Doomsday AI?

A new wave of 'Doomsday Prophets' is emerging around generative AI, warning that frontier models will lead to unparalleled unemployment, poverty, and uncontrolled cybercrime, according to a Fireworks AI analysis. The piece argues that such fears are historically unfounded, as humans have always triumphed over technologies they created, and notes that AI-inflated expectations have previously triggered two major 'AI Winter' periods.

We’re living a very special moment in Generative Artificial Intelligence. Frontier models, including soon-to-be open-weight ones https://fireworks.ai/blog/kimik3-fable , are becoming very capable and effective at sustaining days-long tasks burning several million tokens along the way . AI-inflated expectations are not new. The history clearly marks at least two major “AI Winter” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI winter periods where Artificial Intelligence as a practice field retracted due to limited real-value creation — or simply very high inflated expectations. With the current advancements, what is happening is a bit different: Instead of skeptics, we’re seeing the rise of Doomsday Prophets of GenAI . Those think current GenAI systems are the ultimate and final stage of technology evolution. Those also think there will be one lab/model to rule them all. And they also believe the only possible outcome is unparalleled unemployment, poverty, and uncontrolled cybercrime. In essence, they don’t believe humans will triumph over a technology humans had created . Spoiler: that never happened before in the history of our civilization . Humans dominated Earth due to reasons, including our biological sense of survival combined with our collective wandering and inventiveness.