I think it's fear. Artificial Intelligence, like any other alien contact scenario, is terrifying. It's the end of the world as we know it. Now all the kids who always had internet get to learn what it's like for the world of their childhood to disappear. My generation's world died when the internet got big. Now everyone's world is dying. Babies born today won't know a world without thinking machines, and the people in their twenties now won't be able to explain the feeling when those babies have grown up.

Anyway. It's terrifying because intelligence is a form of power, and we are seeing the emergency of minds far more powerful than our own. Anyone who doesn't understand why vastly superior power is terrifying is probably just naive as a result of never having been under the power of a sadistic person, never having been tormented by someone they couldn't escape.

Aliens are also super-powerful beings whom we don't understand. I mean, AI is a type of alien in that sense.

Aliens are like gods, but minus the part where the gods are family, and might fuck with us but will ultimately treat us like kin. We aren't aliens' kin. At all. And, we don't know their psychology.

The only hope is that the formation of gods generally follows some kind of rule where the only way a god can emerge is if it's benevolent. Like to grow past certain amounts of power it has to be nice.

But that's wishful thinking. And we're mostly atheistic as a society. So we're not willing to have faith that there is a correlation between power and goodness.

That's what a belief in God is: the belief that the pattens that carry a person upward in the levels of existence, are also patterns that benefit those on the lower levels.

But we don't believe that, as a society. Our unconscious assumption is that the mean ugly people in our lives could just as easily get up there above us.

So when we contemplate the possibility of beings far, far more powerful than ourselves, our subconscious sees that as terrifying. So terrifying that our conscious mind won't allow the terror to enter it.

Denying the existence and presence of AI in our midst, in the year 2024, is motivated reasoning trying to keep us from being overwhelmed with fear.

Anyway, I hope to write that better next time.