The Cult of AI - How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future
The Cult of AI - How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future
How one writer's trip to the annual tech conference CES left him with a sinking feeling about the future.
As I listened to PR people try to sell me on an AI-powered fake vagina, I thought back to Andreessen’s claims that AI will fix car crashes and pandemics and myriad other terrors. In particular, I thought about his claim that because of this, halting AI development was akin to murder. It reminded me of another wealthy self-described futurist with a plan to save the world.
The Church of Scientology, founded by the science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and based upon a series of practices his disciples call “tech,” claims that their followers will “rid the planet of insanity, war and crime, and in its place create a civilization in which sanity and peace exist.” Scientology “tech” is so important for mankind’s future that threats against it justify their infamous “fair game” policy. A person declared fair game “may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist.…”
Sinners must be punished, after all.
I was surprised to see Robert Evans as a rolling stone writer. I love his podcasts. Article was a great read.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
I was watching a video of a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show for the Rabbit R1, an AI gadget that promises to act as a sort of personal assistant, when a feeling of doom took hold of me.
Specifically, about a term first defined by psychologist Robert Lifton in his early writing on cult dynamics: “voluntary self-surrender.” This is what happens when people hand over their agency and the power to make decisions about their own lives to a guru.
At Davos, just days ago, he was much more subdued, saying, “I don’t think anybody agrees anymore what AGI means.” A consummate businessman, Altman is happy to lean into that old-time religion when he wants to gin up buzz in the media, but among his fellow plutocrats, he treats AI like any other profitable technology.
As I listened to PR people try to sell me on an AI-powered fake vagina, I thought back to Andreessen’s claims that AI will fix car crashes and pandemics and myriad other terrors.
In an article published by Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, a research journal, Dr. Andreas Roli and colleagues argue that “AGI is not achievable in the current algorithmic frame of AI research.” One point they make is that intelligent organisms can both want things and improvise, capabilities no model yet extant has generated.
What we call AI lacks agency, the ability to make dynamic decisions of its own accord, choices that are “not purely reactive, not entirely determined by environmental conditions.” Midjourney can read a prompt and return with art it calculates will fit the criteria.
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