Insidious Imaginaries: A Critical Overview of AI Speculations

Abstract: Speculative thinking about the capabilities and implications of AI influences computer science research, drives AI industry practices, feeds academic studies of existential hazards, and stirs a global political debate. It primarily concerns predictions about the possibilities, benefits, and risks of reaching artificial general intelligence, artificial superintelligence, and technological singularity. It permeates technophilic philosophies and social movements, fuels the corporate and pundit rhetoric, and remains a potent source of inspiration for the media, popular culture, and arts. However, speculative AI is not just a discursive matter. Steeped in vagueness and brimming with unfounded assertions, manipulative claims, and extreme futuristic scenarios, it often has wide-reaching practical consequences. This paper offers a critical overview of AI speculations. In three central sections, it traces the intertwined sway of science fiction, religiosity, intellectual charlatanism, dubious academic research, suspicious entrepreneurship, and ominous sociopolitical worldviews that make AI speculations troublesome and sometimes harmful. The focus is on the field of existential risk studies and the effective altruism movement, whose ideological flux of techno-utopianism, longtermism, and transhumanism aligns with the power struggles in the AI industry to emblematize speculative AI's conceptual, methodological, ethical, and social issues. The following discussion traverses these issues within a wider context to inform the closing summary of suggestions for a more comprehensive appraisal, practical handling, and further study of the potentially impactful AI imaginaries.