Last week the head of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division told the Financial Times that within the next 18 months his company intends to plunge hundreds of millions of people into poverty, collapse housing markets, implode the banking and insurance industries, crater fertility rates, accelerate the spread of authoritarianism, and radically scale up the speed and scale of environmental ruin.
He didn’t use those words, of course. What he said was that “white-collar work, where you’re sitting at a computer … most of those tasks will be fully automated” in the next year and a bit. Still, given that he was calmly talking about producing a technology that will make hundreds of millions of office workers unemployed, along with hundreds of millions of blue-collar workers, who rely on them to buy their products or services, it was the same thing.
You’d have thought that a threat like this might have caused something of a stir, but Mustafa Suleyman’s comments were met with polite nods from the FT interviewer and that was that.
One reason might be that not everyone believes him: there is a growing chorus of pundits who believe AI is an enormous Ponzi scheme, with fast-talking hustlers pulling in jaw-dropping amounts of investment by whispering sweet, oligarchical nothings to fools and their money.
After all, if you’re worried about vigilante attacks by the likes of Luigi Mangione now, just wait until you’ve created an underclass of over a billion people with nothing to lose, some of whom, their cognitive faculties impaired by your products, want nothing more than to livestream your murder for likes.
Personally, I’m leaning in that direction myself, and not only because I’m a writer who needs it to be true so that he can continue to eat: I also have some faith in humans’ ability to express themselves through extreme violence.
I’m sure that most tech bosses feel immortal right now but even the most Ketamined-up among them must understand that if they do what they say they want to do, everyone above the third floor in every tech company in the world is going to be the target of the largest slaughter of well-dressed dickheads since 1789.
After all, if you’re worried about vigilante attacks by the likes of Luigi Mangione now, just wait until you’ve created an underclass of over a billion people with nothing to lose, some of whom, their cognitive faculties impaired by your products, want nothing more than to livestream your murder for likes.
No. The people foisting AI on us don’t understand humanity’s subtler gifts, but I do think they know enough to flinch away from the prospect of pain, which is why I doubt they intend to go through with the obliteration of white-collar work, even if they could. Far better to get capital all sweaty with fantasies of a compliant robot workforce, take the money and then, as Elon Musk has taught them, deflate and pivot, announcing that something way better is on its way, probably in between 12 and 18 months, and all it takes to be an early investor is another trillion dollars …
Whether the AI jobs apocalypse happens, though, the last few months have revealed just how flimsy some of our purported beliefs really are, not least the notions of democracy and freedom: as Suleyman and his ilk publicly state their intention to plunge us into the most brutal economic shift in history, lurching from broken capitalism to full-blown feudalism in just a few years, our so-called world leaders have yet to ask our opinion.
Mostly, though, it is our compliance in advance that astonishes me; this forelock-tugging shuffle towards the proposed meat grinder, muttering talking points generated by tech firms’ PR agencies about how you can’t stop progress and really it’s just a tool, like the car or the camera …
No wonder the hustlers think humanity is an easy mark.
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