The Threat Is From Within, Not Without

Following on from last night's mention of the post-mid-terms market fall in AI - which was always going to happen sooner or later, it being in the nature of red-hot stocks threatening to go ape in the market to implode at some point on their inflationary curve - I have to caveat rather than cavil about the threat, real or imagined, that AI poses to the human race. AI, as it is not in the strictest sense of the word intelligent, has no sense of self or society, is in fact not sentient in any way humanly recognisable, is only a threat by proxy; the directors of that proxy being the human actors who deploy/employ the technology. The AI 'gold rush' of the last very few years has seen money following money with the aim of capitalising once again on a unicorn technology: in short, the mythologising of yet another evanescent tech beast in pursuit of wealth. As always - think tulips, ostrich feathers, pineapples dot-coms and sub-prime mortgages - these Ponzi schemes disguised as technological progress ultimately implode on prolonged contact with reality.

AI can - is - and will be a genuinely transformative technology, let there be no doubt it, but only if what it is truly useful for can be salvaged from the morass of capital-driven dross that it currently supports. We are taking a Ferrari off-roading and the end result is never going to be either useful or particularly pretty: there's only so much AI slop that we can consume before we become severely mentally dyspeptic and choke on the bile it provokes. AI is genuinely useful, if only people would more generally use it so; but the public image of the technology is pretty much coloured by the dross that surfaces above the clear waters beneath: porn, idiotic cat videos, fake music and cheapo advertising, to name but the most obvious, if not the most egregious.

Maybe this cooling down of the market is just the application of the brake pedal we need: stop short of outright paranoia and scaremongering and apply the technology for good rather than ill. This more cautious approach should exclude the more nefarious schemes by corporate capitalists to do away with large swathes of the workforce, too: not only is that unthinkable on a moral, human level, but it would effectively ultimately backfire on those capitalists and their shareholders as the economy would inevitably tank, destroying big business as well as small into the bargain. A capitalist world without consumption of goods denies the producers of goods a livelihood. It's not a one-way street, it is the essential quid pro quo that enables complex societies to transcend the feudal. [image: AI slop, self-referencing...]