Elon Musk and the Dark Singularity: Is the Fear of AI Running Out of Control Principally a Fear of the Ultra-Privileged?

Time and again I have been struck by the amount of attention given to what seem to me the sillier fears about the problems that progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence may raise, particularly the idea of "AI" emerging as a distinct, malevolent Other, and in particular AI, with its opaque, possibly alien natures and thought processes and agendas, somehow wresting power from "humans."

I have been struck, too, by (at least to hear Ezra Klein tell the story) how many of those involved in AI at its cutting edge themselves publicly espouse such fears, as seen in how heads of major tech companies are themselves calling for a "slowdown" in such research, and appearing on cable news shows to go from merely warning of the possibility of a Dark Singularity they tell us could be coming a lot sooner than even Ray Kurzweil thinks, to telling Tucker Carlson that we need quasi-military contingency plans for preemptively shutting down that none-too-far-off Singularity (!).

In that I see the influence of an abundance of bad sci-fi (such as Isaac Asimov was already inveighing against a century ago, apparently to no effect on the conventional wisdom whatsoever), and shameless, sensationalist attention-grabbing that feeds off of itself. However, there also seems to me an obliviousness to, or desire to ignore, the very real conflicts among humans of vastly unequal power, with all it implies. For all such talk about "humanity" being in control the vast, vast majority of the people on this planet have very little power over their lives, either individually or collectively, and are quite conscious of being subject to other "intelligences" that seem opaque, possibly alien in their natures and thought processes and agendas, which may be hostile to them and a threat to their survival, from dictators to oligarchs to the "faceless" functionaries within the "artificial men" and "corporate persons" that in a very meaningful sense already give us a world crawling with inhuman super-intelligences as scary as any out-of-control computer.

But for a tech billionaire in a culture which, to borrow from Hegel, regards the "successful" entrepreneur, and above all the "successful" Silicon Valley entrepreneur, as "God on Earth," and that precisely because those corporate persons, and even the artificial men, do their bidding, the thought of something replacing them as God on Earth has a different, more threatening, quality, so much so that silly scenarios of robot revolt that may be even less likely than ye olde zombie apocalypse have a powerful purchase on what serves them in place of an imagination.