Future AI doom speculation lets companies avoid accountability today, professor claims

Preoccupation with future AI catastrophe scenarios enables companies to avoid facing responsibility for the significant harm their technology is currently causing, claims a professor.

In an essay published recently, Tobias Osborne, a theoretical physics professor at Leibniz Universität Hannover and a cofounder of the scientific communication firm Innovailia, criticised debates on superintelligent machines and the hypothetical "singularity" as a harmful distraction.

While policymakers and technologists argue about the potential long-term threats AI could pose to human existence, he remarked, the tech industry is causing "significant damage in the present. Right now. It can be quantified."

"The apocalypse isn't coming," Osborne stated. "Instead, the dystopia is already here."

Osborne asserted that this obsession with future scenarios has a tangible impact on regulation and accountability.

"By portraying themselves as preventers of civilisational disaster, AI firms are perceived as national-security entities instead of product suppliers, reducing liability and deterring usual regulations," he explained.

According to Osborne, that perspective allows companies to offload harm while taking advantage of relaxed regulations, confidentiality, and public funding.

He highlighted that some of the most ignored risks today include emotional harm associated with chatbot usage and extensive copyright and data misuse.

Apocalyptic tales persist, he noted, because they are easily marketable, challenging to disprove, and help shift corporate liabilities onto the public.