Washington Is Debating the Wrong AI Risk
Foreign Policy · Michael C. Horowitz, Lauren Kahn ·
Fixating on low-likelihood, high-impact scenarios misses the forest for the trees.
Fixating on low-likelihood, high-impact scenarios misses the forest for the trees.
Washington is gripped by an artificial intelligence (AI) panic, driven by the prospect of superintelligent models delivering our doom. Today’s Nostradamuses include whistleblowers from frontier AI companies—who put the odds of AI killing all humans at greater than one in 10 and warn that insiders expect it could happen before the end of the decade—and anti-nuclear activists, who note that it wouldn’t be the first time humanity built something that could kill us all. The doomsayers may yet be right, but their scenario rests on a long chain of assumptions, each highly unlikely on its own and far less likely to align all at once.
This doesn’t mean AI isn’t dangerous. But by fixating on low-likelihood, high-impact scenarios, we miss the forest for the trees: the common, mundane AI dangers already present and actively causing harm. The pressing AI risk Washington should focus on more is automation bias, the phenomenon where humans over-rely on or over-delegate to AI relative to the accuracy of AI models, off-loading cognition to the machine, sometimes even in the face of contradictory evidence.
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