What should we fear most? AI or the AI Doomerism Movement?

Amid conflicting and well-funded agendas in the age of unreason, the answer is both.

In the early scenes of the new and much-hyped movie Mountainhead, the Elon-Musk-like character Venis Parish’s social media platform becomes the epicentre of global chaos.

After his newly launched AI content creation tools enabled users to flood his Traam platform with divisive “deep fakes” resulting in widespread and bloody conflict across the world, Parish is urged to shut the platform down.

In a defensive rant to his fellow tech billionaire “frenemies” while holed up at a luxury mountain retreat, the fictional Parish counters with an historical fact about humans adapting to new technology:

“The first-time people saw a movie they ran screaming from the theatre because they thought they were going to be hit by a train. The answer to that was not to stop making movies. It was, show more movies!”

Then he reverts to the irresponsible tech bro billionaire type, or at least as Mountainhead creator Jesse Armstrong admitted he defines them:

“We are going to show users as much stuff as possible un…