict use this type of weaponry, it could get out of control and cause much more destruction than originally intended. This is the scenario that many are increasingly worried about (see lethal autonomous weapons). Contrast with superagency. See AI in a nutshell, GPT, technology singularity, robot and AI agent.
AI May Be Harming Itself
The entire programming paradigm for AI is getting very complex, perhaps too much so for mere mortals. The programming maze we are creating may become so hard to understand in the future that it will cause its downfall. Stay tuned!
A Remarkable Observation
Sooner Than You Think
Anxiety in the 1940s
A Warning
According to an AI Expert
In 2025, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, a major AI company, told the Axios news site that the technology he and other companies are building today could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next couple of years. Amodei admitted that it "sounds crazy and people just don't believe it!" Amodei is no lightweight. In 2025, he was one of the Time 100, Time Magazine's hundred most influential people in the world. See Anthropic and AI programming.
An Existential Anxiety
More than just jobs disappearing, many people fear that AI is a threat to humanity. Many celebrities, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and the "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton have all expressed concern that society might be irreparably damaged as AI-based systems increasingly replace human judgment. One hopes the decision to launch a war would never be made by an algorithm. However, under the rationale of "eliminating human emotion," this might eventually seem plausible.
The More Immediate Problem
In the meantime, military drones are being developed in the U.S., China, Russia and many other countries around the world with increasing amounts of autonomy. It is conceivable that if both sides in a conflict use this type of weaponry, it could get out of control and cause much more destruction than originally intended. This is the scenario that many are increasingly worried about (see lethal autonomous weapons). Contrast with superagency. See AI in a nutshell, GPT, technology singularity, robot and AI agent.
AI May Be Harming Itself
The entire programming paradigm for AI is getting very complex, perhaps too much so for mere mortals. The programming maze we are creating may become so hard to understand in the future that it will cause its downfall. Stay tuned!
In a 2024 podcast entitled "Our AI future is way worse than you think," best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari observed that as time goes on, instead of training an AI model with human-generated data, the output of previous AIs will be used. In other words, AI will be learning from itself. Sounds like calamity written all over it!
Former chief business officer at Google X, Mo Gawdat said in Steven Bartlett's 2023 "Diary of a CEO" podcast that AI will become much more intelligent than humans in only a few months. Gawdat claimed that in a couple years, Bartlett will be interviewing a robot for his podcast, and in 10 years, we will be hiding from the machines. Needless to say, his comments caused controversy. See Google X.
The above quote appeared in 1947 in an essay on social criticism entitled "Dialectic of Enlightenment" by German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. The quote was referenced in "The Loop" by Jacob Ward (see below).
In his 2022 book, science and tech journalist Jacob Ward says our innermost loop is the behavior we inherited, but the outermost loop is the way technology, capitalism, marketing and politics use AI to sample our behavior and reflect those patterns back at us. He claims the real threat is what happens as AI alters future behavior.