Kill all humans | Richard Seymour on Patreon
Richard Seymour on AI P(doom) scaremongering and publicity:
AI may not be able to do your job, for instance, but the threat of it can be used as a disciplinary mechanism to hold down wages: which is exactly what has happened. The data centres may not revolutionise production or open vast new seams of value, and many of their owners may not exist by the time they are scheduled to start operating, but that doesn’t mean they won’t waste enormous quantities of water, power, labour, time, effort, resources and opportunities, as well as spewing out pyroclastic clouds of CO2 and visiting desolation on the natural environment before the bubble bursts, leaving behind abandoned concrete hulks. And just because AI won’t eventuate in a god-device, even one that goes rogue and unleashes biological warfare on humanity, doesn’t mean that LLMs, particularly those with safety standards relaxed in order to compete, won’t behave in unpredictable and potentially ruinous ways. Nor does it mean they won’t be used by hackers, criminal gangs, dark-money-funded political campaigns, blackmailers and various others to sabotage public bodies and infrastructure. Just as there are many problems with the advertising industry that don’t involve subliminal mind control, so the problems with AI that don’t involve a god-device turning against humanity are legion.