Stop Worrying, Love AI?

December 5, 2024

By Jim Towey

Artificial intelligence (AI) is metastasizing rapidly. It will soon be added to our mac & cheese and power our pizza. AI has become the new virtue signal. With diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in disarray, American companies, investors, and consumers alike have turned to modernity’s golden calf: the algorithm perched on top of a sprawling data center.

Marketing appeals touting AI are everywhere. Stating that a product or service is “driven by AI” stamps it with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Cool. Just look at how Apple is marketing its new phone. The cynical use of Hollywood and sports celebrities to validate the questionable, like Taylor Swift’s football hunk Travis Kelce did with Covid jabs, always signals an underlying uneasiness about what is being sold to the public. Very, very few people understand how AI works. It is the secret language of the coder class and few of us speak it. So Apple bribes celebrities with cash to get the public comfortable with the omnipresence of AI, whether we want it or not. “Lebron James isn’t worried about AI. Why should I be?”

The C Suites of corporate America don’t understand AI, either. Most of the people there barely know how to operate their TV remotes or smart phones. But they do understand how money works. Profits aren’t concerned by the ethical nightmare AI is secretly developing. Greed isn’t into vision; it’s into “gimme money now.” AI chipmaker NVIDIA’s market value has tripled IN TWO YEARS! It is now the second most valuable company in the world, sitting at $3.6 trillion.

With this kind of money multiplying like AI content on the internet, no wonder everyone wants to get on the AI train. If your company isn’t all-in on AI, then it’s all-out.

A government role?

So yes, the herd has formed, and anyone proposing to put a brake on AI development is at risk of being stampeded. My former White House colleague, Condi Rice, who now heads Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, recently warned government to stay out of the way of AI’s development. She explained that we are in a race with other countries, and also, that we shouldn’t try to regulate what we don’t understand. Condi is one of my heroes, but I can’t buy the argument that passivity on the inevitable abuse of AI as it proliferates is the way to go.

It is all hauntingly familiar. Remember the dark comedy, “Dr. Strangelove”? It came out in 1964 and warned of the danger nuclear weapons posed to humanity. It was satire at its finest. Well, get ready for its sequel, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI.” The AI race between the U.S., India, Russia and China has all of the same breakneck speed and moral recklessness as the Cold War arms race had. Now there are enough nuclear warheads to blow up the planet many times over, at any moment. This all happened despite intense government regulation and masterful geopolitical chess moves – imagine if in 1950 we had thrown nuclear weapons to the private sector!

And we wonder why our young people have anxiety?

Just as the nuclear genie can’t be put back in the bottle (witness Putin as he menaces Ukraine and NATO with his threats to use some of his arsenal), AI isn’t going away. It is infiltrating everything. Top secret research into military uses of AI has been ongoing for some time. Conventional weaponry isn’t modern if it isn’t “powered” by AI. Banking, driving, shopping, writing – I can’t even finish a sentence on Microsoft Word without AI “helping” me with word choice and grammar suggestions – AI is there, like bad grace.

How AI got here

AI marched into our lives because of two reasons. First, our federal government, populated at the top by old people who knew next to nothing about information technology, were preoccupied with petty political disputes. They did nothing to slow down AI’s deployment.

And second, old-fashioned greed. Look at the awakening of Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, the company that sells ChatGPT and is now worth $150 billion. Remember in the beginning how OpenAI was going to be altruistic, not driven by profits? He said he would have no equity in the company. “I am doing this because I love it,” he said. But his heart strayed, for the love of money, alas, is the root of all evil. Now our boy Sam’s pockets are stuffed with lucre.  

Marc Andreesen, another AI whiz kid basking in bucks, doesn’t want government involvement. He said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he was “terrified” of government controlling the platforms. But of course, government already is consulting with the AI giants. Gee, how could the government abuse seemingly neutral tech platforms and their monopoly on information in a free society?

Now AI is a battle royal of Big Tech, Little Tech, and everything in between, with government incapable of preserving our right to be free from fakery. As Andreesen admitted to Rogan, ordinary people won’t be able to tell the difference between the fake and the real. So, we will have to trust someone to tell us what is real and what isn’t?  Who might that be?

Stop worrying and love AI? Not I.  

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)