The fear of AI: A simple story of complexity

This brief essay reflects on the fears that humans express toward the latest generation of AI, arguing that these fears plausibly originate from the fact that current AI possesses many characteristics that assimilate it to complex systems, as defined in modern systems theory. The features of unpredictability, emergent behavior, and self-organization, that typically characterize complex systems, do not reassure humans who usually expect predictability and determinism from the systems they are entrusted with. The essay suggests that part of the complex nature of modern AI lies in the very algorithm used for learning from data, which, in the process of training these systems, highlights and amplifies the aforementioned characteristics. The essay concludes by offering a final reflection on the fear that stems from the uncertainty inherent in science as a whole, not just from the latest generation of AI.