Dell founder says calm down about SHODAN-style sentient AI because 'you remember the ozone layer and all' and we fixed that

pcgamer.com:

We live in an era of AI hype and everyone has a take. But while most of us are a bit concerned about what the rise of ultra-predictive-text means for human creativity and criticism, a few Silicon Valley types are worrying themselves about Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which is basically a serious-sounding term for self-teaching AI with sentience and, potentially, an unslakeable lust for human blood. Or something of the sort.

But Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell says not to worry. In a recent virtual fireside chat with wealth management firm Bernstein (spotted by The Register), Dell said that he worried about the advent of AGI «a little bit, but not too much.» Why? Because «For as long as there’s been technology, humans have worried about bad things that could happen with it and we’ve told ourselves stories… about horrible things that could happen.»

That worrying, continues Dell, lets humanity «create counter actions» to prevent those apocalyptic scenarios from playing out before they happen. «You remember the ozone layer and all,» said Dell to Bernstein's Tony Sacconaghi, «there are all sorts of things that were going to happen. They didn't happen because humans took countermeasures.»

Dell (the man) went on to say that Dell's (the company) AI business was booming. «Customer demand nearly doubled quarter-on-quarter for us and the AI optimized backlog roughly doubled to about $1.6 billion at the end of our third quarter,» beamed Dell (the man again), which—and I write this as someone for whom 'literally GLaDOS' ranks low on the list of fear priorities—does seem like the kind of thing a tech CEO would say in the prologue to a film about AI killing everyone.

Regardless, Dell reckons you shouldn't be worried about