AI and the end of the world

This is going to be a different type of article, less fact and more opinion. I mean, all my articles include some component of opinion, I'm a strong defender of the idea that there is no such thing as objectivity, only shared subjectivity... but that's a topic for another day.

An internal conversation at work triggered a reflection on the dangers of AI. Now, I'm going to be fully open about how I feel, maybe too much. I'm going to touch on potentially controversial topics, perhaps even prick some sensitivities; if you feel upset about some or all of the content in this article, I'm sorry, that wasn't my intention. So here we go.

First of all, this may be my own coping mechanism, maybe even an exercise of self-deception, but personally I find the whole AI scare so laughable that I mostly enjoy it with a side of popcorn. When I see Sam Altman or Dario Amodei pretending to be all scared because AI advances while building new data centres and training new models I'm like "maybe stop pouring billions into it if you're so concerned?" 🤣

To me, this is all just a marketing campaign: fear implies power, and power drives up valuation. These guys are just competing to see who has the baddest weapon in preparation for their respective IPOs.

I know I'm probably going to ruffle a few feathers saying this but, sadly, I do think that exaggeration over the dangers that society face is an old (and effective) tool to sway the masses. Ever since I was a kid I kept hearing that "the world only has oil reserves for another 10 years"; decades have passed and we seem to still have plenty. I did some research and it turns out that even in 1914, the US Bureau of Mines said that the US only had oil for another 10 years 😂

The doomsday clock is another fear-inducing tool that I find mostly useless. Its current status is that we are 85 seconds to midnight, the closest to human-made global catastrophe we've ever been. Honestly, if we're so close to armageddon, then who cares about AI or climate change?

And that moves me to what is potentially the most controversial point: global warming. I mean, yes, climate change is real, and it's bad, and we ought to do something about it, but it's been such a long sequence of setting a target, and then blowing past it, and then setting another target, and then blowing past it as well, etc. that the whole thing is beginning to feel like a charade. Al Gore scared the sh** out of everyone in 2009 when he said that the Arctic would be ice-free during the summer by 2016, which hasn't happened. Patricia MacCormack, Toni Vernelli, and Verena Brunschweiger are some activists that advocate that, in order to save the planet, we need to stop having children. If we're not having children, then who are we saving the planet for?

Then there is social media, mass surveillance, political manipulation, disinformation, corruption... No wonder people conclude that we live in the worst possible time for humanity. I know that I'm mixing wildly different topics and potentially opening Pandora's box (which might come back to bite me) but, to me, they all have one thing in common: nudge the behaviour that you want through the induction of fear. Sometimes that behaviour is well-intentioned (I do think that climate change is a real issue that we need to address, even if I disagree with some of the proposed measures), some other times is tribalism and virtual signalling (we are better than them because we worry), but some other times the behaviour is just pure greed (AI companies). And maybe all the fear-induction that I've been exposed to has desensitised me.

What to do about it? Well, I don't know if this is pragmatic or nihilistic, but the way I'm dealing with it is that I try to focus on what I can actually influence. The rest? that's just weather.