We Don't Need Imitative AI for Utopia. We Need Politics

One of the pet peeves I have about the technology industry at large is its tendency to pretend that technological advancement will automatically improve everyone’s lives. This is nonsense, of course, and I do not think that anyone believes it. The Luddites found that out when the merchants refused to use technology that would benefit the Luddites but did use technology that would replace them with child labor. Distributing the benefits of technology has always been a difficult, fraught task where the owners of capital have had the advantage and thus the majority of the benefit. Merely introducing a technology does nothing to ensure that the broad swath of humanity benefits from said technology.

And yet.

And yet we have yet another manifesto promising us that imitative AI, which I remind you is not as accurate as a calculator, will somehow in the next few years guarantee a utopia. This one is from the head of Anthropic, a leading imitative AI company. It is fourteen thousand words long and promises that the word calculator he now produces will one day soon be able to advance medicine a hundred years in a decade, cure mental illness, load your mind to the cloud, etc.

As long as you give his company seven billion dollars and a regulatory free environment.

I could find no mention of safety, only one dismissive mention of universal incomes and precious little talk of alignment (the buzzword that means making sure AI does what we want it to do instead of turning us all into paperclips). Though, to be fair, the manifesto is all a bit bullshit-y so I may have missed some unclear allusions. The bullshit-y is the point, of course. This is not a serious document laying out serious plans and pros and cons. It is a marketing tool to try and get some of that sweet, sweet venture capital money before the other companies do.

As such, it probably should not irritate me as much as it does, but a lifetime of listening to this self-serving bullshit has made me grumpy. We don’t need to boil the oceans and ruin the planet’s climate to get to a utopia. We just have to decide to implement one. The problem is not that we don’t have a powerful enough Clippy. The problem is that we don’t have a powerful enough political force.

We are the wealthiest society to ever grace the planet. We can literally reshape our environments to suit ourselves and travel to other planets and moons if we choose to. We could spend much more money on medical research. We could provide everyone with cradle to grave medical care. We could ensure that no one is homeless. We could ensure that education is world class for every student. We could lower the working hours, or provide a job to everyone who needs one, or provide a basic universal income to everyone to help them through the rough times, or all of the above. We could rebuild our infrastructure to both limit the damage that climate change can do and to ensure that climate change slows or ends.

Almost everything that the manifesto promises, we can do today, right now. Many of those things other countries are already doing. We chose not to do them for a variety of political and societal reasons. And those political and societal reasons will not change with new technology. They never have, and there is no reason to think that they ever will.

Utopia is a political problem, not a technological one.

I suspect that the people who write these manifestos know that at some level. The fact that the manifesto reads like a marketing pitch more than a sober look at the promises and problems with the current and projected technology is proof enough of that contention. I suspect, also, that the people who build systems that can be thrown off by irrelevant data understand that their most grandiose promises are not going to come to fruition, at least not with the current models and systems.

But acknowledging that is inconceivable to these people. First, it means that they won’t make as much money. Second, and I suspect that this is just as important to them, it means that the kind of software they write and support (because most of these people, not all, can no more write these systems than I can start in net for the Blackhawks.) won’t be centered in the nation’s consciousness. The loss of both money and ego is likely too much to contemplate.

But even if I am being unfair to at least some of these tech leaders, the fact remains that technology will not deliver us utopia. Politics will. If you want the world that exists in those manifestos, you need to re-order the politics in order to spend money on building a better world, not a better word calculator.