Essays

A chatbot called a Tolan will let you turn your real life into a dystopian sci-fi nightmare.

Digital technologies have already divided all of us, without exception and in ways that we have been told were inevitable and are now irrevocable.

Most of what we do will be outsourced to AIs, whether or not we want it to happen, while we’ll chose to let AI augment and manage the rest of it for us. And we have no public discourse on what kind of world that will be, let alone if we’ll want to live in it.

So, is it reasonable to expect that accounting firms staffed with, well, accountants and not hoity-toity AI developers, and operating with potentially mixed or biased incentives, will meaningfully ensure that AI tools are safe? Of course not. But why shouldn’t they cash in on the AI craze before the real accounting occurs?

A collection of scientists and corporate types have decided that inventing AI that can run the world in a decade or so is the most important thing humanity could ever choose to do. Did you get to vote on that?

The Question of “why” a super-intelligent AI might want to destroy humanity is immaterial when we’re talking about an intelligence that we could never understand.

A recent survey of AI use in the workplace found that “AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation.” Phew. I was worried that the whole point of putting AI to work was to put human beings out of it.

School is boring? The answer can’t be attaching kids to AIs and demoting teachers to “primarily provide motivational and emotion support.” 

We’re being conditioned to accept AIs as the de facto interface, intermediator, and manager of our experience of the world. Throwing in some marketing spin is no big deal for a deal that’s already been spun.

Amidst all the speculation about AI solving problems great and small (while potentially destroying all of humanity in the process), we’ve lost sight of what it’s already doing to our work and lives: It’s remaking us into peasants.