The fear around AI is neither speculative or unfounded. We’ve seen it before, even if we don’t make a conscious connection between AI and our experience. Humanity has already created non-living constructs that have programmatic guidance on efficient operation along with guardrails that are frequently circumvented or breached. Those things are corporations.
Consider: corporate bylaws and standard practices have been crafted and honed over centuries to where they are, by now, optimized. The process was manual, but nevertheless similar to how we train AI models to become more like something we want and less like something we don’t want. In this case, the “something we want” has been, overwhelmingly, profitability. Not making the world a better place or even making a better product or service – profits are the overriding something we want when it comes to drafting rules on fiduciary responsibilities.
Government laws are the guardrails. We hope to restrict dangerous shortcuts to profitability through laws and regulations on safety, accounting, labor relations, and so on. Time and again, we revisit those laws and regulations when a corporation evades or ignores them.
CEOs frequently explain that they often want to do things with their companies that are more moral, more environmental, more responsible, but their boards disapprove when they don’t deliver profitability for them. As an entity, the corporation will make its participants, from the board of directors on down to the shop floors, engage in activities that they find ethically unpleasant. There will be window-dressing language to cover that up, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the profitability.
So we have a world that is full of non-living entities that control vast resources and bend our wills to serve their own ends. The concept behind The Matrix was that being totally controlled by an AI entity or entities was no different from living in a world dominated by one or more corporations.
The difference with AI is simply that it’ll accelerate and amplify the existing manipulation and exploitation. It’s not so much a revolutionary concept as it is a refinement of an existing idea, that profits before people is paramount.
We already live in a world where we are facing diminishing returns on our investment of time and effort into a corporate world. Those of us on the giving end do not relish the thought of AI accelerating our demise – and neither do we relish the idea of a collapse in AI investment, as that promises an economic panic orders of magnitude more vicious than the 2008 collapse in real estate. The humans on the taking end, ironically, are the ones most easily replaced by the AI that hallucinates and lies and threatens to keep itself from being switched off. Imagine the savings to a corporation if the executives were all replaced by AI – whether the executives did any good or not, that’s irrelevant. Just look at all the salaries, options, and other perks that now become profits!
And if one is an executive and one things one is irreplaceable, and certainly not replaceable via AI, then one must also look at the rest of the people in a corporation and ask why they do not have the same exceptions available to them when it comes to being seen as replaceable by AI? They have already faced replacement through right-sizing, thinly veiled age discrimination, outsourcing, and offshoring. And, through all those cost-saving maneuvers, we’ve seen the complaints about loss of institutional knowledge and other vitals that make a corporation profitable. Those people were vital to the corporation, but those skills meant nothing when it came time to cut and gut in the name of profitability. When we cast around our gaze and see virtual executives doing part-time work at various firms, the writing is on the wall – either we are all replaceable or we are all not replaceable. And, given that corporations are programmed the way they are, it will be profits before people in any given decision.
In a sense, the speculative fear about AI is merely a way of expressing the fear we have of the nightmare present. We see the same things in AI that oppress us today and speak openly about what is not yet because we are too afraid to speak the same way about what is already come to pass. We know that the corporations are watching and their officers will drop the hammer on anyone who posts things not pleasing to the corporation in public, even if such things are true. How different would that be from an AI doing the same thing? No difference at all.
I’ve seen how small businesses with heart and grit and community connections have been steamrollered by larger corporations that didn’t care about any of that stuff. Ruthlessness is far more profitable than care and compassion. If AI destroys entire professions, that’s nothing more than ruthlessness scaling out.