Jensen Huang and his Nvidia AI chips have created a monster.
The monster is “Artificial General Intelligence,” or AGI.
Last year I called this “the lie of the year.” Since then it has grown to become America’s greatest danger.
Just as Victor Frankenstein tried to help mankind by bringing a human being back to life, Huang has tried to help mankind by enabling intelligence that mimics, even exceeds, the reasoning power of the human brain.
Computers have always exceeded humans in pulling insight from large databases. This was the plot of the 1957 Tracy-Hepburn movie Desk Set. Hepburn’s TV network researcher feare
d Tracy’s mainframe computer would make her department obsolete.
Nothing has changed since then, except the size of the databases and the hubris of technologists. People like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen believe they can build a world where people are unnecessary. What they fail to even ask, because I don’t think they care, is what people will be doing in that world. Andreessen, for instance, whose team built the first NCSA browser, Mosaic, recently retweeted an attack on Universal Basic Income. If you’re not going to make yourself useful to your AI and robotic overlords, in other words, drop dead.
This is the motive force behind Trump 2024. This is what’s different from 2020. Yesterday’s fascists just wanted to overturn the election. Today’s TechnoFascists seek to condemn those they consider “useless.”
But who or what defines useless?
TechnoFascism
Today’s TechnoFascists define usefulness in one way, the market. If you’re not working on behalf of money, or the interests of money, then you’re useless and you don’t deserve to live.
The naivete, the stupidity, of this attitude is astounding.
In Andreessen’s little world, Van Gogh would not exist. Art for the sake of art has no monetary value. The true value of art is only seen over time, often long after the artist is gone. The same is true for every branch of thought. The same is true for every university, except for its scientific research departments, and even these often close off any inquiry that doesn’t deliver a quick return.
Idealism comes in many forms that would be crushed under TechnoFascism. Journalists searching for truth, as opposed to serving power, have no place in Andreessen’s world. The homeless, and anyone who can’t find their way in the TechnoFascist world, will be ground down. Maybe they can be burned to make the electricity that fires the AI factories of the future.
These monsters have the nerve to call what they believe “techno-optimism.” https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
Combine the financial power of the TechnoFascists with the high dudgeon of the Christian Nationalists, add the naked authoritarianism of the Leonard Leos and the sheer mindlessness of the Trump Deadheads, and you indeed have a close election.
You have an election that Vladimir Putin can win.
Jensen Can You Hear Me?
Political systems include the economy and all technology. They are meant to serve people, not just to control them. What is key to the Declaration of Independence doesn’t lie in its declaration of rights, but in what comes after:
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”
I know Jensen Huang is busy right now, but it would be nice if he spoke to this point. What is the purpose of AI? Who does it serve?
