I see the appeal of cramming AI into everything from a management viewpoint: no one is responsible when AI is in the driver seat.

If this is what tech journalism looks like now, we are sinking further and further into a technocratic future where the tech-priests can make up whatever story they want about how machines work and the plebs will eat it up without question.

I wouldn't be all that concerned about the words used to describe industrial accidents involving robots if it wasn't for all the headlines last year that came from a single Google employee musing that a #chatbot he was interacting with was sentient.

Senators and parliamentarians read the same newspapers we do and see the same headlines but they make the laws we all live under.

This might seem nitpicky, and in a way it is. However if we are going to be making informed decisions as a democracy, we need to have accurate news coverage and that means being more precise with the words we use.

2. It takes pressure off of plant management and serves as a face-saving PR move. Now, instead of a company having a grim industrial accident due to lax safety, it was just a case of a confused robot that went rogue.

1. It gives the false impression that robots have far more agency than they actually do and that robots are making decisions.

Language like this gives the general public a very distorted image of the state of robotics, especially now with the current fascination with everything related to AI.

This has two negative consequences:

I've programmed industrial robots. They are not "thinking", they are programmed to do motions under specific conditions. At most a robot might have a pressure sensor that will trigger a motion if it is set off. They can't "mistake" a person for a box or "attack" someone with any kind of intent.

Turnip slapper has such poetic beauty to it.

I’d imagine most of these tech bro billionaires would be huddling in a bunker talking to each other along the lines of “…and then when we made it out of the city I told the security guard to escort my family to the airport and he just started talking about HIS own family?!?! So unprofessional!”

“Recently reinstalled #OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an arrangement with Peter Thiel, first revealed to The New Yorker, where the pair will take a jet to one of Thiel’s New Zealand properties in the case of an #apocalyptic event. "

I hate thinking about this stuff and I'm honestly trying not to. Hopefully Roko's basilisk will whisk me away soon enough to torture me for eternity for being such an AI party pooper.

We as a society will sleepwalk into some new AI nightmare, like how we sleepwalked into the Cambridge Analytica scandal in regards to social media, and still have the gall to wonder why these things keep happening.

I'd imagine most of the people deep in the e/acc movement are die-hard believers but I can't help but see this as mostly a cynical power play by tech execs for them to create a reason to ignore all concerns raised about the technology they develop.