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In one of my most beloved science-fiction novels of all time, the Dune series, Frank Herbert casts a bewildering image of the future. In a genre previously filled with machines and cyborgs, the author creates a revolutionary world with neither of those two things. The plot goes something like this: Many millenniums ago, there was a cosmic insurrection referred to as the "Butlerian Jihad" that led to artificial intelligence (AI) machines and cyborgs being outlawed in this new universe. One theory posits that the Butlerian Jihad was named after a woman named Jehanne Butler, whose pregnancy had been prematurely terminated without her knowledge or approval because an AI machine judged it to be unfit and unworthy of a full-fledged human life. What followed was a massive rebellion fueled by public outrage over the incident, the prohibition of "thinking" robots, and a much more draconian moral code that stated humans would no longer build machines "in likeness of a human mind."1
Many years after I first read this novel, the story still reverberates in my thoughts whenever I hear people talking about artificial intelligence. Perhaps it has something to do with the novel's radical imagery regarding this new phase in human civilization, or perhaps its socio-political implications hit close to home. The expression "moral panic" is most often employed (or misappropriated) sarcastically to imply there is an invalid, unreasonable stampede by those who cede their better judgment to sheer mob mentality. When public opinion at large comes to terms with this so-called "panic"-for example, on gun control-you will rarely see the media refer to them as the overreacting mob. In fact, panic is most often reserved as a response to "others" that are not part of "us." In some ways, it is similar to how we view censorship, in that people frequently weaponize the concept with respect to those to whom they are not partial. But should we choose to refer to this phenomenon as "moral panic" or some virtuous "people's revolt" or any other phraseological equivalent to that effect? I had a chance to contemplate this idea through the lens of two incidents: one in the United Kingdom and the other in the People's Republic of China, both of which incited much controversy online at...