‘Don’t be evil’ may be dead, but ‘don’t be Frankenstein’ is alive

Some still remember when Google defined itself by a simple motto: “Don’t be evil.” When Google reorganized under Alphabet in 2015, the new parent company adopted the somehow less confidence-inspiring, “Do the right thing.” Another phrase with a lower bar also made the rounds — “to organize the world’s information” — but rest assured, that was never the motto. It was simply … uh … the mission statement.

Anyway …

The AI doomers’ strange brand of apocalypticism is: Let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it.

It took until this week for some of the most powerful voices in tech policy to circle back explicitly to a prime directive: Avoid hellacious acts. For that, thank the AI doomers, whose strange brand of apocalypticism