Fixation on futuristic AI catastrophe scenarios is allowing companies to evade accountability for the very real harms their technology is already causing, a professor says.
In an essay published this week, Tobias Osborne, a professor of theoretical physics at Leibniz Universität Hannover and a cofounder of the scientific communication firm Innovailia, said debates about superintelligent machines and a hypothetical “singularity” have become a dangerous distraction.
While policymakers and technologists argue over whether AI could one day threaten humanity’s survival, he wrote, the industry is inflicting “real harm right now. Today. Measurably.”
“The apocalypse isn’t coming,” Osborne wrote. “Instead, the dystopia is already here.”
How doomsday AI narratives can weaken oversight
The AI debate has increasingly been shaped by doomsday scenarios — including warnings that superintelligent systems could wipe out humanity by design or by accident, become uncontrollable, or trigger civilizational collapse — fears amplified by prominent AI researchers, tech leaders, and government reports.
In comments to Business Insider, Osborne said the fixation on such scenarios has a concrete effect on regulation and accountability.
“By framing themselves as guardians against civilizational catastrophe, AI firms are treated like national-security actors rather than product vendors, which dilutes liability and discourages ordinary regulation,” he said.
That shift, Osborne said, allows companies to externalize harm while benefiting from regulatory deference, secrecy, and public subsidies.
He added that some of the most overlooked risks today include psychological harm linked to chatbot use and widespread copyright and data expropriation.
Apocalypse-style narratives persist, he said, because they are easy to market, difficult to falsify, and help shift corporate risk onto the public.
While the European Union has begun rolling out the AI Act — a sweeping regulatory framework that will phase in stricter rules through 2026 — the US is moving in the opposite direction, with federal efforts focused on limiting state-level AI regulation and keeping national standards “minimally burdensome.”
The harm is already here
Osborne’s essay laid out a long list of present-day harms he believes are being sidelined.
It includes the exploitation of low-paid workers who label AI training data, the mass scraping of artists’ and writers’ work without consent, the environmental cost of energy-hungry data centers, and a flood of AI-generated content that makes it harder for people to find trustworthy information online.
He also takes aim at the popular idea that AI is racing toward a runaway intelligence explosion.
In the essay, Osborne described such claims as “a religious eschatology dressed up in scientific language,” saying that such scenarios collapse when confronted with physical limits, such as energy consumption and thermodynamics.
“These aren’t engineering problems waiting for clever solutions,” he wrote. “They’re consequences of physics.”
What should change now
Rather than focusing on speculative future threats, Osborne said policymakers should apply existing product liability and duty-of-care laws to AI systems, forcing companies to take responsibility for the real-world impacts of their tools.
Osborne said that he is not opposed to AI itself.
In his essay, he highlighted the genuine benefits large language models can offer, especially for people with disabilities who struggle with written communication.
But he warned that without accountability, those benefits risk being overshadowed.
“The real problems,” he wrote, “are the very ordinary, very human problems of power, accountability, and who gets to decide how these systems are built and deployed.”
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