It very much is still mostly a future problem, everything you’ve mentioned is mild in comparison to the potential disasters and some of those are kind of nothing burgers. Job lost: Actually, over 175k people have been laid off due to AI since they started tracking it in 2023. That number is likely to be underreported due to private terminations and layoffs that aren’t being reported. In the same time frame 664k people total (including AI layoffs) have been laid off since 2023, so AI lay offs only make up about a third of layoffs companies are doing. AI Psychosis: It makes splashy headlines but only a few dozen people have been inspired by AI to commit suicide or murder. Roughly 50k people commit suicide each year so 30 people is kind of a rounding error and if you dig into the individual cases those people had already determined to die by suicide and tricked the AI into giving them advice about it. I can’t find any good data about non-lethal AI psychosis numbers, but the phenomenon is linked to people who already have a personality disorder. Just like many people having manic episodes or psychotic breaks claim religious or conspiratorial circumstances, so too will they claim AI. Environmental impact: So AI data centers consume slightly less power and water than a traditional data center. That’s largely because traditional data centers use load balancers to keep the hardware running at as close to full speed as possible while AI data centers are more spiky in usage. Also next gen AI hardware is moving to closed loop liquid cooling which never needs fresh water while traditional data centers use evaporative cooling which requires large amounts of fresh water. The only reason this is news is because new data centers are being built, but if there were a different technology, like a novel social media platform, that was expanding their data centers all of the same arguments could be made against that. Also this is the most pointless thing to argue about. Power and water are costs, companies hate costs, there are substantial resources being invested into how to use less power and water, so this problem will actually be solved eventually. Mass surveillance: AI is a flashy and fashionable target for ire, but it’s far from the only technology enabling mass surveillance. Solar panels, advanced lithium batteries, advanced imaging, sdr, and a host of others are all just as important to the effort. If anything blaming AI is sort of like blaming immigrants for the country’s problems when we should be going after the organizations and institutions that are buying and using the tech. Propaganda: This is one of those future problems. A few AI images and videos is nothing compared to what AI will be capable of once it matures. Right now it’s mostly individual actors and some institutional ones using it, but just wait until it can advise the psychology underpinning the propaganda and create individualized agitprop. Destroying Culture: This is another hypothetical future problem. Yeah there is AI “art”, but so far the art world isn’t responding to it. There are no up and coming AI artists and the AI actors they’re pimping have uncanny valley problems. The truth is, at least in the United States, the culture has been deteriorating rapidly for the last ten years, mostly due to the extreme politicization of daily life and the destruction of shared reality, which is a social media problem, not an AI one. AI doesn’t help things because it’s capable of generating infinite content to reinforce reality-blind world views but it didn’t start the problem and if we got rid of it today it wouldn’t get any better. Destroying Education Outcomes: Again this is a problem that AI has exacerbated rather than caused. For the last 20 years, study after study has shown that students who are given individual access to a screen, whether it’s a phone, tablet, or laptop have significantly reduced education outcomes. AI has enabled struggling students to skate by a failure that would have them held back or required to retake a class, but the real source of the problem is screens in the classroom.