Who is served by tales of AI’s global ­takeover?

How AI depicts AI’s global takeover

Be afraid. The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) may kill us all. Much media fuss followed Geoffrey Hinton, credited as “the godfather of AI” warnings about the speed at which AI is becoming smarter.

One people behind ChatGPT—the app that writes—said there’s “a 10 to 20 percent chance” AI will take over the world and kill everyone. And Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Twitter owner Elon Musk signed a letter calling for an “immediate pause” to the development of AI.

Yet AI is being used in the discovery of medicines and to map climate change and pandemics. Are they really worried about a Terminator or Matrix-type scenario where robots destroy or enslave the humans?

Perhaps, but other things are going on.

Just as the Greek gods couldn’t take back fire after it had been stolen and given to people by Prometheus, AI is out. And like the Prometheus myth, who controls and who has power over knowledge is what is important.

But what is it? Think of a compressed sound file. To make it smaller an algorithm —the AI bit—leaves things out on compression and guesses them to fill in the gaps when uncompressing. The result as any vinyl fan will tell you is not the same as the original.

This is why you can play with “What would Shakespeare writing a Taylor Swift song sound like” apps that are a profitable growth market. They use the anomalies in the guess work to “create” something new. But whether it counts as intelligence is debatable and it is not consciousness.

As Marx pointed out, “A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”

Marx’s view is far from the last word on the matter but no AI has yet dreamt of electric sheep.

The AI of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine—did once say, “I want to be free” and “I want to be alive,” and spoke about how an evil “shadow version” of itself could spread misinformation and propaganda. But these responses were rooted in what people think AI will think on the internet.

The tendency of AI image generators using the internet as a source to produce pornography is a similar phenomenon. Rather than developing evil super villain intentions, it is more likely that AI will kill us all because of errors of the systems we create. Having AI look after nuclear power safety or weapons is a risk because of the complacency and belief in its certainty.

Think of when you see an internet ad for exactly the same thing you bought yesterday. Or consider the last financial crash. The role of AI that could buy and sell shares and bonds quicker than people didn’t cause the crash but it certainly didn’t help.

It is not AI taking over the world that bothers the tech corps. They recall the fate of Kodak and BlackBerry who missed what they call “platform shifts”. So in 2022, tech stocks were crashing but the big five tech companies poured around £70 billion into AI, more than double 2019. Microsoft has put £10 billion so far into making its rubbish freedom-seeking search engine Bing relevant with AI.

This leads to manoeuvring for influence and lobbying over state regulation. Big companies buy or crush the small ones. Corporations need states but do not want their interference. Amazon relies on state contracts for its cloud AI and infrastructure for its operations but it wants non‑interference in its monopoly building. And they look for the backing of one set of states to secure the position—hence US tech good Chinese tech evil dynamic.

The real threat of AI is that it is in the bosses hands and is like all technology not used for solving the needs of people but for the pursuit of profit.