Cheryl Rofer at Lawyers, Guns and Money wants to know why all the big tech firms are suddenly interested in what is called artificial intelligence (reminder: there is no such thing as artificial intelligence):
That lot of activity implies that there is a reason for it, but maybe not. One reason is that bright boys [yes] who can code like to think they are bright enough to define for us what intelligence is, or, if they are a bit more mature, investigate some of the parameters of what we might call intelligence by simulating functions that we believe indicate intelligence.
But there has to be a reason that Big Tech is putting money into the enterprise, and presumably they believe they will make money out of it. They gloss this with Benefits To The User. Better search! Automated letter writing! They leave out things like automated facial recognition to help arrest people and yet another way to separate the customer from the seller.
Why Artificial Intelligence? – Lawyers, Guns & Money (lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)
Like most things, there are a lot of reasons big companies are pushing for artificial intelligence right now. Some of them good, most of them bad, and a few of the weird.
For a lot of the people doing the work, if not necessarily the people funding the work, there are good reasons to be interested in doing work with deep learning and other so-called artificial intelligence systems. These things really can, and have, provided a lot of benefit to society. Artificial intelligence tools can automate gene editing processes, for example, and make possible treatments that would be out fo reach if we had to reply on manual intervention only. They can and do reduce manual labor of all types, though its questionable value of the end result is to screw over the people displaced and simply take the money paid to them and concentrate in the hands of the capital who funded the programs. For people interested in studying actual intelligence, trying to derive or generate intelligence in machines is a legitimate and potentially fruitful means of doing so (Cheryl is skeptical of this line of inquiry, noting that we have al kinds of intelligences available to us to study, so why haven't been able to figure out what gives rise to intelligence? Well, we can experiment on and understand the parameters of code in a way that we should not and cannot with animals and/or people. And while I am skeptical that deep learning, for example, is a path to understanding actual intelligence, a lot of very smart people disagree with me.) So yes, there are lots of at least potentially beneficial applications of so-called artificial intelligence.
But the main reason is of course money.
The large tech companies have not had a significant hit in years. Google hasn't had one arguably since search -- everything else they bought. Apple hasn't since at least the iPad, Facebook since its inception (their various frauds don't really count, in my opinion). Crypto/blockchain has imploded into the irrelevance it has always deserved and things like the Metaverse have been pretty soundly rejected by actual users. These companies are all mature, meaning they have no easy, huge growth drivers on the horizon. And without those, they are going to be punished by our warped financial system. They need the next big thing, and right now, the only thing left standing is artificial intelligence.
It probably helps that so-called artificial intelligence is tied to things like self-driving cars, search, and recommendations -- all areas that these companies have some expertise/investment in already. Going all in in adjacent areas probably feels at least somewhat reasonable. Regardless, at the end of the day, these companies have spent their existence as growth companies, even if that growth was largely through acquisitions. If they don't want their stock to be punished, they need to continue that growth. Crypto didn't provide that spark. Maybe, they hope, so-called artificial intelligence will.
And then there is the weird. Some of the people who invest in startups driving artificial intelligence are like Peter Thiel -- people with an apparent deep and abiding contempt for democracy at any level. Aside from the fact that he thinks woman voting is bad, and that freedom and democracy are incompatible, Thiel has been a supporter of the neo-reactionary movement. One of his more famous companies is the surveillance firm Palantir and, of course, one of the more controversial uses of AI is facial recognition.
Of course, people like Thiel also hope to make money. But they are not afraid to deploy their capital in a way that advances their ideological goals either. Thiel has spent millions supporting candidates like Trump and JD Vance and Blake Masters. Investing in facial recognition or ChatGPT -- a system almost tailor made to spread misinformation and weaken democracy -- provide both financial and ideological benefits to people like Thiel. Having people who think democracy is bad behind some so-called artificial intelligence start-ups given the possible implications on society at large is concerning, to say the least.
And that is why artificial intelligence: its practitioners see potential good and understanding, and some of its backers sometimes see a way to undermine democracy and advance their reactionary goals. Mosly, though, it is a group of large companies that haven't been able to convince Wall Street that they stil have their moo desperately searching for a means of keeping their stock prices inflated. When so-called artificial intelligence doesn't do the trick, they will move onto the next big thing.
Internet of smells, anyone?
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