David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times ; A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. Silicon Valley oligarchs worried about the risks their technology posed to the world. They forgot about people.
"In one sense, the vision peddled by A.I. companies is remarkably depersonalized: We hand more and more responsibility and judgment off to superintelligent black boxes, which rapidly begin shaping the course of the human future with decisions that remain illegible to the rest of us, including their designers. “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own A.I. creations work,” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote last year. “They are right to be concerned: This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”
In another sense, and in the meantime, A.I. represents perhaps the most personalized sales pitch ever foisted on the passive American consumer — a vision of a near-total takeover of the country’s economic, social and cognitive lives by tools engineered by just five companies, run by five particular people, several of whom are widely described as sociopaths. The list is so short that you may know most of them by first name: Sam, Dario, Elon and Mark. (Demis Hassabis, who runs Google’s DeepMind, is perhaps less famous.)
These men are all already billionaires, or close to it, and on their current trajectories their wealth and influence look set to expand exponentially as, around them, anti-elitism multiplies, too. Perhaps this is one reason 50 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center last year they were more concerned than excited about what’s to come from A.I. Only 10 percent said they were more excited. That is a yawning gap into which an entire society is being asked to tumble."
