Arguments about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) have become almost religious in nature.
They shouldn’t be. It’s not a question of if but when, and exactly what AGI will look like when it’s here.
To the Tech Bros, and their Amen Corner, AGI means workers can go to hell. Software engineers, writers, artists of all kinds, become redundant, a proletariat that can be talked down to and given bread and circuses.
The skeptics share this vision. They’re afraid AGI will make knowledge workers redundant, destroy the middle class, creating an authoritarian state we can never get rid of because we can never outwit it.
Making this worse is that, despite mostly growing up middle class, the TechBros use the language of fear and intimidation, certain of their economic might and political power.
Sergey Brin, for instance, wants Google workers to be in the office 60 hours a week, grinding away to make him competitive. Sounds awful when he says it, but it’s just what Googlers used to do 20 years ago, when the company brought in the pool tables, the free food, and (most important) the beds. Somehow, we assume that, when Brin describes what he wants, he’s expecting engineers to be his slaves. I don’t think he is. But having been out of action for nearly a decade he has lost his connection to the work he’s involved with.
Elon and Sam
It doesn’t help that Elon Musk and Sam Altman, whom I talked about a few days ago, make Sergey sound like Father Christmas.
Elon isn’t half as clever as he makes himself out to be. With the mask off he really is Henry Ford, the Ford who massacred the homeless, who had goons attack union organizers, and who made common cause with the KKK and Nazis.
Altman is just a Musk wannabe, the child to the man. On the one hand he wants a “gentler” antitrust policy. On the other hand, he wants open source software from China banned. He sees no contradiction.
This is Idiocy. No wonder no one wants to work for him.
Altman also insists “super intelligence” is right around the corner, offering for evidence a short story he was struck by. That’s not to say that it can’t get better. But why does it need to be?
Class vs. Class
What the AI Supremacists have accidentally done is whip up a class struggle.
Working on AI has been defined as an elite activity, while software development has been defined as a proletarian one. Much as 200 years ago, Manchester factories created managers and wage slaves, not just among former hand workers but those who directed the work. Everything went to the top, and it’s from that environment that Marx and Engels rose, although we remember it more today for Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”
It’s not necessary. AI won’t replace software engineers. It will just lead them to higher levels of abstraction. You go from writing code to managing code bases. Understanding what AI is supposed to be doing requires skills from English and the humanities people like Musk and Altman simply don’t have.
No one is prepared for the AI Revolution. We’ve gone into the same corners we were in when the Industrial Revolution started. Both sides are ignorant of their roles and how to manage the result.
What Jim Whitehurst Taught Me
A decade ago, when Cloud was getting started, Jim Whitehurst told me how Red Hat and its Open Source contemporaries were building the standard nuts-and-bolts of the Information Age.
Standard nuts, bolts, and screws were required for the Industrial Revolution to produce the ships, trains, and cars of the 19th century. They were what let people like Isambard Kingdom Brunel loose on the world.
My point is that AI is a tool, or a set of tools. It’s not the finished product, but the means to an end. There’s an enormous amount of work to be done, by thinkers and engineers of all kinds, using AI to build the bridges, dreadnoughts, and even rocket ships our grandchildren will ride on.
It’s time to get past the religious and political nonsense, the false divisions between rulers and the ruled, and get back to work, together, building the future.
Because it ain’t here yet.
