Speculative thinking about the capabilities and implications of artificial intelligence (AI) influences computer science research, drives AI industry practices, feeds academic studies of existential hazards, and stirs a global political debate. It primarily concerns predictions about the possibilities, benefits, and risks of reaching artificial general intelligence, artificial superintelligence, and technological singularity. It permeates technophilic philosophies and social movements, fuels the corporate and pundit rhetoric, and remains a potent source of inspiration for the media, popular culture, and arts. However, speculative AI is not just a discursive matter. Steeped in vagueness and brimming with unfounded assertions, manipulative claims, and extreme futuristic scenarios, it often has wide-reaching practical consequences. This paper offers a critical overview of AI speculations. In three central sections, it traces the intertwined sway of science fiction, religiosity, intellectual charlatanism, dubious academic research, suspicious entrepreneurship, and ominous sociopolitical worldviews that make AI speculations troublesome and sometimes harmful. The focus is on the field of existential risk studies and the effective altruism movement, whose ideological flux of techno-utopianism, longtermism, and transhumanism aligns with the power struggles in the AI industry to emblematize speculative AI's conceptual, methodological, ethical, and social issues. The following discussion traverses these issues within a wider context to inform the closing summary of suggestions for a more comprehensive appraisal, practical handling, and further study of the potentially impactful AI imaginaries.

翻译：关于人工智能（AI）能力与影响的推测性思维影响着计算机科学研究，驱动着AI产业实践，滋养着存在性风险的学术研究，并激起了全球政治辩论。它主要涉及对实现人工通用智能、人工超级智能与技术奇点的可能性、益处及风险的预测。这种思维渗透于技术乐观主义哲学与社会运动，助长了企业与专家的修辞，并持续为媒体、流行文化与艺术提供强大的灵感来源。然而，AI推测并非仅仅是话语层面的议题。它充斥着模糊性，饱含无根据的断言、操纵性主张与极端未来情景，往往产生深远的实际后果。本文对AI推测进行了批判性概览。通过三个核心部分，文章追溯了科幻小说、宗教性、学术欺诈、可疑的学术研究、投机性创业以及不祥的社会政治世界观之间相互交织的影响，这些因素共同使得AI推测问题重重，有时甚至具有危害性。本文重点关注存在风险研究领域与有效利他主义运动，其技术乌托邦主义、长期主义与超人类主义的意识形态流变，与AI产业中的权力斗争相结合，集中体现了AI推测在概念、方法论、伦理与社会层面的问题。随后的讨论在更广泛的背景下审视这些问题，从而为结论部分的建议提供依据，这些建议旨在对可能产生重大影响的AI想象进行更全面的评估、实际处理与深入研究。