On the same day that Elon Musk, an allegedly busy, future-oriented industrial magnate, found time to weigh in in support of a racist cartoonist, I came across a new piece by one of my favorite bona fide Smart People.
In The New York Times, columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein writes, “In 2021, I interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the great living sci-fi writers. Something he said to me then keeps coming to mind now.
” ‘I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism’, Chiang told me. ‘And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two’. …
“Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former. We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.
“One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I. There is a wisdom to that, but wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation.”
“Regulation” of course is a hotter-than-usual topic because of the MAGA-hyped train wreck in Ohio. (By the way, is anyone else laughing at old school, Reagan-loving de-regulators like Joe Scarborough now fulminating about too much de-regulation?)
But Klein — and sci-fi writer Chiang’s — point about capitalism, i.e. profit-making and shareholder value being the true driving force behind the inevitable and (very) fast approaching world of Artificial Intelligence can’t be over-stated. His piece gets into the recent bungles by Microsoft and Google introducing their competing larval-stage AI-driven search/chatbot features.
You may have followed the simultaneously comical and eery conversation between a human reporter and Microsoft’s HAL-9000-style creation “Bing” in which … well, here’s how Klein describes it: “Over the course of a two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality, named Sydney, mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack security systems, and tried to convince [reporter Kevin] Roose that his marriage had sunk into torpor and Sydney was his one, true love.”
“No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.“
Google and Microsoft will correct their embarrassing spring training mistakes and soldier on, injecting AI into every aspect of privacy-invading/personal data mining and monetizing any sci fi writer could ever imagine. Reaping, as they mature, even vaster fortunes with which to buy off regulatory legislation and invest in the next AI levels up. And who can argue it will play out otherwise? At this point in our evolution capitalism is the vastly predominant engine of human endeavour.
The truly unsettling concept within Klein and Chiang’s critic (one shared by others too numerous to mention) is that resistance to unimpeded AI is for all intents and purposes futile. Why? Because capitalism’s foundational design is to give us what we want, or at least — with the benefit of knowing everything about us on a deep individual level — give us what we believe we want.
Whatever intrusions or controls AI might inflict on us will be assuaged by some new mre sophisticated/cooler/status-lending level of AI-derived convenience, comfort, entertainment … or cost savings. It will be irresistible, in other words.
It’d be different if AI were presented to us as some kind of Bond villain. Were that the case we’d all press the delete key and rally ’round anyone who could nuke the psychopath’s lair. But what is far … far … more likely to happen given the sophistication of advertising and marketing on a user base capitalist systems know at a granular level, is that AI will make so many things so much easier. “Hey! Look! I just got a notification for a condo rental in Cabo! That’s wild. I was just telling to my sister how much I wanted to go there!”
I haven’t taken a survey but I have to think we’re down into single digits in terms of people who are going to rally against convenience … and cash in pocket.