Fear sells. Not just newspapers but grant proposals and intrusive legislation. Just look at how successful global warming alarmism has been at creating a trillion-dollar business employing hundreds of thousands of Experts™ and activists making a living “saving the planet.”

If you’re an up-and-coming social scientist carving out a career niche, is there a better way to put Artificial Intelligence (AI) to work than to prompt it to paint a terrifying picture of all the calamities it might unleash? Just fire up an active learning systematic review of published records and before you know it you’ve collected more than 700 risks of AI!

Behold the AI Risk Repository, a new safetyism resource developed by the FutureTech Research Project at MIT. That ought to help shift the AI fear mongering business into overdrive.

Imagine the Wright Brothers trying to get aviation off the ground in today’s cultural environment. How long would Thomas Edison have lasted given the thousands of risks unleashed by his hundreds of inventions? And forget about Henry Ford, pioneer of an industry that has killed over three million people and counting in the US alone.

Times sure have changed since the snail darter was our biggest antidevelopment worry.

The risks identified are grouped into seven domains: discrimination and toxicity; privacy and security; misinformation; malicious actors and misuse; human-computer interaction; socioeconomic and environmental harms; and A.I. system safety, failures and limitations. Managing all these risks while discovering new ones every day will surely employ a veritable nanny army!

As always, further study is required. And our political parties need flip a coin to decide which cabal of Experts™ to team up with. Send grant money and campaign donations.