The above poem describes evolution’s inevitability and how humanity, fortuitously, has surpassed this. We’re unique in having the opportunity to perpetually reshape the future. Only now we’re outsourcing it to the wrong people.
Speaking of the wrong people – a year and half has passed since I first aired my suspicions of claims that, in the near future, advancements in AI would dramatically improve everyone’s life.
Back then, the trillionaire gobshite and his army of gilet and chino clad acolytes were triumphantly so assured. Within a few years everything would be cheaper. It would cannibalise most rudimentary jobs, with universal basic income allowing us to squander our lives by being Graham Linehan sized horrible cunts on social media.
Best of all it would necessitate an end to the heavily deregulated “trickle up” economic model of the last fifty years, which has steadily eroded living standards for the vast majority of people. Even the Thatcherite pondlife who hand-wring that our economy will collapse without “wealth creators” would have to fall in line. It would be utopia for them too – with virtually no human labour required businesses will cost less to run and our precipitous decline in literacy won’t matter.
Such claims, especially the timelines of implementation, always felt preposterous and delusional. I’m reminded of an incident twenty years ago where some peculiar Godbotherer (I can’t remember what the loopy sui-generis Quaker adjacent denomination was) turned up at my door, replete with leaflets that showed animals unbound and living communally with humans. Drawn were grizzly bears, geese, wolves, tigers, fuck off turtles, badgers, gorillas, lions, eagles, rabbits, elephants, komodo dragons (or some other species of large lizard), swans, corgis, parrots, lemurs, small children and silver haired hippies all in harmony and hugging it out at this latitude. Keeping a straight face was difficult, trust me, and it’s equally hard not to scoff at the latest wave of mendacious AI superintelligence claims doing the rounds.
Because back in the real world there is scant evidence that superintelligent AI is here, or will be soon. I still have my lowly, primitive job, and I’m busier than I have ever been. They’re hiring more people where I work too. The cost of living? Food, petrol, energy, housing – it all keeps going up exponentially (and it aint the Strait of Hormuz being closed bruv), as do the profits for the asset owning class.
The creep of automation is at a snail’s pace and that isn’t uniform across all employment sectors. But we are getting more laughably janky robotics and a preponderance of unconvincing AI deepfakes that’s finally throttled what remained of the porn industry. Ignore all the lack of real-world consequences though, AI can now create Will Smith having conversations with a semi realistic individual while eating pasta normally. Just four years ago he was chewing it through his cheek, while his arms shot out of his ringpiece. Amazing. But yeah, be afraid, superintelligence is a-comin, innit.
The AI hype has become a grift industry. Victoria Derbyshire recently interviewed the “Godfather of AI”. In said interview he delivered his zinger with an indifference that bordered on comatose – that a ten percent chance that AI could wipe out humanity in the next decade “sounds not unreasonable”.
Quite a claim. But why ten percent and not twelve, or eight point six? And why the next ten years, not five? Not seven? Not twenty? You’ll notice the constant caveating through the use of “could” or “may”. Would he have been interviewed at all if he stated there was a less than one percent chance? This inclination for silly hyperbole typifies the media age we exist in, and helps the AI oligarchs to do their bidding – much reporting functions to capture interest and dim understanding rather than inform us.
Conspiracy theories are dismal, but it’s hard to resist the temptation here, given the media’s willing complicity, that this round of AI superintelligence scares are planned and planted. It’s noticeable that the latest “it’s fully autonomous” story where AI agents independently hacked into something and worked in concert together, some even sacrificing themselves to achieve the collective goal, comes as the tech oligarchs are now being met with robust public resistance to the AI industry’s first significant physical intrusion on civilian topography – data centres.
Data centres are unpopular not for their lack of functionality or commercial viability, but their size, consumption of resources, encroachment on nature and noise pollution. The best way to counter any opposition to them? Increasing our perceived reliance on AI technology with infrastructure and bluster of our susceptibility to AI’s advancement.
Pumping up the capability, and in this case necessity, of a product is marketing 101, even these whistleblowers grassing that the speed of AI advancement is going unchecked falls into this category. Sam “just one more war in the Middle East” Harris is a fully paid-up member of this AI could SkyNet us groupthink. An unwelcome video of his popped in my suggested videos YouTube feed, with a suitably clickbait title “Coin toss whether AI takes over”.
In most cases airing concerns over what superintelligent AI might do to us of its own volition is not designed to mobilize people against AI’s grotesque infrastructure requirements and the finance bubble it relies upon, but a positioning of fatuous intellectual vanity to appear prophetic. If correct, nobody will be around for Harris to smugly say I told you so.
Focusing on the speculative ways AI could gain complete autonomy from humans misses the bigger more immediate threat – what those who control and own the technology intend to do with the resources it has yielded them to date.
The main mode of protecting our freedom is liberty for all under the law. The rush of data centres being built has been the most consequential AI related development in the last two years. They are multiplying, sporing like fungi. The data centre rush is a blatant flex by these AI billionaires to capture and hoard resources, making them less accessible for you and me – energy, land and water (and many computer components, including graphics cards – the horrible swine). It isn’t the only means. The nefarious influence the tech and crypto dickheads are having on politics with huge donations is another downstream example of mass conforming to the AI bubble. Then there’s Musk’s tenure owning Twitter, it’s now a petri-dish of disinformation on all number of subjects, AI included.
Flooding the zone need not be limited to daft speculation or disinformation about, say, immigration, with a slew of fake statistics, claims or anecdotes. It can also take the form of our redundant preoccupations with semantics. For instance – whether Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza. Having a debate about what to call industrial scale murder is not only an extravagance but worrying about the wrong thing. It’s as redundant as worrying about hypotheticals of artificial intelligence wiping us out when the owners of AI companies are actively shaping economies to their benefit and our detriment.
There’s always been a class struggle for rights, usually between those of means and those who rely on labour. But I’m starting to wonder whether AI’s future success will be shaped by a battle between those who are bamboozled or cowed into inertia by the threat of AI’s superintelligence, and those who see it and reject it and the associated infrastructure for what it is – an elitist, anti-human, nihilistic abomination.
I genuinely believe opposition to data centres can be that class warfare trigger, but only if we ignore all the bluffs. Why am I so confident? AI’s encroachment has the capacity to offend everyone. The supposition I’ve personally found most offensive – that AI will supersede art made by humans.
Nobody wants books, movies, sculptures, paintings, installations, TV or music that is made by AI. Artistic endeavors and artists are appreciated because their creation is an inherently and exclusively human behaviour. It is not an affectation of humanity, it is humanity. AI cannot write prose fiction, it struggles with consequential thinking from one sentence to the next, not to mention failing to grasp human irrationality. Music? Get tae fuck cunt. I’d rather listen to stuff made by hacks, such as that twat who wears a marshmallow head, Deadmau5 and Fred Again than a jingle made by an OpenSource based algorithm, especially as the ones we have now suggest Sam Harris videos to me occasionally.
Yet despite AI offering a mediocre suite of products thus far some are worried about AI Superintelligence. But that makes sense. So many of us are chronically online in our echo chambers, consuming the propaganda of this being the shape of progress and that makes it harder to discern the real threat in front of us – ourselves, by meekly accepting the ascendency of AI, and the clowns who runs these companies, as inevitable.
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