The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

The problem is that news coverage systematically skews our perceptions about these trends. As any novelist or screenwriter can tell you, capturing an audience’s interest usually requires an element of escalating danger or conflict.[20] From ancient mythology to Star Wars, this is the pattern that grabs our brains. As a result—sometimes deliberately and sometimes quite organically—the news tries to emulate this paradigm. Social media algorithms, which are optimized to maximize emotional response to drive user engagement and thus ad revenue, exacerbate this even further.[21] This creates a selection bias toward stories about looming crises while relegating the kinds of headlines cited at the beginning of this chapter to the bottom of our news feeds. Our attraction to bad news is in fact an evolutionary adaptation. Historically it’s been more important for our survival to pay attention to potential challenges. That rustling in the leaves might have been a predator, so it made sense to focus on that threat instead of the fact that your crops may have improved a tenth of a percent since the previous year.