Artificial Capitalist Intelligence.
26 Mar 2023 - by: Darkwraith Covenant
AI in its current form is inherently Capitalist
- It is being used as a means for wealth creation, solely and primarily as its de facto primary objective. There are no companies of note developing LLMs that are designed with anarchistic principles of mutual aid and egalitarianism in mind.
- Microsoft acquiring OpenAI is another example of how capital creation is the dominant paradigm in the most of the modern world.
- This paradigm is inherently oppressive and leads to harmful outcomes in societies that don’t have extremely strong protections for humans who work. The US is a unique example in that worker power is incredibly weak compared to other wealthy developed nations. While being the richest country on Earth, it is one of the most unequal and least unionized compared to similar western democracies.
- All of the recent hype around AI is by people who are most interested in its potential for getting rich, not for helping those in need. There is no hype around its potential to stop wars, to make medicine free, to make housing available to all, to increase the standard of living of all human beings and to end the suffering of animals.
- Big companies will benefit the most, as they will automate away jobs like customer service, making the experience no better or even worse than it is now.
- This doesn’t even take into account the danger of building an AGI whose goals misalign with those of human survival, as this is what people really mean when they are talking about alignment. Malicious alignment for capital interests is a favorable goal to those who are powerful enough to train and deploy these large language models.
- Microsoft is hoping to wrest power and market share away from Google search, 2 already unimaginably powerful and wealthy corporations. Google took in $75 billion dollars (that’s $75,000 million dollars) in 2022 alone. Numbers like these are unfathomable to humans in real world terms, but spending 1 million dollars a month for 83 years will spend nearly 1 billion dollars, let alone 75. Most of this money will be hoarded to create even more money, a sick exploit of a broken system fueled by inexplicable, unmitigated, nonsensical greed.
While there is no doubt many industries will be shaken up by AI, and GPT 4 is a very impressive product - despite its serious, intractable problems - the current overall directive won’t benefit those in society who need it the most sadly. When I see posts exhalting how AI will change the world, I can’t help but think about for whom the world will be really changed.
