Why Fear of AI May Be More Dangerous Than AI Itself, Says Petr Koubský

Petr Koubský’s essay uses a childhood memory of a panicking horse to illustrate how fear can spiral into chaos, drawing a parallel to today’s AI hysteria. He references Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous line that the only thing to fear is fear itself, suggesting that one outlet dread mirrors that historic warning. Koubský notes that Jiří Sobota recently described a growing wave of concern among both elites and the public about AI developments.

Within the AI community, a niche of “doomers” quantifies existential risk with a metric called P(doom), ranging from zero to one. Jacob Coxon, a mathematician who left OpenAI and Anthropic over worries of contributing to an apocalypse, has publicly claimed that the probability of humanity’s end within ten years is alarmingly high. Koubský concludes that the obsession with such predictions may amplify panic more than the technology itself.