A reader wrote to me today about artificial intelligence:
“What strikes me is that everyone is excited about the wonderful savings it will bring. And nothing else.
Nowhere do you read that it might allow us to shorten the workweek. Or that it could enable women to devote more time to motherhood. Or that it might make possible bold projects for which we have so far lacked the capacity. None of this is even considered worth discussing. All we hear is that people will be laid off and profits will rise.”
He is, of course, right. And this is precisely what real civilizational decline looks like. Far more so than a handful of deviants running naked in a parade. We have come to regard it as entirely self-evident that the purpose of new technologies is to increase corporate profits and make life worse for the majority. We take this so much for granted that we hardly even talk about it anymore.
What makes this even more disturbing is that a large share of investment in artificial intelligence comes from governments—that is, from taxpayers. Yes: taxpayers are spending their money in order to raise corporate profits and worsen the living conditions of most people. In the jargon of neoliberal economists, this is called “competitiveness.”
What would a normal approach look like? A normal approach would begin with a serious public discussion about what kind of society and way of life we actually want in the age of artificial intelligence. Only then would we move on to questions of how to achieve those goals and how to divide responsibilities among the state, private enterprise, and large corporations.
Here in the Czech Republic, such a debate would have to take into account the power of global giants and the fact that compromises may be unavoidable. Compromise is part of life. But that is still something fundamentally different from accepting the worst possible outcome as the only option.
I am afraid that today’s Western reality is already worse than any hypothetical rule by machines.