Opinion | Why Did Technologists Become Doomers?

They promised us the future, and now they want us terrified of it. “I think short of the transporter, most things you see in science fiction are, in the next decade, the kinds of things you’ll see,” Bill Gates said in 2007. Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel physics laureate known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, said in 2016: “People should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do a lot better than radiologists.”

Last month Mr. Gates warned that AI could cause a billion deaths. Not to be outdone, Mr. Hinton has been speculating for a couple of years about the prospect for total human extinction at the hands of AI. Last month he told the BBC that it’s “not unreasonable” to put the likelihood of such an outcome at 10%.

How did boosterism give way to doomerism? I asked Zack Korman, a self-described former doomer who now believes that AI’s risks can be contained and aren’t so different from those of other technologies when they first emerged.

“I do think the risks are real and we will face serious AI risk challenges,” Mr. Korman, 34, says over Google Meet from Norway, headquarters of his AI cybersecurity startup, Embroidery. “There are threats and there are problems ahead. With that said, I don’t think banning anything is going to help.” He faults the doomers for having “managed to make the debate between safe and unsafe,” and he maintains that “a lot of their proposals are extraordinarily unsafe or also dangerous in other ways.”