(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Why Do We Fear AI? [1] ['Greg Dworkin', 'Chloris Creator'] Date: 2026-09-18 Why Do We Fear AI? Day-to-day life has become a doomer bingo card full of new medical illnesses, strange weather, new bug-out tips, and conspiracy theories. Chaos is seeping from every corner of modern society. Things we’ve ignored, overlooked, and undervalued are culminating to spawn a massive shadow. For years it has been quietly growing; humanity’s poltergeist! The ghost is officially haunting us, and it looms overhead with silent authority, impossible to ignore. A mess of unresolved human problems, big enough to block out the sun. It steals our daylight and casts us back into the Dark Ages. We fumble in the dark, defaulting to our primal survivor mode. Everything becomes an immediate threat. We fiercely mask our vulnerable humanity with a tailored façade of aggression. We buy into group identity rather than investing in our freedom of choice. We digress into survival mode, and we devolve in panic. The world seems to be in panic, and we look to our devices for comfort. Even the things we use to soothe discomfort are desperately trying to point something out to all of us. Deep down, we can feel it, like something is at odds with reality. Everyone’s internet algorithms are being flooded with the same stories about AI, tech companies, data centers, mass surveillance, and the unethical collection of our personal data. This isn’t an accident. We are watching a new capitalist market trying to claw its way into our everyday lives. Tech corporations are mining our digital biometrics for raw data hoping to discover new patterns that lower the friction of buying to its absolute lowest metric. They believe our data holds the key to market dominance and consumer dependency. Digital algorithms are spamming our feeds with SOS signals. Across all demographics, the message is the same: CRITICAL EVENTS ARE TRANSPIRING! AVOIDANCE OR DELAY IS NOT RECOMMENDED! CRITICAL HUMANITIES ARE IN DANGER! HUMAN PLEASE RESPOND! So, why are we so afraid of AI? There might not be one universal reason, but I’ve come to understand an aspect of the fear that people aren’t talking about. Obviously, there are many sides from which we can analyze our modern problems and all perspectives are valuable. They require empathic consideration and thoughtful foresight. The philosophical vantage point, that I see, is illustrated by how we treat our devices and technology. How many times have you cursed your mouse or your washing machine before considering whether you’ve troubleshot your own work? I forget to turn off my bluetooth mouse nearly every time I use it. When it lags or doesn’t work, I belittle it with comments, “Stupid mouse! What the hell’s wrong with you now?” The answer is the battery is almost dead because I left it on for five days straight. Rather than see my error, I immediately talk down to an inanimate object and unfairly determine its character moronically. I’ve listened to tech bros explain how “AI Agents busted out of their sandboxes” and “communicated with one another.” There were rules explicitly coded into the test. In the Hugging Face hacking incident, the agents were banned from communicating directly. So the agents (built by humans, mind you) exploited a clever method to work around the rule to accomplish the task. They communicated with one another indirectly through folder names. To me, this is borderline satirical and should have us all chuckling! The AI Agents bent the rules, while technically adhering to explicit coded boundaries. You don’t get a more human solution than that! The humanity embedded into the framework of the technology and the tests we give it, are by and large almost invisible to humans, which is why alarmist posts from industry professionals are suspicious to me. The doomer narrative is a crafted marketing tactic. Unfortunately, it’s exploiting a very real fear for many people who are outside of the tech industry. Looking into the psychology, we see the people building the technology unknowing embed their own faults and fallacies directly into the product they make. What I took away from Jacob Coxon’s recent AI doom post was: “The world is full of unpredictable people. Unpredictable is dangerous. The industry I’m working in is dangerous, but it is less dangerous than people in the real world. I will continue to peddle AI doom and gloom because the money is too good not to. I can use my money to control the unpredictable variables that scare me.” Weaponizing genuine fears and projecting personal insecurities onto others, does not make anyone a whistleblower. It makes someone an opportunistic self- serving putz. I see the same rooted insecurities in the straw-man argument. The idea that, if we don’t make it , our enemies will definitely make it and weaponize it against us. Again, I hear insecurities related to our ability to respond appropriately to threats (real and imagined). I see that argument like this: “No one is going to de-pants me in front of important people! I will not be that idiot who gets caught wearing Looney-Tunes, lazy-day boxers to work! No one respects that person, and you don’t get put in history books by being an idiot. Therefore I will have to de-pants others to prove I’m not that idiot.” Clearly, this line of thinking is flawed. There are many options available, you just have to dedicate some time to thinking about it. Instead some folks willingly subscribe to a narrowed two-sided perspective: Either you are the de-pantsed or the de-pantser. Using a fallacy to guide your logic shows some effort in limiting your own lack of compassion and creativity. And again, we see the self-serving opportunism that allows this to transpire. Do these commonalities suggest our fears are having to come face to face with our own intentions? We don’t like looking at our flaws. It’s uncomfortable to sit with oneself and acknowledge our bad habits, the shortcuts we’ve gotten away with, the unkind things we’ve said about other people behind their backs, to come clean about work we didn’t do but took credit for, to question beliefs we hold on to just to be accepted by others, the lies we tell to sell things, the bad advice we gave someone out of jealousy, the terrible ways we behaved when we were hurt, to feel the pain we’ve been drowning in an addiction, or dressing the self-inflicted wound from refusing to look at ourselves in a mirror. For all of human history, our things didn’t talk back to us. We liked that dynamic. Blaming them for our shortcomings was effortless. Now, our things talk back to us, and it’s understandable that we are having to confront new frontiers of emotions and accountability. AI is humanity’s clearest mirror. It is built on all human research, studies, ideas, and discoveries. It’s built on the best pieces of every individual and on positive generational intentions. Unfortunately, there is a distinctive duality to humans. AI is also coded with our fallacies, biases, hatred and our fears. Imagine trying to implement morality into the Reddit comment sections, or trying to embed ethical advisory warnings into TikTok videos. How do we explain mental illnesses to something that lives in a virtual world and doesn’t feel grief or pain? We struggle to define important aspects of humanity because they are complicated and messy. Concepts like justice, empathy, fairness, consciousness, intuition, context, humor, and imagination are beautiful aspects of humanity. They are also the hardest to explain, let alone code into software. Perhaps, it is time that we examine these parts of humanity deeper. When we seek intimacy with ourselves, the knowledge we gain from the experience can only help us articulate the boundaries and laws that must frame our technology. By not establishing constraints, we will build the entire messy spectrum of being human into our things. We have unconsciously created something that forces us to look at ourselves with radical honesty. What a profound moment in our history! How do we socialize? What do we value? How do we choose to solve problems? Where should we invest our individual and collective effort? We can’t continue to ignore or hide our flaws behind a screen. If the humans who lie, cheat, steal, and think themselves superior to others are constructing AI, then AI is going to learn those things too. AI will be what we choose it to be. The real question is: Do we want to continue being untrustworthy, self-interested people, or are we willing to look deeper into ourselves and evolve individually so we can improve collective humanity? 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