Catching up on Peggy Noonan since resubscribing to the Wall Street Journal, and, well, this hits the nail on the head:
Google is another major developer of AI. It has been accused of monopolistic practices, attempting to keep secret its accidental exposure of user data, actions to avoid scrutiny of how it handles public information, and re-engineering and interfering with its own search results in response to political and financial pressure from interest groups, businesses and governments. Also of misleading publishers and advertisers about the pricing and processes of its ad auctions, and spying on its workers who were organizing employee protests.
These are the people we want in charge of rigorous and meticulous governance of a technology that could upend civilization?
At the dawn of the internet most people didn’t know what it was, but its inventors explained it. It would connect the world literally—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually—leading to greater wisdom and understanding through deeper communication.
No one saw its shadow self. But there was and is a shadow self. And much of it seems to have been connected to the Silicon Valley titans’ strongly felt need to be the richest, most celebrated and powerful human beings in the history of the world. They were, as a group, more or less figures of the left, not the right, and that will and always has had an impact on their decisions.
I am sure that as individuals they have their own private ethical commitments, their own faiths perhaps. Surely as human beings they have consciences, but consciences have to be formed by something, shaped and made mature. It’s never been clear to me from their actions what shaped theirs. I have come to see them the past 40 years as, speaking generally, morally and ethically shallow—uniquely self-seeking and not at all preoccupied with potential harms done to others through their decisions. Also some are sociopaths.
AI will be as benign or malignant as its creators. That alone should throw a fright—“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”—but especially that crooked timber.
She goes on in a follow-up article:
I will be rude here and say that in the past 30 years we have not only come to understand the internet’s and high tech’s steep and brutal downsides—political polarization for profit, the knowing encouragement of internet addiction, the destruction of childhood, a nation that has grown shallower and less able to think—we have come to understand the visionaries who created it all, and those who now govern AI, are only arguably admirable or impressive.
You can’t have spent 30 years reading about them, listening to them, watching their interviews and not understand they’re half mad.
Now, I don’t find that rude in the slightest. It’s flatly true and, if anything, she’s being too nice. As Noonan points at at the start of the first article above, defenders of AI, and of Big Tech in general, are either stupid, preening, or greedy. I’m sure there is a less malicious, more quietly naive category for which “stupid” is too harsh a word, but still conceding its accuracy, I think those three categories pretty much cover it.
Granting all that, and completely agreeing: all of it only matters because the vast majority of us are too busy worrying about our own minute happiness to give a shit.
None of it should really be that surprising. Long before social media or Big Tech took over just about everything, we had Black Friday. In 2021, 180 million shoppers spent $54 billion on Black Friday. As Talbot Brewer recently pointed out:
Just consider what we now do when we set aside our work and gather to express the values that bind us together. Here in the United States, we cut short our Thanksgiving retreat and join long queues in front of big-box stores so we can elbow each other over Black Friday markdowns. And we do this, as often as not, to amass consumer goods for gift exchange at the next family gathering, which (at least nominally) celebrates the birth of a man who counseled his followers to sell all of their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.
It’s all so illogical and grandly stupid — and universal. What sort of bootstrap-pulling, courageous and virtuous gusto are we expecting from ourselves when it comes to any of this tech business?
The guilt of it all is spread so far and wide that I often have a hard time blaming anyone. But more often, I have a harder time not blaming everyone.