A computer sci-fi action role-playing “Deus Ex”, published in 2000, has the player pitted against a conspiracy plotted by a cabal of multibillionaires and US and UN officials hellbent on plunging the world into chaos, so that the leader of the conspirators, a socially detached, heartless man called Bob Paige, can elevate himself to a state of a cybernetic god by fusing his mortal coil with an autonomous Artificial Intelligence called Helios and a fully automated factory-of-everything based on nanotechnology.
To gamers, Peter Thiel’s Antichrist speeches and alarmist articles, such as the one in Truthdig informing us that “Recent years have seen the emergence of a second and arguably more powerful ‘Armageddon Lobby’. It resides in epicenters of power like Silicon Valley and embraces a ‘secular’ vision of humanity’s grand future — though it shares many similarities with traditional religion, including a belief in “God” and the promise of immortality through cryonics. The renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this vision ‘The Mindset’…” is more of a rehash of cyberpunk pop-culture tropes than a warning of impending doom.
“As Elon Musk declared in an interview last year: The percentage of intelligence that is biological grows smaller with each passing month. Eventually, the percent of intelligence that is biological will be less than 1%. I just don’t want AI that is brittle. If the AI is somehow brittle — you know, silicon circuit boards don’t do well just out in the elements. So, I think biological intelligence can serve as a backstop, as a buffer of intelligence. But almost all — as a percentage — almost all intelligence will be digital…In Musk’s own words, a superintelligent AI would be akin to a ‘digital god’.”
Yeah, honey-bunny, we played that one 25 years ago, back when CD-ROM was a thing. Why do people engage in gaming as a pastime? It is an interactive adventure set in fantastic worlds where you can safely engage in insanely dangerous, mostly heroic activities. Mistakes are tolerated, you can die a million times, and morality is void; killing sprees are tolerated, sometimes encouraged. But a rational person will know the difference between virtual reality and actual reality – once the gaming session is over, you go back to your mundane life.
This might not be the case with the hyper-rich techbros, with too much time and too much money on their hands. They need more than mind-altering recreational drugs – they need to LARP (live-action role play) a power fantasy.
So why you SHOULD NOT be worried about the prospect of a dystopia ushered by Silicon Valley moguls erasing humanity? Because all signs point to the fact that Musks, Thiels, and Zuckmeisters of this world drank too much of their marketing Kool-Aid while high as kites and are running fast towards an AI market crash that will make the mortgage crisis and dot-com bubble look like misplaced lunch money.
“AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging “foundation models” will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or “discouraged” and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations…
This week, no less than the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy, well-reported story (by Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan) on the catastrophic finances of AI companies.
The WSJ writers compare the AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom’s fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company’s CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history.
That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft “invests” in OpenAI by giving the company free access to its servers. OpenAI reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these “tokens” at Microsoft’s data centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.“
– Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic
We should not fall into the trap of believing that multi-billionaires are infallible in their business endeavours or that they can’t simply drop dead of a kidney failure from doing too much Special K. They are not infallible nor immortal.
The cyberpunk genre is described as “high-tech, low-life”. It is cynical and gritty. Considering how cynics are just loud realists, they are also insulated from the pearl-clutching naivete that tends to be the reaction to the destructive and predatory practices of people like the techbros. They tend not to engage in virtue signalling, of making “OMG, how dare they do this?” slogans that lead to political paralysis of wasting people’s time with endless self-defeating “how did we get here!?” debates.
One of the famous quotes by the protagonist of the 2011 video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution (a reboot of the original), Adam Jensen, is “I Never Asked for This“, when he refers to the fact that he never asked to be outfitted with cybernetic augmentations – it was a result of suffering life-threatening injuries during combat. But he accepted his fate – Amor fati – and moved on to fight another day. The Dark MAGA political phenomenon actually thrives on histrionics and doomsaying in the echo chambers of its opponents.
And do keep in mind that the world has been ending ever since it existed. End-times talk was always all the rage. Nothing new under the sun in that regard.
Serbianism 