The Dictatorship of AI.. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) bubble… | by Lev Stesin | Jun, 2024
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) bubble is unlike any technological bacchanalia that has preceded it. Like all prior “Gold Rushes” of the Valley it is driven by money, greed, charlatans and a sprinkle of curiosity. Yet AI has an additional component associated with its seemingly meteoric rise. It is fueled by cult-like behavior. Rather it is a pseudo scientific loosely held belief system, an ideology, not too dissimilar to another ideology attempting to predict the way history ends: Marxism.
AI, like Marxism, believes it possesses the scientific foundation to predict the future and the ultimate “end of history”. It believes the all powerful machine will rule the world and there is nothing to prevent the inevitable from taking place. Like the tide of the rising proletariat in Marx’s teaching, the machine is the ghost marching through the countries and industries to its eventual and predictable triumph. Marx believed in the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. The protagonists of the current bubble believe in the “Dictatorship of AI”.
Unlike all previous bubbles AI has a real technological enigma. It is a culmination of the decades of technological revolution. Very few individuals in the very industry that spawned it can explain or even understand how it really works. A lot many pretend they do, but in reality their understanding of AI is similar to the way the ancient priests faked their awareness of the world around them. Like the Aztek Priests some would even admit the human “sacrifices” are possible or even necessary to pacify the machine.
This is also the first bubble occurring in the world that is thoroughly interconnected financially. That makes the amount of money available unprecedented, allowing not only for the unseen before scale of spending but making the duration and intensity of the bubble to dwarf all its “poor” predecessors. Like the “Comintern” that led the world wide revolution, the global finances powering the bubble are truly international, no longer belonging to one or few corners of the world.
The rhetoric of the leaders of the “movement”, tech executives, CEO, propagandists, “evangelists” and “technologists” (the last two euphemisms coined by Silicon Valley to replace “commissar” and “apparatchik”) is reminiscent of the pseudo scientific speak of the Soviets. They all claim the indisputable truth of their belief in the ultimate fast approaching victory of AI by, more or less, paraphrasing the old Soviet tautological slogan: “AI is correct, because it is right”. To add more rhetorical weight to their claims the agitators like to pepper their speeches and presentations with numerous and repetitive mentions of AI. “Pravda” of the yesteryear used to measure the strength of its editorials by the number of the times the words “communism” and “the party” were mentioned. “AI” nowadays serves the very same bombastic purpose. By inserting “AI” everywhere all the time the folks running the show try, and, if one to be honest, succeed, in convincing the general populace, already frightened by the rapid technological progress, that AI will rule us all and resistance is futile.
As an ideology AI requires “thinkers” and spokespeople. Many large well to do companies hire individuals to think of the “day after”. Never before have industrial giants hired science fiction writers of dubious quality, created entire departments for them to run, to promote one’s second rate imagination as the reality knocking at the door. To keep the revolutionary message hot and strong, CEOs of AI companies travel the world and give daily interviews predicting the future in detail and demanding trillions of dollars of private and public money to be diverted to prepare for the immediate “dawn of the machine”.
AI uses the Wall Street as its enforcer, the “muscle”, the street power of Marxist movements of the past century. No company, no matter how powerful and successful it is, can stand up to the “party line”. One either accepts the gospel, the new “Capital” of AI, or gets mercilessly punished by the “markets”. The Street understands AI even less than the Valley and, hence, is apprehensive of the technology even more. With the previously unseen amounts of investment currently going into AI, but with very few examples of the technology returning a profit, the industry propagandists have found a way to raise funds a lot more efficiently than through violent expropriations or party dues.
No matter how fast the governments around the world print money, eventually the spigots showering billions on AI will run dry. As with every technological bubble, AI will produce some very successful applications of its power and with most of the money spent going to waste and enrich the charlatans. And the party members will find another home and another reason to benefit from the world gullible and stupid around them.
