The AI Conundrum

 I am admittedly not a big AI fan.  After having spent my whole career in technology and generally embracing each new trend and capability, I am now evolving into a bit of a luddite.

Today I happened upon articles in the NYT, Nature and several other news sources that framed the myriad controversies that swirl around the AI juggernaut.  These types of articles are becoming ever more common.  Here are some of their fears:

 

• Environmental and resource concerns over the inexhaustible demands for server farms and electrical power
• The negative impact on developing countries where US tech giants have built vast server farms that compete with local needs for water and power
• The fraught decision-making in many countries as they weigh falling behind in the AI future versus meeting the basic needs of their constituencies.
• The uncertainties associated with generative AI accuracy, reliability and debugging.
• The unauthorized and uncompensated use of content 
• The effect generative AI will have on human creativity and skills
• The potential rapid loss of jobs (new jobs may eventually be created as in past technology leaps, but the initial impact might be so sudden as to cause major trauma)
• The likely rapid introduction of AI into military goals, creating a costly new arms race in addition to the costly AI race
• The existential dangers that a future AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may pose

 

It is probably naïve to believe that anything could put the brakes on the AI juggernaut.  Competition and multi-faceted FOMO, as well as basic human curiosity will drive it forward no matter what scruples may arise.  What politician or tech executive can argue caution in the face of the AI gold rush?  

 

The AI true believers probably fall into two potentially overlapping categories of allegiance.  The first is the oldest motivation in human endeavor – greed.  The money and valuations that AI companies are already achieving beggar belief (though belief has been similarly beggared in past tech hype cycles as well).  Even with a likely dot-comish bubble deflation there will be unreal amounts of money to be made.

 

The second allegiance is to the billionaire-backed, messianic, ‘this will save the world’ club.  Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Andreesen, Thiel and their brethren have jettisoned all concerns about climate change, plastic pollution, wealth and income inequality, international conflict and any other mundane earthly problems and seem to believe that AI will be the solution to all problems and will save the planet (how it will do this is still to be determined).

 

The accumulation of wealth in the hands of the increasingly narcissistic and wacked-out  billionaire club has made breakneck AI development an inevitability.  And under the current despotic Trump regime there will be nothing but encouragement as long as the Tech world licks the boots of the glorious leader.   The en masse shift of the tech bros away from Biden and the Democrats to Trump and the MAGA world can be directly traced to their outrage at the democrats’ inclinations to place some controls on AI development and potentially break up the clearly monopolistic tech giants.  And, of course, the democrats’ caution over their side hustle of cryptocurrency contributed to the breakup.

 

So, the AI conundrum is not whether it will be pursued as aggressively as possible because that is a foregone conclusion, but rather what ordinary people should do about it.  As for me, I will mostly fight it because I do not wish to be seduced into ever more soul-sucking forms of technical bondage.  Human beings of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your digital chains!