Some commentators are worrying existing AI and it's unintended consequences and some commentators are worrying about purely hypothetical superintelligence and it's hypothetical consequences. I find it remarkable there's almost not crossover between the two sorts of criticism. Real AI is probablematic because it's just correlation dressed up as intelligence and it allows organizations to get away simplistic correlation/appearance based reasoning that they otherwise wouldn't be legal/ethically allowed to engage in.
Hypothetical superintelligence worriers recycle Pascal's wage in newer and sillier forms.
Hence the issue of institutional racism in the blackbox AI systems being sold to law enforcement to determine whether to grant parole, for example. There's no review of them, but more importantly the system isn't obligated to explain itself, and no one gets themselves fired because they don't have to explain why they did what the system said to.
You assume someone has malevolent intent: whereas the reality is they just don't care and want a nuisance out of sight and out of mind.
The solution then is accountability to those in power - for negligence. Treat the snake oil salesmen who sell racism in a box like the sociopaths who sold dowsing rod bomb detectors for both have shown a callous disregard for human life in pursuit of profit. This isn't radical - not doing it is radical and messed up.
We are already seeing, for almost 10 years now, a whole bunch of Unintended Consequences of dumb algorithms applied at global population scales.
Just because some people are throwing the phrase superintelligence/singularity etc into the discussion, and terminology being used is inaccurate, doesn't mean we focus on correcting terminology and forget about the issues.
The article is saying too many (serious) people are doing that. And I agree.