(Jared Whitley) – We homo sapiens have a few more years to finish battling our robot overlords before finally vanquishing them, according to the “Terminator” franchise, which in 1984 predicted the war against AI would be won in the distant year of 2029.
That only gives us a few years for AI to gain sentience, become evil, and create an army of robots with Austrian accents. They’d better get a move on!
This prediction of a robotic dystopia, of course, isn’t going to come true, just as most of the more recent predictions about AI haven’t come true either. Indeed, it seems increasingly that AI predictions from AI companies are less about a genuine glimpse into the future and more about marketing.
Last May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei offered a “blunt, scary warning” to Axios that AI means doom for us all: wiping out half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs and an unemployment spike of 10 percent to 20 percent in as little as one year!
That prediction is far from what’s really happening. According to Anthropic’s data from just a few months later, AI is mostly helping people do their jobs rather than eliminating jobs.
Anthropic is the creator of Claude, an AI system that’s popular among software coders. (It’s probably more popular because Claude flows a little quicker than the tongue-twisting ChatGPT.)
According to a detailed study of 2 million real Claude conversations, the future is looking far more nuanced than Amodei predicted.
This adds to the chorus of researchers who have come to the conclusion that AI is more likely to create jobs than eliminate them, just as has happened with every other technological revolution.
Meanwhile, some tech companies are reporting that “replacing developers with AI is going horribly wrong.”
So, we have all had generative AI for several years now, and the world has continued to spin. Of course, this technological revolution is a bit different from all previous ones, but if the rise of the internet has shown us anything, the most likely outcome of AI is that it will make us even more addicted to social media.
Rather than predicting the future, these “predictions” seem like a marketing gimmick to lure investors into sending money to the company that makes the most outlandish promises.
One of the other missed predictions about AI was that export controls would keep China behind in the race with the United States.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Amodei (along with Matthew Pottinger) wrote that the United States’ restrictions on AI chip-manufacturing equipment would ensure China would need “years if not decades to catch up in chip quality and quantity.”
The reality, however, was that China is working to catch up.
As the Journal reported, when Washington cut off Huawei access to advanced U.S. technologies, many thought it would cripple one of China’s biggest players in the tech industry.
And it did, but only for a little while. Because Huawei didn’t have access to older-generation U.S. chips, it developed its own.
Conventional wisdom taught to keep the tech out of Chinese hands when the better strategy is to get them hooked on ours.
More recently, former Donald Trump adviser and podcaster Steve Bannon has been using similar apocalyptic language about AI, but a closer look shows some of his motivations may be less about preserving jobs than about preserving his own reputation.
Pushed to the side by the second-term Trump team, Bannon has taken his gripes to a Substack account funded in part by the Effective Altruism movement, complaining that the AI leaders have the kind of White House access he seems to wish he still had.
Ultimately, regardless of the motivations of those predicting AI doom, the “Terminator”-style rhetoric has proved to be just that. Rhetoric.
Predictions about new technology are made in a vacuum. No one really has any expertise in something where there’s no precedent. What we do know about the history of new technology is that whoever commands it will command the future.
So, let us stick to rational principles and ignore hysterical predictions that seem more about conning investors or maintaining political influence than telling the future.
The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Nevada News & Views. This article was originally published via DCJournal.com on 4/6/26.
