AI Is a Distraction Maneuver & Back Door Escape for Tech Billionaires
Superintelligent AI is coming, if it's not already here. But how will it be managed and by who? Let's take the skeptical look.
AI is a rearrangement of data and capital. Words written by humans throughout centuries are now accessible in a new format via a new medium for a new price. Impressive as LLMs are, we don’t talk nearly enough about how these word calculator monstrosities came to be in the first place.
We understand that the AI models have been trained on enormous amounts of copyrighted data – which may or may not be an infringement (I think it is, based on legal analysis). We also understand that training the models requires an enormous computing infrastructure and capital that came out of the pockets of BigTech, including Nvidia and Tesla, and excluding Apple. What is less talked about, and much less obvious, is how the capital used to train AI was generated.
In the earlier days of the internet, American tech companies managed to put a price on attention. This enabled them to turn human thoughts and emotions into a rich data source. They capitalized on it through mass surveillance and monopolization of the web, unhindered while democratic institutions didn’t know what was up and down but couldn’t deny the apparent comfort and conveniences of new digital services. Civilians reacted with the same demeanor and uncritically embraced that part of their personhood became transmuted into being a “user”. Still to this day, people often treat the internet like their private living rooms instead of public squares with cameras – even though the companies that own the infrastructure are making a ton of money from selling knowledge about what they see to advertisers, businesses, and God knows who.
Way back in September 2018, the South African/American sociology researcher Michael Kwet was among the first academics to observe that American tech corporations took ownership of the digital infrastructure in the Global South in a way that resembled “digital colonialism”. Digital infrastructure consists of software, hardware, and network connectivity (e.g. cables, cellular towers, and satellites). South Africans were quick to integrate BigTech’s products into all aspects of society but it came with an invisible price tag. Analogous to how European colonialists built railways in South Africa during the Industrial Revolution, the digital infrastructure was not built to benefit the natives but the colonial forces.
The rapid adoption of BigTech products into South Africa’s infrastructure, allowed the US to leverage enormous power over the country’s economy, the flow of information, social activities, and critical functions of society including education, healthcare, and the military. This foreign, imperialistic digital control is proven to be detrimental to local industries and cultures. Michael Kwet mentions Uber as just one example:
“Uber has had devastating effects in Africa and beyond. The company takes around 25% commission for each trip, in addition to hidden costs, leading to an outflow of revenue from the local economy to foreign coffers. Moreover, they are able to undercut local markets by offering artificially low prices: Uber can operate at a loss – to the tune of billions – thanks to funding from Wall Street and other wealthy investors. With the backing of corporate finance, it leverages predatory subsidies, network effects, Big Data analytics, and the deregulatory effects of its position as an “intermediary” to stamp out competition and colonize the market. Within just two years, Uber sported a net worth of R1.65 billion (~$125 million) inside South Africa.”
In the last few years, these issues have become mainstream talking points and much more studied across academic disciplines. The researcher Toussaint Nothias sums up the literature about digital colonialism in a recent paper titled “An intellectual history of digital colonialism”:
“The critique of digital colonialism takes aim at the social system where a handful of key actors, through digital technologies, operate on a global scale (unequal concentration of power) and extract profits, data, labor and natural resources (extraction); ensure dependency on their products while reproducing, accelerating or even creating new forms of violence, and imposing distinct cultural norms and values (cultural imperialism) – all of it in the name of progress and helping (benevolence).”
We have now reached the next stage of the digital evolution which is AI. As discussed last week, the major AI labs are racing each other to “build Samantha”, a personal AI assistant that far exceeds our intellects but can take care of all our individual wants and needs. However, given that the same companies responsible for building cutting-edge AI are also responsible for digital colonialism, it's probably worth closer examining the superintelligence claim and where exactly it comes from.
The idea that humanity is on the cusp of a major “superintelligence breakthrough” stems from a small but powerful group of tech billionaires in Silicon Valley - a group of people that is financially rich and morally poor. The distinguished researchers Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres coined the term the “TESCREAL bundle” which encapsulates all of the life philosophies held by this class of billionaires. TESCRAL is an acronym for “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism”.
All seven belief systems in the TESCRAL bundle have the idea of “transhumanism” in common. According to this belief, humanity is only an intermediate stepping stone in the grand scheme of the universe and our destiny is to clear the pathway for a greater form of intelligence which will be enabled through AI and/or biotech. Compared to the great unfolding of this new technological paradigm, human rights and any individual human life is fairly insignificant. Your favorite tech billionaire would agree with this, whether Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, or someone else.
If we look closely at the “superintelligence idea” we discover that it’s not only based on a wish for dominance but also a reductionist view of human intelligence as such. If machine intelligence can trump human intelligence on all metrics, in all instances, the need for humans to think critically for themselves is greatly reduced - if not eliminated completely. In such a world, all we need is to trust the machine and – of course - the investors and executive class behind it. Our complete trust in them will also be a permanent evasion of accountability for all of their past and future actions, including but not limited to negative second-order effects of digital technology. In this light, AI is both a distraction maneuver and a back door escape for the richest tech billionaires amongst us.
If there is one universal lesson we can take away from all of this: “free stuff is not always free”. The MAGAfication of US politics has finally forced other countries to rethink the motives and intentions behind Silicon Valley’s seemingly friendly-minded expansion. For a long time, Europeans saw the US as a mirror but now the mirror is broken. Many countries have realized that without rapid intervention, the American fade will become the rest of the world’s fade; politics infiltrated, the rule of law strangled, and civil rights eroded under the inhumane force of tech capitalism.
