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Ai ANGST: the constellation of social, ethical, psychological, economic, and existential anxieties provoked by artificial intelligence, including loss of agency, opacity, misalignment, inequity, surveillance, misinformation, and the erosion of meaning, authorship, and trust.
AI Angst captures not a rejection of technology but a profound uncertainty about its direction. As algorithms learn faster and spread wider, the questions they provoke, about identity, agency, and fairness, only deepen.
Artificial intelligence is often introduced in headlines with a flourish, “revolutionary,” “disruptive,” “world-changing.”
Yet in quieter moments, another feeling emerges: anxiety.
Not panic, exactly, but a persistent unease that hovers at the edges of conversation.
AI Angst is not simply about machines replacing workers or algorithms misfiring.
It is about how it feels to live in a world where human identity, our sense of originality, control, even reality, is suddenly up for debate.
There is nothing new about cultural dread in the face of innovation.
The Luddites smashed textile machines.
Early cinema was accused of corrupting the imagination.
Yet the anxieties attached to AI feel different in kind.
Here, the fear is not of one profession or medium but of the very categories by which we define ourselves.
Are we thinkers, creators, decision-makers, or have we been reduced to spectators in a game already simulated?
While some warn of mass job losses and imagine armies of robots taking control, others predict another "AI winter" and call for restraint and perspective.
Between these poles lies a more balanced truth: artificial intelligence is, above all, a technology, one that is here to stay, and poised to alter daily life in ways both visible and invisible.
Keeping a cool head requires clarity. It is especially important to distinguish between the broad idea of “artificial intelligence” and related terms: machine learning, deep learning, and, most prominently today, large language models (LLMs).
Without such distinctions, public debate risks being guided more by metaphor than by fact.
As with every major innovation in human history, the task is twofold: to learn and to understand, and at the same time to keep perspective.
If the 20th century was haunted by the fear of nuclear annihilation, the 21st may be defined by a subtler dread, not of a single catastrophic event but of a slow, pervasive erosion of certainty.
Angst is less about whether machines can think than whether, in trusting them, we lose sight of what it means to think for ourselves.
In that sense, it is not just a story about technology, but about culture: how human beings absorb the shock of progress, how we wrestle with its shadows, and how we redefine meaning in an age when even a poem, a portrait, or a decision may no longer feel entirely our own.
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