Much of our fear of AI runs higher than the actual risk, and the excess may be about us.

AI sits in an uncanny valley of mind: human enough to seem like someone, not enough to be one.

Old stories of machines enslaving us may carry our own history of dehumanizing others.

Chatbots tend to validate us, which can make us surer we are right and less willing to repair.

I was catching up with a friend last week and our conversation drifted to AI. He told me, pretty matter-of-factly, that he's been stockpiling food and cash and is thinking about buying a gun because he's worried about apocalyptic-level events. He's not the only one.

The news lately has carried a steady drumbeat of prominent voices warning that AI could wipe us out within a few years, and I've watched that fear land on other friends and family too.

Some of the concern is warranted. But the intensity of these fears goes beyond the technical reality, which suggests something psychological is shaping how we see it.

To explain this discomfort, I keep thinking of the mannequin in a store window. It's too human to be just an object and not human enough to be a person, and a lot of people (myself included) find it upsetting. The roboticist Masahiro Mori called this dip in comfort the "uncanny valley" (Mori, 1970/2012).

Now imagine a mannequin that walks, talks, reasons, and tells you it has feelings. That's where we are. And research suggests the unease isn't just about physical appearance.

In one study, participants in virtual reality watched the same scene of two digital characters chatting warmly. Those told the characters were AI acting on their own, rather than avatars controlled by people, found them significantly creepier (Stein & Ohler, 2017). Nothing about the characters changed except the belief that a machine was the one expressing feelings.

To complicate things further, AI is getting a face. Last week, Y Combinator's Garry Tan retweeted a demo of Griffin, from the company Tavus. In Tavus's own unverified study, 48% of people on a one-minute call thought it was human. Watching it, I felt discomfort in my body.

An Old Fear in a New Body

None of this fear is new. Creations that rise up to enslave or destroy us are some of the oldest stories in the........

© Psychology Today