AI Will Doom You to Poverty Unless You Do AI to Make Money
January 23, 2025
Prepared by a still-alive dinobaby.
I enjoy reading snippets of the AI doomsayers. Some spent too much time worrying about the power of Joe Stalin’s approach to governing. Others just watched the Terminator series instead of playing touch football. A few “invented” AI by cobbling together incremental improvements in statistical procedures lashed to ever-more-capable computing infrastructures. A couple of these folks know that Nostradamus became a brand and want to emulate that predictive master.
I read “Godfather of AI Explains How Scary AI Will Increase the Wealth Gap and Make Society Worse.” That is a snappy title. Whoever wrote it crafted the idea of an explainer to fear. Plus, the click bait explains that homelessness is for you too. Finally, it presents a trope popular among the elder care set. (Remember, please, that I am a dinobaby myself.) Prod a group of senior citizens to a dinner and you will hear, “Everything is broken.” Also, “I am glad I am old.” Then there is the ever popular, “Those tattoos! The check out clerks cannot make change! I don’t understand commercials!” I like to ask, “How many wars are going on now? Quick.”
Two robots plan a day trip to see the street people in Key West. Thanks, You.com. I asked for a cartoon; I get a photorealistic image. I asked for a coffee shop; I get weird carnival setting. Good enough. (That’s why I am not too worried.)
Is society worse than it ever was? Probably not. I have had an opportunity to visit a number of countries, go to college, work with intelligent (for the most part) people, and read books whilst sitting on the executive mailing tube. Human behavior has been consistent for a long time. Indigenous people did not go to Wegman’s or Whole Paycheck. Some herded animals toward a cliff. Other harvested the food and raw materials from the dead bison at the bottom of the cliff. There were no unskilled change makers at this food delivery location.
The write up says:
One of the major voices expressing these concerns is the ‘Godfather of AI’ himself Geoffrey Hinton, who is viewed as a leading figure in the deep learning community and has played a major role in the development of artificial neural networks. Hinton previously worked for Google on their deep learning AI research team ‘Google Brain’ before resigning in 2023 over what he expresses as the ‘risks’ of artificial intelligence technology.
My hunch is that like me the “worked at” Google was for a good reason — Money. Having departed from the land of volleyball and weird empty office buildings, Geoffrey Hinton is in the doom business. His vision is that there will be more poverty. There’s some poverty in Soweto and the other townships in South Africa. The slums of Rio are no Palm Springs. Rural China is interesting as well. Doesn’t everyone want to run a business from the area in front of a wooden structure adjacent an empty highway to nowhere? Sounds like there is some poverty around, doesn’t it?
The write up reports:
“We’re talking about having a huge increase in productivity. So there’s going to be more goods and services for everybody, so everybody ought to be better off, but actually it’s going to be the other way around. “It’s because we live in a capitalist society, and so what’s going to happen is this huge increase in productivity is going to make much more money for the big companies and the rich, and it’s going to increase the gap between the rich and the people who lose their jobs.”
The fix is to get rid of capitalism. The alternative? Kumbaya or a better version of those fun dudes Marx. Lenin, and Mao. I stayed in the “last” fancy hotel the USSR built in Tallinn, Estonia. News flash: The hotels near LaGuardia are quite a bit more luxurious.
The godfather then evokes the robot that wanted to kill a rebel. You remember this character. He said, “I’ll be back.” Of course, you will. Hollywood does not do originals.
The write up says:
Hinton’s worries don’t just stop at the wealth imbalance caused by AI too, as he details his worries about where AI will stop following investment from big companies in an interview with CBC News: “There’s all the normal things that everybody knows about, but there’s another threat that’s rather different from those, which is if we produce things that are more intelligent than us, how do we know we can keep control?” This is a conundrum that has circulated the development of robots and AI for years and years, but it’s seeming to be an increasingly relevant proposition that we might have to tackle sooner rather than later.
Yep, doom. The fix is to become an AI wizard, work at a Google-type outfit, cash out, and predict doom. It is a solid career plan. Trust me.
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2025
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