I made the mistake Wednesday night of reading Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter before I went to bed.
In it she discussed the incredible damage the DOGE (pronounced dodgy) minions are doing across our government at the behest of Elon Musk — firing employees, cancelling funds already appropriated and approved, and pulling together data that has been carefully kept separate to protect our privacy.
She also pointed out:
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggests Musk’s faith in his AI company is at least part of what’s behind the administration’s devastating cuts to biomedical research. Those who believe in a future centered around AI believe that it will be far more effective than human research scientists, so cutting actual research is efficient. At the same time, Marshall suggests, tech oligarchs find the years-long timelines of actual research and the demands of scientists on peer reviews and careful study frustrating, as they want to put their ideas into practice quickly.
And she added:
If the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is an example of what it looks like when a tech oligarch tries to run a government agency, it’s a cautionary tale. Under Trump the FAA has become entangled with Musk’s SpaceX space technology company and its subsidiary Starlink satellite company, and it appears that the American people are being used to make Musk’s dream come true.
While I’ve been saying from the beginning that the damage done by the dodgy minions has to stop and while I’ve been ranting about the idiocy of so-called AI for some time, I’ve been keeping my worries about what the broligarchs in general might do to us all somewhat separate from my fears about what the grifter’s administration is doing to government.
But reading that post from Dr. Richardson reminded me that it’s all part of the same problem.
There are many terrible things being done to our government and to our people by what Rebecca Solnit calls the Stupid Coup. The nonsense at the FAA is an example of attacking parts of the government for the financial benefit of the person doing the attacking.
But there are also a lot of terrible things being done by those broligarchs to whom most of us are merely NPCs. The faith in so-called AI goes far beyond Musk, and the effort to shove it down our throats is happening everywhere, not just in the government.
I’ve been reading Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. I’ll have more to say about it once I’ve finished, but here’s a link to Dave Karpf’s review.
Becker’s book isn’t the first thing I’ve read about the large language models being touted as AI, but it’s an excellent one, given that he is both an astrophysicist and a science writer. By looking at the shortcomings in the people behind such things as AI, the singularity, effective altruism, and colonization of space, he makes it very clear that their fantasies are not likely to be realized.
Large language models have some uses, but no one is going to make the fantastic amounts of money needed to keep the businesses going from the actual uses of them.
As Cory Doctorow often points out, the biggest threat to workers is not that AI can do your job – it can’t – but that the companies will convince your employer that it can do your job.
I’d like to think employers aren’t that stupid, but given what the people putting on WorldCon this year did with ChatGPT and programming – here’s an update – I’m afraid many people still want to believe in this stuff. I mean, if science fiction people, who should know better, buy into the hype, what can you expect from people who don’t pay close attention to these things.
Undermining health research or government programs by expecting so-called AI to replace people doing the real work will leave all that in tatters. The real question is how much damage are they going to be able to do before sane people are back in authority.
I do think sane people will be back in power at one point. Regimes like this one don’t last, particularly when they’re tanking the economy. (I’d like to think the absolute cruelty they are showing toward people would also be a disqualifying factor, but I’m feeling cynical as I write this so I have more faith in financial pain.)
But we’re going to lose so many people who know what they’re doing and we’re going to have bad technology in their place as well. And if the broligarchs have their way, the problems with that bad tech won’t just be in government. Regardless of what happens with the stupid coup, Musk and the others will still be trying to settle Mars and milk our common resources for their libertarian dreams.
And we’ll still need to deal with climate change and the ever-growing inequities of the current situation while we’re picking up the pieces from everything else.
I say “we.” I hope I’ll still be around to help when we start rebuilding. We’re going to need a lot of people. After all, unlike ChatGPT, people can actually think, and we’re going to need a lot of good thinking.