"Unemployment, stupidity, stagnation." Maxim Trustlyubov* About the best friends of the Alarmist

Protest of protest at the office of the Google DeepMind office in London June 30, 2025

VUK Valcic / Zuma Press Wire / Scanpix

If you distract from the constant anxiety that political news causes, you can switch to another, possibly more exciting. This is a panic about the emergence of artificial intelligence in our life. In his weekly column, Maxim Trustlyubov* talks about fears that are well sold.

For three years that have passed since the appearance of instruments built on generative artificial intelligence, a whole literature of anxiety and warnings arose. The spectrum of fears is wide: AI will deprive millions of people of work, will shine between real and generated actors, and in the ultimate forecasts will jeopardize the very existence of human civilization. Alarmism is a win -win intellectual game.

Critics of new technologies - from specialists within the industry, such as Jeffrey Hinton, to public intellectuals like Juval Noval Harari - say that the changes caused by AI are qualitatively different from all previous technological transitions. Nevertheless, if you return a step back, it becomes obvious: fears about the future are now played out as an old, slightly forgotten play.

Comparisons with previous waves of panic are useful, because in the case of the consequences of the first industrial revolution, we have at least two hundred years to evaluate, and in the case of a digital revolution, dozens.

Economic historian Joel Mokir, whose books were translated into Russian, back in 2015, co -authored with Chris Vikex and Nicholas Tsibart, published an article “History of Technological Alarm and Futory of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth: IS This Time Different?). In it, the authors identified three stable types of technological anxiety. The first two are “optimistic”. Technologies will develop, but will cause undesirable consequences, firstly, for the labor market, and secondly, for human moral well-being. The third is “pessimistic”: progress may simply stop. It is interesting that at the time of the release of this article, AI has not yet gone beyond the laboratories, but the Alarmism, which today accompanies its expansion, looks like previous bouts of the same syndrome.

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