It's all getting a bit weird, isn't it? OpenAI's Sam Altman arguing that we should stop worrying about AI's environmental impact because the concern about water is "fake", and anyway humans take 20 years and loads of food to become "trained", so (presumably) we should instead turn the criticism on ourselves and our own selfish desire not to be starved of resources. The most discussed supposed breakthrough in AI of recent weeks was the appearance of 'OpenClaw' an AI agent that can run – and in some cases destroy – your life on your behalf. We're still waiting for OpenAI to add sexual and erotic content.
All of this was supposed to change the world. If it was to destroy it instead, then it would do so in grand and radical ways; even an out-of-control AI system that wiped us all out would at least do something. Instead, we seem stuck in a kind of very loud stasis: lots of shouting about how everything is going to change, all while nothing much in particular changes.
The AI monarchs are starting to notice. Jensen Huang has said that the loss of the "battle of narratives" is "extremely hurtful, frankly". Altman has said that the "absorption" of AI has been disappointing: "it does feel sort of surprisingly slow", he noted at the recent AI conference in India.
Their response, as in Altman's case, is to get angry and weird. Blame selfish humans and their need to eat for what's going wrong. Or to suggest that people don't really get it – that if only they weren't "scared" by the "doomer narrative, end-of-the-world narrative, science fiction narrative", as Huang said, they'd see that the future was coming and that they should be excited.
The idea that the public might have recognised AI for what it really is and still don't want it doesn't seem to occur very much. It has never really been part of the conversation: the AI revolution was proposed to us as something that was coming whether we like it or not. The fact that we don't seem to like it very much was secondary. But AI is a product: someone does eventually have to buy it.
For now, the lack of engagement doesn't much matter. Money is flooding into AI companies because investors are afraid that they might miss out. And in that sense they are probably right: it's true that AI will change a lot of things in a lot of ways, and so it might be rational to invest in a lot just in case. (Booms are rarely entirely fictional: the dot-com bust didn't mean that online shopping wasn't the future.) Besides, lots of the big numbers we hear aren't quite correct under scrutiny, because they often involve a lot of very rich tech companies investing in each other, so the money is being pumped around in ways that make it seem more substantial than it is.
One day, however, it will dry up. Investors will be hurt, and companies will be closed. But the damage might be more wide and more lasting than that. Recent years have seen a chorus of tech companies promote ideas of the future that failed to turn up: the metaverse, Web 3, NFTs, 3D printing, voice assistants, the Hyperloop, cryptocurrency.
Each one of these leaves behind a mass of money that could have been better used elsewhere. But it also frays an important contract between the tech companies and the public: between the buyers and the sellers. It can lead to an increasing sense that there is an entire very rich world that has nothing to do with you – that actually holds your own preferences in contempt, because they are the result of fear and bad faith. It mirrors a kind of disillusionment and dissatisfaction that appears everywhere from politics to the media.
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