The World According to AI’s Loudest Doomers: Review

The prophets of Silicon Valley have changed their tune. At least some of them.

Not long ago, tech visionaries saw a rosy future full of leisure and abundance. Ray Kurzweil, the computer scientist hired by Google co-founder Larry Page to further the company’s machine-learning technology, once foretold liberation from the prison of mortal human bodies as consciousness ascended to the cloud. Today Silicon Valley’s most influential futurists aren’t peddling so much optimism — after all, who’d believe them?

Even at this incipient stage, artificial intelligence technologies are threatening career prospects in white-collar professions and generating mass anxiety among workers expected ...