Donald Trump, President-Elect of the United States, and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and a technological wizard, what a conjunction. Remember, even as the country is preparing to receive Trump as its 47th President, Elon Musk is suing OpenAI for, in effect, having abandoned its core mission of peaceful AI. It is my understand that Eliezer Yudkowsky, Doomster-in-Chief, played a role in the meetings that resulted in the creation of OpenAI.
So, in an article in 3 Quarks Daily, I argued that the cult of AI doom is best conceived of as an aspect of a high-tech inspired counter culture comparable to the drug inspired counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Yudkowsky plays a role in the current counterculture comparable to the role that Timothy Leary played in the 1960s counter culture. But as far as I know, Leary never got as close to the levers of power as Yudkowsky is.
On the one hand we have this rationalist doomster culture that is devoted to scaring itself witless with stories about rogue AI. Many members of this culture make their livings in the AI business. They’re scaring themselves silly with stories about the products of their own labor. What would Karl Marx make of that? Talk about alienation....
And, through the person of Elon Musk and his high-tech buddies, these doomsters are part of the cultural wave that brought Donald Trump to his second term as President. Trump got there, in large part, by exploiting fear in the electorate, with much of that fear directed at immigrants. Is that the sort of thing Marx was talking about when he talked of the contradictions of capitalism? Musk fears his own shadow while Trump is at war with his.
The mind boggles.
