While I type these words, billions of dollars have been spent on and barely tabulated amounts of electrical power, water and human labor (barely tabulated, because deliberately obscured) have been devoted to large language model (LLM) systems such as ChatGPT. If you follow the AI critical space you’re familiar with the many problems produced by the use and promotion of these systems – including, on the hype end, the most recent gyration, a declaration of “existential risk” by a collection of tech luminaries (a category which, in a Venn diagram, overlaps with carnival barker). This use of mountains of resources to enhance the profit objectives of Microsoft, Amazon and Google, among other firms not occupying their olympian perches, is wasted potential in frenetic action.
But what of alternative visions? They exist, all is not despair. The dangerous nonsense relentlessly spewing from the AI industry is overwhelming and countering it is a full time pursuit. But we can’t stay stuck, as if in amber, in a state of debunking and critique. There must be more. I recommend the DAIR Institute and Logic(s) magazine as starting points for exploring other ways of thinking about applied computation. Ideologically, AI doomerism is fueled in large measure by dystopian pop sci-fi such as Terminator. You know the story, which is a tale as old as the age of digital computers: a malevolent supercomputer – Skynet (a name that sounds like a product) – launches, for some reason, a war on humanity, resulting in near extinction. The tech industry seems to love ripping dystopian yarns. Judging by the now almost completely forgotten metaverse push (a year ago, almost as distant as the pleistocene in hype cycle time), inspired by the less than sunny sci-fi novel Snow Crash, we can even say that dystopian storylines are a part of business plans (what is the idea of sitting for hours wearing VR goggles if not darkly funny?).