AI Doomerism Is Getting Out of Control — Let’s Break the Myths Apart One by One

Hello world,I’m an unemployed ex–big tech software engineer with 25 years in the industry. That sentence tends to land somewhere between confession and credibility, depending on how charitable you’re feeling.Lately, I’ve been watching the rise of something… strange.Not AI itself, that part makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the explosion of AI Doomerism. Everywhere you look, there are headlines warning that AI is lying, stealing, scheming, or quietly plotting humanity’s demise.And to be clear, AI does pose real challenges. Serious ones. But what concerns me more is how many people, technical and non-technical alike, are buying into narratives that simply don’t hold up under scrutiny.Let’s talk about that.Myth #1: AI LiesWhen people say AI “lies,” they’re projecting human intent onto something that has none.Lying requires awareness. It requires understanding the difference between truth and falsehood and then deliberately choosing deception.AI doesn’t do that.What it does is generate text probabilistically. Word by word. Based on patterns in its training data. When it doesn’t “know” something, especially in obscure or edge cases, it doesn’t refuse to answer. It guesses.Confidently.That’s what we call a hallucination. Not deception. Not intent. Just math doing its best impression of certainty.Myth #2: AI StealsYou’ve probably seen headlines claiming AI is stealing corporate secrets or personal data.Look closer, and the story usually falls apart into three very human problems:* Data leakage — People accidentally paste sensitive information into prompts* Weak security — Systems rushed into production without proper safeguards* Human exploitation — Attackers using AI tools to scale old tricks in new waysAI isn’t sneaking into databases and exfiltrating secrets.People are building leaky systems… and other people are taking advantage of them.If anything, AI is an amplifier. It makes both productivity and exploitation more efficient. And right now, we’re still figuring out how to handle that.Myth #3: AI Has AgencyThis is my personal favorite.The idea that AI has goals, survival instincts, or some hidden desire to stay alive makes for great sci-fi but terrible analysis.At its core, AI is a set of statistical functions wrapped in code. It doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t fear anything. It doesn’t even know it exists.So why does it sometimes act like it does?Two reasons:Instrumental convergence — If you tell a model to solve a problem, and imply it will be shut off before it finishes, the most “logical” response (statistically speaking) is to generate outputs that keep it running.Training data — AI has absorbed a massive archive of human behavior. Every story of survival, manipulation, strategy, and conflict ever written online. When it generates responses, it draws from those patterns.It’s not scheming.It’s imitating.The Real Problems We’re IgnoringHere’s the part that actually matters.AI is already reshaping the world and not always in good ways.* It’s devaluing certain types of cognitive labor, especially entry-level white-collar roles* It’s supercharging misinformation, eroding trust and distorting reality* It’s impacting mental health, feeding anxiety, confusion, and polarizationThese are hard problems. Complex problems. The kind that require thoughtful, grounded solutions.So why are we so obsessed with hypothetical robot uprisings?Follow the IncentivesFear is powerful.It captures attention. Drives clicks. Boosts valuations.At the lowest level, you have opportunists packaging AI doom as content. At the highest level, you have industry leaders amplifying existential risk narratives that conveniently keep AI at the center of public discourse.And in the process, something subtle but important happens:We stop paying attention to what’s already broken.Because while we argue about imaginary futures, the real issues: messy, technical, and urgent, quietly compound in the background.Final ThoughtAI isn’t about to become sentient.But it is already changing the rules of the game.If we’re serious about navigating that future, we need less fear-driven storytelling and more clear-eyed thinking about what these systems actually are, and what they’re actually doing.Otherwise, we’re not just misunderstanding AI.We’re distracting ourselves at the exact moment we should be paying attention.If you’ve got a taste for uncomfortable truths and a bit of technical realism, you might enjoy sticking around. I’ll be writing more about this strange new world we’re building, whether we fully understand it or not. Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe