EdgeRunner: Guntram Shatterhand: You know you're trying to make a big deal out of nothing where your technofear about what nonexistent AI could do is referencing an old horror film that didn't even have a solid premise.   Seriously, the movie is about some guy literally jamming some microchips into a comatose woman's head and somehow turning her into some superpowered death cyborg for no reason.

I think these AI folks need some medication, nobody should be this afraid of something that doesn't exist.

AI absolutely exists. Just not in the lazy and uncreative "Oh no, it turned bad and now it's a monster!" fashion that Hollywood always leans into. OG Star Trek (channeling Isaac Asimov's Robot stories) called out the possible dangers in a much smarter way, dramatizing how a machine will only do what it's instructed to do, and can cause a lot of problems because it doesn't actually think about the results of its actions. Its only purpose is to do the actions themselves, not consider the results.

So no, we're not going to get M3GAN. But we'll eventually have HAL. And AI will wind up killing a few people here and there not because it suddenly decided to turn malicious, but because a piece of hardware broke down or someone put a decimal point in the wrong place. In fact, it already has. Someone died during a Tesla autodriving test due to the AI mistaking a truck trailer for clear sky. AI assisted surgeries have resulted in deaths, often for making procedures take too long and putting too much strain on the patients. People have been killed on assembly lines when sensor equipment mistook them for parts that needed to be grabbed and fit into assemblies. (Yes, that's a real thing, not just a Five Nights At Freddy's idea.) But the more we automate things, the more we get used to the chance of fatalities and write them off as an infrequent and acceptable risk.

Short recap? AI is already here, it will become more omnipresent every year, and one day it might kill you but we'll shrug it off as just one of those things. It probably won't crush your head with a basketball, but might crush your head with heavy machinery by mistake. Try not to take it personally.