I suspect that the most important thing happening right now has little or nothing to do with politics.
Although AI executives commonly speak of the coming AGI revolution—referring to artificial “general” intelligence that rivals or exceeds human capability—they notably have all at this moment coalesced around real, albeit loose, deadlines. Many of their prophecies also have an undeniable utopian slant. First, Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, repeated in August his suggestion from earlier this year that AGI could arrive by 2030, adding that “we could cure most diseases within the next decade or two.” A month later, even Meta’s more typically grounded chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said he expected powerful and all-knowing AI assistants within years, or perhaps a decade. Then the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, wrote a blog post stating that “it is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days,” which would in turn make such dreams as “fixing the climate” and “establishing a space colony” reality. Not to be outdone, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the rival AI start-up Anthropic, wrote in a sprawling self-published essay last week that such ultra-powerful AI “could come as early as 2026.” He predicts that the technology will end disease and poverty and bring about “a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights,” and that “many will be literally moved to tears” as they behold these accomplishments. The tech, he writes, is “a thing of transcendent beauty.”
The naivete of this kind of utopian thinking is breathtaking.
When I hear these Silicon Valley techno-optimists talk, they appear to me like excitable nerds who were in the rocket club at high school. They’re brainy, but they have the moral maturity and emotional intelligence of 12 year olds.
But wait—they’re successful and rich, so they must know what they’re doing, right? And technological progress is human progress, right? Why worry? It’ll all work out like they say, right?
Of course not. There will inevitably be an AI version of a Chernobyl/Three Mile Island event. And If we’re lucky, it won’t be massively catastrophic, but serious enough to sober the rest of us up as to what we’re letting these children play with.
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