lastly Last week, a number of top technology executives, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, joined the chorus of desperate voices from Silicon Valley. slow down In the development of artificial intelligence.
Executives said they feared the tool could quickly become too powerful and threaten humanity’s survival.
Why do three billionaire technology CEOs all agree that the technology their companies are developing may be too dangerous?
Do Silicon Valley’s rulers really think that frontier AI models are likely to “kill all humanity”, says one senior Anthropic employee? warned last week? Is this all? another example hype Did they spread it to attract more investment?
Talking about existential risks is a very convenient way to avoid addressing the known harms caused by AI.
Even if AI stocks rise in value, the beneficiaries of the AI gold rush and the beneficiaries of AI safety investments are likely to be the very same people after all. fell In the midst of the latest cycle of destruction, these past few days.
You can waste a lot of time speculating about a tech billionaire’s apocalyptic or cynical worldview. But regardless of what these CEOs and their employees actually believe, one thing is clear. Talking about existential risks is a very convenient way to avoid addressing the known harms posed by AI technologies overseen by fascist billionaires like Musk and Palantir CEO Alex Karp.
It’s a questionable time for Silicon Valley leaders to bring back the millennial narrative about existential risks beyond our understanding. After all, the CEOs’ warnings come at a moment when there is a growing consensus across politics against the proliferation of real harms in AI and its infrastructure. For example, consider mass Opposition to data center and Banning AI in the classroom.
Talk of existential risk in Silicon Valley is nothing new. By 2023, hundreds of technology researchers, CEOs of leading AI companies, investors, and academics will signed The open letter on AI risks is just one sentence long: “Reducing the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, alongside other society-wide risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
While pitiful international promises to prevent future pandemics or nuclear wars are hardly reassuring standards, the sentiment of the open letter has taken on theological overtones, echoing the now typical AI narrative. Perhaps we are approaching a threshold that could lead to the complete destruction of life on Earth, or even our salvation.
The dividing line, Techno Capital representatives say, is the creation of AGI, or “artificial general intelligence,” or systems with intelligence equal to or greater than that of humans. From that point on, according to these stories, powerful superintelligent machines will emerge through a recursive cycle of AI self-improvement.
Liberation or destruction?
We are told that if these AI systems are not “aligned” with human interests, the destruction wrought by them could be complete. One particularly insane thought experiment suggests that our future robot overlords will control everything on Earth. paper clip.
Or, in a utopian storyline, the magic of AI, described with as little specificity as a gesture toward magic, will solve all sorts of worldly problems, from climate change to poverty to disease to mortality itself.
Consider how tech billionaires Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt dismissed the already devastating problem of massive energy and water consumption from AI processing. new york times reported Schmidt said he believes AI has “too much potential for concerns about climate change to get in the way.”
Advanced AI, they say, will bring such growth, such prosperity, such green technology, such divine deliverance. Only narrow-minded technophobes would want to hold back the rapidly progressing learning machines.
How will super AI achieve this? I can’t tell you. Importantly, billionaires and engineers cannot bring this magic or supposed fear to the world. Nor can those directing unprecedented amounts of economy-redefining capital and energy to data centers and AI research provide a clear path to artificial intelligence salvation.
The point is that it is impossible for those of us at the bottom of the food chain, the consumers, or perhaps all of humanity, to understand the forces at work here.
We should be skeptical of these propaganda stories. This is not to say that the AI industry won’t change the world. AI can already do incredible things that are far beyond human capabilities. These technologies are already having a major impact on the world of work, global infrastructure, the application of state violence, and massive flows of capital and energy.
After all, AI is not a single thing. AI is a collection of methods based on so-called machine learning, which are basically algorithms that use statistics to find patterns in large amounts of data, including in very complex ways.
AI products and services abound, from text and image-generating content to recommendation engines like those used by Spotify and Netflix. Fraud detection system. Navigation systems such as Google Maps.
Yes, we are swimming in AI blunders, rogue search engines, stolen content, deepfakes, embarrassing mistakes, and hallucinations. However, some scientists are using machine learning to: start a revolution Alzheimer’s disease detection and treatment.
AI systems, on the other hand, are used for generation and justification. kill list It can also commit genocide, generate revenge porn, and create predictive police databases along racist lines.
AI fairy tale
The problem with AI fairy tales whose teleological endpoint is the development of “artificial general intelligence” is that an array of current and potential applications of machine learning are collapsing together as part of a single unstoppable force.
Instead of seriously considering the existing harms and potential of technological development, the spokesmen of techno capital prefer narratives of inevitable judgment day. The idea is that some great thinking machine will come and either destroy us or rescue us.
Nagging questions about the actual capabilities and potential of machine learning are tossed aside. It is also difficult to discuss the dark history of “intelligence” as a calculable property and a messy and contested concept.
Real uncertainty and unknowns about how best to develop and deploy advanced machine learning technologies are avoided. This consideration is reserved for Silicon Valley greats.
Cognitive scientist Hagen Blix and machine learning researcher Ingeborg Grimmer write in 2025: book “Why We Fear AI”: “When the stakes are as high as human survival itself, concerns about the current effects of real-world artificial intelligence technologies, from excessive energy use to undermining the livelihoods of artists and longshoremen, introducing cybersecurity vulnerabilities, perpetuating and exacerbating discrimination, disinformation and deepfakes, increasing mass surveillance, and more, can easily be dismissed.”