AI Won’t Destroy the World.  Humans Using AI Will.

We are being told by CEOs, self-proclaimed futurists, visionaries, technology gurus and Silicon Valley geeks with millions of followers and thousands of books sold, that AI will bring about a never-before-seen abundance, after a “short rough patch” of adjustment.  I’ve watched a number of talks, interviews and discussions online with these experts over the years, trying to get to the bottom of their delusional visions of the future, and their audacity to talk about a subject matter which is beyond them.  They think they can talk about AI without considering climate, politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, and last but not least, human nature. 

The truth is that they are experts, indeed, but experts only in technology.  They are experts in modelling ideal future scenarios of AI in a world without a climate crisis, without fascism, without inflation, and with an intact food supply.  These are some highly delusional, dangerous geeks.  As with all geeks, their love for their subject matter, technology, has gotten the best of them yet again.  This is why so many of them tend to be supremacists.  They genuinely feel they belong in a class of “the chosen few”, just because they can do coding.  Yawn.

Let me introduce you very quickly to what happens to a civilisation during a time of collapse, and how this plays out on the real AI game.  By contrast to the utopian scenarios of the geeks, this is a realistic one which takes into consideration all the factors I mentioned above that the esteemed colleagues missed out on:

As food production yields drop further, inflation spins out of control, and governments fail to find the billions they need for disaster relief each year. The globe enters economic meltdown.  While all technological development slows down, AI development continues strongly, thanks to multinational corporations who have the means, and fascist governments who have the power to shift budget from feeding their people, to developing AI.  Despite being robbed of public money in broad daylight, billions of people decimated by hunger and inflation vote for even more fascist governments, who invest in even more AI under the promise that it is the only hope we have now to save the world.  A campaign of “information transition” similar to the current “energy transition” is launched across the world to get all of us to support AI, even though we are hungry, unemployed and oppressed more than ever.

The outcome of course is that, as with most technologies humans developed throughout history, the worst, most evil and most profitable forms of AI are developed first, as opposed to those actually needed by society.  The “abundance” never actually materializes, as people are charged through the roof to use AI in a world where the oligarchs and their geek friends make all the money.  

This is the realistic scenario, one where greed and power corruption survive well into the AI dystopia. And why wouldn’t they? They’ve been with us forever.  Technology never makes better humans.  It just makes humans think that they are better.  For those who thought AI would bring more democracy, equality and abundance, think again. The rise of fascism has been largely aided by the likes of Cambridge Analytica, equality is about to become a joke as billions become unemployed in the AI era, and as for abundance, I have a question: abundance of what?  In a world that has become largely uninhabitable and food resources have dwindled, how can we talk about abundance in a time of world famine and economic disruption?

But most of all, how can the geeks talk about abundance when AI cyberwarfare, world hunger and mass climate migration are already taking us towards world war?  Hmmm…I guess this is all a bit too depressing for the geeks, perhaps “too imaginary”.  Yet this doesn’t stop them from imagining wild scenarios of AI having solved all of our problems.  What do they know after all?  They’ve grown up watching Star Trek and other fairy tales while eating supermarket sandwiches. They have no global, systemic view of the world, the ecosystem, and society.  I mistrust geeks, and all highly specialised professionals. They have gone down too far into the rabbit hole of their profession and missed the forest for the trees.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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