The Machine We Fear Is the One We Are Becoming: AI Panic and the Return of Collective Hysteria

It increasingly feels like we are witnessing a kind of collective hysteria around AI — less a sober technological transition than a crisis of identity in which the machine is mystified as the ultimate cheater or as something capable of “kidnapping” human minds. Thinkers as different as Gustave Le Bon (on crowd psychology), Sigmund Freud (on collective projections and anxieties), and René Girard (on moral contagion and scapegoating) all described moments in which social reactions amplify themselves beyond careful analysis. I think we can recognize this kind of moment when certain patterns converge. Unexamined premises begin to circulate as unquestionable certainties, and those certainties quickly become the basis for moralizing claims and public shaming. At the same time, denial often surpasses the willingness to understand scientifically what the technology is actually doing to cognition, and non-technical words like “theft” and “degrading” substitute for the lack of awareness. Another sign is the romantic treatment of existing cultural and social paradigms — as if they were sacred defaults that must simply be preserved — instead of examining them in terms of their costs, trade-offs, and historical contingencies.

But I would like to end this post with a small turn — of course open to disagreement about how “interesting” the turn actually is. Ironically, the very feature of the technology that many critics point to as most problematic — opacity, the lack of transparent awareness and uniformity-blind-reproduction of content — is precisely the feature that is present in the hysteria. When words like “theft” or “degrading” substitute for technical analysis, and when cultural paradigms are treated as unquestionable blind-moral defaults, the reaction itself begins to mirror what it fears. People are falling prey to a kind of machine-like collective reaction that is ironically the closest thing to the “machine” they fear in this whole debate. And they are also far more dangerous than the technology itself, because this reaction reproduces and spreads through bullying, public shaming, and mob-like dynamics.

I suspect this will only begin to change when more people start looking at their own children, cousins, nephews, students — the younger generation already using these tools — and realize that they are not losing their ambitions, their human goals, or their desire to build things and project themselves into the world. Unfortunately, human beings are deeply irrational creatures. Often the only thing that breaks a collective hysteria is familiarity. When people see the technology being used by those they love, and notice that those people remain fully human in their aspirations, they finally begin to step outside the panic.

My work on Semantic Opacity:

https://lnkd.in/dtZ6Yqdb