Morals matter. Ethics matter. Character matters. Bad people create bad societies. AI culture, like Big Tech culture, is riddled with fast and greedy characters. AI is the latest bitcoin, the latest blockchain. It is the latest way scammers, con artists and grifters think they can grift, scam and con. It is the latest magnet for the speedy and the greedy. This doesn’t mean that deep within AI there aren’t profoundly important developments that have the capacity to radically reshape society and our environment. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t many wonderful scientists and developers working on AI. It means that the people who matter, the people who make the decisions, are generally scammers, con artists and ruthless grifters. Bad characters create bad software that creates a bad society.
Bad characters operating with a bad model. Modern AI is advertising. It is born out of the great advertising minds in Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Advertising has always been fake news. Advertising has always been about lying and targeting vulnerable, poorer people, and/or the vulnerabilities in all of us. Advertising is constantly probing for our weaknesses. As one marketer boasted to me: “The best marketing is when I make you buy something and you don’t even know why.” AI truly excels at this sort of manipulation. Freed of having to be truthful, it can search, in milliseconds, through millions of combinations of words or images, to find the exact right combination that triggers a buying reaction from you or your child or your brother or sister or your old and frail mother or father. The truth for AI is the sale, the conversion, the convert, whether it’s selling a trump or a fake skin cream.
Over the years, I have met many of the people behind advertising strategies. They have no problem about what they do. In fact, they think it’s the right thing to do—moving power and money from a sucker who doesn’t deserve to have it because of the very fact they are a sucker, and giving that money and power to smarter, stronger people. The culture that modern AI has been nurtured on is best described by the following quote. It’s from a tech bro who’s very religious and moral and so loves his family, and who wrote a book about how to write clickbait, about how to be a growth hacker:
Some of you will be bothered by this. Shouldn’t people be looking for facts, logic, good buying material, and so on? They probably should be, but those things don’t get good clickthrough rates. Don’t blame me; blame the folly of the human condition. We didn’t make people this way. We’re just advertising to people who are this way.
Many of the worst practices come back to the voracious need for fast growth, for ever greater acceleration. We can bring almost all wrongs back to the door of the Growth Death Cult, and within the halls of mirrors of the Growth Death Cult we will find the priests of eugenics whispering their mantras of godliness. “Many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI [Artificial General Intelligence], resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power, while using the language of ‘safety’ and ‘benefiting humanity’ to evade accountability,” Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres wrote for First Monday. It has often been left to women of color like Gebru to stand in front of the unstoppable train. Her Mastodon profile states that she was “fired from Google for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace and writing about the dangers of large language models.”
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