Why is the Silicon Valley Elite So Terrified By AI?

Douglas Rushkoff has long struck me as an interesting, if limited, social critic--at the least, willing and able to point out things that few others with even his level of access to the mainstream do. Thus has it gone with his remarks about the dread of artificial intelligence expressed by so many of the Silicon Valley elite about "AI" becoming independent and powerful and hostile. Where the mainstream media has, in line with its normal mode of operation , tended to do little but provide members of the elite and their favored spokespersons a colossal megaphone for their view, especially insofar as that view is sensationalist (rather than attempting to represent a genuine range of views), he at least seems to be on the right track when he quips that the powerful are afraid that, where they have for so long fancied themselves the demi-god masters of the universe, they are anxious that "the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us."