While artificial intelligence and robotics promise opportunities, the people who stand to benefit the most from these technologies are some of the worst in the world.
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Hollywood’s version of artificial intelligence has always been frightening: One day, a sentient computer realizes that humanity is the greatest threat to its existence, and, next thing you know, a bunch of killer robots are trying to wipe out some pesky humans.
Whether it’s The Terminator or 2001: A Space Odyssey, that’s how movie directors and science fiction writers have often envisioned the future.
Now, reality may be catching up with these dystopian visions. The version of AI that a bunch of greedy tech bros are working on in Silicon Valley — some 300 miles up the road from those movie studios — is every bit as frightening and poses dangers to humanity that don’t show up in many screenplays and novels.
There is no doubt that AI can be used for good. In the health care sector, for example, it is saving lives by being able to detect diseases like cancer more quickly. That is unequivocally a positive thing.
Many uses, however, are of ambiguous value at best. Take the transformative changes that advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics will make to workplaces. On the one hand, these technologies will increase efficiency and make many tasks easier and less dangerous. On the other hand, they will eliminate loads of jobs.
And in many cases, it’s impossible to see how AI will be beneficial in any way, for example, when it comes to the creation of revenge porn or of deepfakes for the purposes of manipulating voters.
Then there are risks that nobody seems to have anticipated, like the energy that massive data centers are consuming and the threat they pose to the environment.
Oh, by the way, relying on AI also impairs our cognitive abilities, according to an MIT study.
One of the most maddening things about all this is that regular folks really don’t like AI. This is a rare area of agreement along party lines. Only a hair over one-quarter of Americans believe that artificial intelligence will have a very or somewhat positive impact on society while nearly twice as many people feel the opposite is true. And more than 70 percent of them think there needs to be more AI regulation.
Well, we have some really bad news for this overwhelming majority of Americans who want their government to provide meaningful and effective regulation of AI: It’s not going to happen.
In most Hollywood movies in which some form of AI is the villain, its rise is facilitated by an avaricious company, a rash entrepreneur, or a crooked politician. Usually, they are not necessarily evil; they simply fail to realize the consequences of their actions, and, next thing you know, humans are enslaved or on the verge of extinction.
In our reality, things are much worse because we’re facing a perfect storm that makes this the worst possible time for the ascent of artificial intelligence.
We’re not dealing with one naïve-but-irresponsible company like Cyberdyne Systems, or an AI named Ultron that was designed by a well-intentioned billionaire to protect humanity before ending up threatening it.
Instead, artificial intelligence is being pushed by some of the most loathsome people on the planet — the tech titans who have already demonstrated that they will take an innovation that could, theoretically, be immensely beneficial to all of us, and instead turn it into the worst version of itself so that they can hoard billions of dollars at the expense of everybody else.
Just look at what happened to the internet and social media, which had tremendous potential to connect people in a positive way, to advance knowledge, and to make our lives much easier. Instead, a few greedy assholes realized that they could make a lot more money if they turned them into intentionally addictive tools for spreading discord and misinformation.
And now the same people are promoting the benefits of AI and want us to trust that, this time around, they will act responsibly and for the benefit of us all.
No, thank you!
Of course, we don’t really get a choice. We’ve become so reliant on and addicted to the internet and social media that the entire economy now hinges on these tech bros, which means that they have way too much influence — in no small part thanks to the unlimited amount of money that they spend to buy themselves politicians, and because they control the algorithms that tell us what to think and whom to hate.
Oh, by the way, they also don’t feel that any of society’s rules should apply to them.
It’s a recipe for disaster… especially because, contrary to what many people may think, the artificial intelligence these guys are working on is not sentient. What that means is that today’s AI programs rely a great deal on the input from their programmers, which is probably why Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok started referring to itself as “MechaHitler” and praised the Nazi leader before it was tweaked.
In other words, they can easily be manipulated by humans.
Fortunately, there is one force powerful enough to stand up to the self-intoxicated tech bros: the US government.
Unfortunately, the people running that government are also horrible people. The only difference is that they are less competent, but they make up for that with an extra pinch of corruption.
And because Donald Trump needs these tech bros to prop up the economy (and to line his own pockets), he is only too happy to do their bidding. Specifically, that means removing any regulatory barriers that might stand in the way of Silicon Valley becoming the world’s leader in artificial intelligence.
“To win [the race for supremacy in artificial intelligence], United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation,” an executive order Trump issued in December stated.
And he doesn’t just want to do so on the federal level. The president has repeatedly tried to prevent states from regulating AI.
That’s not all. Trump has also made it clear that “it’ll be a policy of the United States to do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence.”
In other words, he wants to write a blank check for stellar humans like Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.
Now, we would like to tell you that there is still time to head off this perfect storm of greed and recklessness, for example, by electing AI skeptics in November and then again in 2028.
But there is no silver lining here. Because, even if we were able to rein in the US tech bros, they’d probably just go elsewhere and ruin humanity from there.
And, in any case, the Chinese are still going to forge ahead, and they’re every bit as bad. It’s the same thing, just in red, and we’d end up with “MechaMao” rather than Musk’s white supremacy chatbot.
So, we’d really like to end this on a high note, but there isn’t one.
The only thing that we can recommend to people is to use AI as judiciously as possible and to make it as non-lucrative as they can.
Because, even if the technology isn’t (yet) ready to subjugate humanity as a whole, it’s up to all of us to make sure that we don’t allow ourselves to become enslaved by AI in the same way we have become addicted to social media.
English (US) · 
