Assessing Existential Risks: AI vs. Climate Change

We use the wrong metaphor for thinking about AI, Shannon Vallor argues, and bad thinking leads to bad results. We need to stop thinking about AI as being an agent or having a mind, and stop thinking of the human mind/brain as a kind of software/hardware configuration. All of this is misguided. Instead, we should think of AI as a mirror, reflecting our images in a sometimes helpful, sometimes distorted way. Our shifting to this new metaphor, she says, will lead us to better, and ethically better, AI.