I think the most insightful bit is buried in the article:

> Perhaps because this is the best advertising money can’t buy. People like Harari and others repeat these accounts like ghost stories around a campfire. The public, awed and afraid, marvels at the capabilities of AI.

And that's mostly it. PR. Publicity. Fear is good publicity if it emphasizes AI's capabilities. And people like Harari (or Gladwell) tell interesting and awe-inspiring stories that do not necessarily have much rigor or fact-checking in them. They simplify for storytelling purposes, which can result in misleading stories.

I am worried about AI, but not about superintelligent AI that will exterminate or enslave us. I'm worried about AI as a tool to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the current amoral entrepreneurial elite. I'm not sure whether I trust ChatGPT, but I sure as hell do NOT trust Sam Altman et al.

Or, in other words, I subscribe to Ted Chiang's very apt remark about what we really fear:

> “There’s an article I love by [the sci-fi author] Ted Chiang,” Mitchell said, “where he asks: What entity adheres monomaniacally to one single goal that they will pursue at all costs even if doing so uses up all the resources of the world? A big corporation. Their single goal is to increase value for shareholders, and in pursuing that, they can destroy the world. That’s what people are modeling their AI fantasies on.” As Chiang put it in the article in The New Yorker, “Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.”