Weekly Column
There Is No AI Takeover
Every few weeks, some AI company executive sits for an interview to warn the world their own product might end civilization as we know it. Strange business plan — unless you understand that "this technology is so powerful it terrifies even its creator" is the single best marketing line ever accidentally invented, and every investor with a checkbook is listening.
Doom-saying behooves AI company heads, who have everything to gain from the attention fearmongering lends their companies. They know powerful people with money will always support their development, while people trying to feed their families have no recourse to speak of, so they risk nothing with these claims.
You read the recent story about AI companies buying books, scanning them, and destroying them to feed the AI? Does that anger you? Yeah? What do you plan to do about it? Nothing. That's what we're going to do. That's all we're able to do. They know that, and they also know most people are powerless to do anything about any of their actions.
But here's the thing: there is no AI takeover. There never will be. Since the dawn of the internal combustion engine, new technology has given us more work to do, not less. Yes, it often raises the standard of living, but at the cost of that standard becoming more expensive. I relax, sweat-free, in my air-conditioned home, which I have to pay electricity companies to run and possibly $10K upon AC unit replacement. Would I prefer to keep the money and sweat? No, but the point is that its operational costs belong to me. I also have three toilets in my home, with accompanying plumbing, and plumbing issues. Would I rather traipse to the outhouse at 3 a.m. and relieve myself into a ten-foot pit I dug? No. Does the ten-foot pit have any logistical problems other than me slowly filling it with sand and needing a new pit? Also no.
Has AI made our jobs easier? I write this blog post myself, in VIM. I could have AI write it for me. It could attempt to sound like me. I'd still have to proofread and change it. The metaphors and anecdotes would no longer be my own. It would lack my styled, rapier wit.
Despite several doomsday articles every two to three months claiming AI has become sentient or has "refused to shut down" (all of which gives AI companies that aforementioned attention), AI use for most people simply replaced Google search. Some YouTubers' every video features a wild-eyed PhD, with a resume of accomplishments tangential to anything useful, predicting massive, vague warnings of doom if AI is allowed to continue its development. We're to believe it may somehow combine with robot technology to give us killer robots. I don't care what kind of gun the killer robot has — anything that runs on electricity can be defeated by a man with a fire hose and a bolt cutter.
Don DeLillo once wrote, "Longing on a large scale is what makes history." AI never longs. It does what we train it to do. I think we all expected Jarvis, the Marvel Avengers' Tony Stark personal-assistant AI that predicts your moods and desires and knows what you want to say or do before you do — and maybe someday that will be a reality, but I doubt it. AI will eventually saturate its niche usages the same way the internal combustion engine or the internet has, and find its mundane existence in specific sections of our lives. For most people, that usage is just being able to skip Google to find an answer, or at most, program faster.
And me? I'm waiting for one of the two inventions that will actually remold the world as we know it: teleportation or gravity drives. Either one will do.
— Daniel