I'll admit it. In the first couple days after using ChatGPT, the advanced chatbot from OpenAI, I felt the same way I did when I first downloaded the Mosaic Web Browser in the early '90s. The earth seemed like it had shifted below my feet. I write about the history of technology, so you'd think I'd have the intellectual armor to keep such dramatic feelings in check. But I didn't. I felt genuinely awed.
In the subsequent months, I've had chances to recalibrate those feelings in light of other people's reactions. Some, with a utopian bent, speak of ChatGPT fueling an economic boom that increases intellectual productivity multifold. Others, who have been described as "doomers," trot out visions of robot apocalypse. Doom talk, in one of its more curious, and perhaps corrosive forms, can generate "wishful worries," as the historian David Brock has suggested. People who engage in wishful worrying would rather fantasize about some future injustice that AI might cause rather than focus on its present-day harms. Some have even created "The AI Hype Wall of Shame" to critique pundits who dramatize and mystify A.I. overmuch.
