Do AI enthusiasts dream of techno-feudalist sheep?
I recently had an interesting discussion with an Imperial alumnus who works at one of the big artificial intelligence (AI) companies. They work in optimisation, which will be important for later, because the question I wanted to ask them was how they feel, knowing that should AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), the point where AI matches or surpasses human cognitive capability occur, their work may be culpable for all the problems that occur?
The most charitable, and naïve, AI futurists may believe in Iain Banks’ postscarcity vision – a vision that the likes of Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos claim to believe in. But that isn’t necessarily what AI supremos believe in. Sure, they may not all be Peter Thiel-esque Dark Enlightenment fanboys, who believe in replacing liberal democracy with a tech-bro monarchic Reich, but even Sam Altman believes that AI will “break” the relatively successful model of the neoliberal capitalism that is our current economic model.
Any AI-based industrial revolution will cause years of upheaval and strife, no matter how swift the implementation. Across the Anglosphere at least, there isn’t a strong social welfare net, or public infrastructure, for that matter. What happens when a broken system on edge has to deal with a whole mass of people heaped on?
That’s not to mention the effects of AI on the psyche. The tech bros of the 2010s already sold off our human connection through social media and dating apps. Now there is an ever-growing reliance by people ton LLMs as a single point of call. Earlier this year, ChatGPT was sued after allegedly encouraging a 16-year-old to commit suicide in the state of California.
In the ever-prescient words of David Foster Wallace,“the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.”
Aren’t we already seeing that, plastered over our social media feeds, lolcows born from alienation?
The AI alumnus was aware of all of this, yet were happy to continue working because, for them, their work was mitigating all the environmental damage AI does – let alone causing prices for consumers to soar by up to 267% as they offload their costs onto the public.
I didn’t find their answers satisfactory. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to ask them that if things went horribly wrong, that in some just miracle, the technofeudalist uprising went the way of Nuremberg, would they still just be happy to say that? Would they be happy to look at the starving masses and say they were just doing an interesting job?
