Are we losing our minds to AI?

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers didn’t mince words in court this week while adjudicating the ongoing trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI in Oakland, California. Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, needed to stop being messy bitches.

While she didn’t put it like that (she advised both men: “Control your propensity to use social media to make things worse outside this courtroom”), the underlying message was clear.

The fact that the case even made it to court is indication enough of how strongly both men feel about one another. Social media name-calling is hardly necessary to make that plain. But the reason they’re so eager to throw digital barbs at each other stems from a fundamental difference in belief about the future of AI. Musk doesn’t trust Altman to oversee it. Many people might say the same about Musk.

The anger and messiness between the two is simply the highest-profile example of how the debate over AI is pushing everyone closer to the brink. The wider cultural debate around artificial intelligence is increasingly polarized—some might say unhinged—and is spilling into dangerous territory.

Altman attended court just days after his house was firebombed, then shot at, by Daniel Moreno-Gama, a 20-year-old from Texas who was charged after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home and later threatening OpenAI’s headquarters. The motivation? A fundamental belief that the future direction of AI needs to be stopped.

Even if most people aren’t taking to the streets in the same way Moreno-Gama did, there is a growing divide on social media and in society between those who believe AI is the future we’ve all been waiting for and those who believe it’s the future we’ve all been dreading.

Scroll through social media and you won’t spend long before finding people crowing about AI’s potential to transform how we live and work, arguing that anyone holding out is simply a Luddite with no concept of how vital the technology will become in the years ahead. Many seem to take it personally when others don’t share their enthusiasm.

On the other side are those who loathe the way AI is running roughshod over copyright law, the world of work, and nearly every other aspect of society. They view AI boosters as ignorant tech bros who would gladly consign them to penury, enslaved to an AI overlord indifferent to their survival.

Both camps feel wholly vindicated in their judgment of how awful or ignorant the other side is. There is no compromise. Increasingly it feels like there’s no space left to occupy the middle ground.

Why do we feel this way? “When a new technology is sold to the public on false promises, people tend to react badly; they feel they’ve been tricked,” says Mar Hicks, historian of technology and associate professor at the University of Virginia. “I think that’s a big part of what’s happening with the growing backlash against AI and the data centers the industry is building throughout the U.S.”

The heightened tension many of us are experiencing stems from the potential existential risks AI poses to how we live, or the material ways it could reshape our lives, depending on whether you believe AI’s boosters or its cynics. If you’re of working age, haven’t gotten to grips with AI, and are absorbing a constant drip-drip of commentary from social or traditional media, you may well believe this technology is capable of eliminating your job entirely, or that it’s so overhyped it could attract destabilizing investment, tank your 401(k), and wreck your future. Neither scenario is reassuring.

“Historically, new technologies often come with a level of risk and cost,” says Hicks, “but when that risk and cost is disproportionately pushed onto the people who have less power while allowing the wealthy to gain ever more control, we often see situations and public discourses like we are seeing now with AI.”

Part of this is driven by the gulf between the hype and the reality of what the public was told the technology would deliver. “AI was presented as a public good, but people are becoming increasingly skeptical of that idea,” Hicks says.

For the likes of Musk and Altman, however, the equation behind the heightened emotion is different, Hicks argues. “I’m inclined to see that more through the lens of those particular men’s personalities and their feelings of entitlement,” she says. “They both think that they’re going to lose out not just on money but on an enormous amount of control over society’s future—and for whatever reason both men seem to feel very entitled to being in charge.”

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