AI Utopianism Masks Tech Billionaires’ Fear: Douglas Rushkoff

For media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, the shiny guarantees of a silicon-powered utopia are little greater than a smokescreen for an elitist exit technique.

Rushkoff, a professor of media idea and digital economics at Queens Faculty/CUNY, and the creator of Survival of the Richest and Workforce Human, made the remarks throughout a current interview on the Repatterning Podcast with host Arden Leigh. Within the interview, he provided a scathing critique of the tech billionaire class, arguing that these evangelizing synthetic intelligence are much less occupied with “saving the world” than in surviving its potential collapse introduced on by the know-how they unleashed.

“The billionaires are afraid of being hoisted on their very own petard,” Rushkoff mentioned. “They’re afraid of getting to cope with the repercussions of their actions.”

He pointed to tech titans, together with Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, reportedly investing in bunker building, whereas on the identical time SpaceX CEO Elon Musk preaches area colonization, betraying their public optimism, and secretly they count on social and environmental collapse reasonably than a technological golden age.

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“What they’ve performed by constructing their bunkers and revealing their varied area plans is that they’ve uncovered the truth that they don’t imagine that the issues they’re making are going to avoid wasting the world,” Rushkoff mentioned. “They imagine that the issues they’re making may save them and that the remainder of us are taking place.”

Rushkoff additionally challenged the notion that AI is lowering human labor. Quite, he mentioned, the know-how shifts work into much less seen and extra exploitative varieties reasonably than eliminating it.

“We’re not truly seeing a discount in labor due to AI,” Rushkoff mentioned. “What we’re seeing is a downskilling of labor.”

Whereas technologists, together with Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev, argue that AI will gasoline a surge of latest jobs and industries. Rushkoff mentioned the worldwide infrastructure required to maintain AI methods, from mining to knowledge preparation, is a core contradiction in claims about the advantages automation will carry.

“You want a lot of slaves to get uncommon earth medals, and also you want a lot of individuals in China and Pakistan to tag all this knowledge,” Rushkoff mentioned. “There are 1000’s and 1000’s of individuals behind AI. We’re going to should have individuals constructing energy vegetation and determining new power sources and digging up extra coal and getting extra oil. To this point, there are tons and plenty of jobs—simply not jobs that we need to have.”

Rushkoff argued that this hidden labor undercuts guarantees of a post-work future, at the same time as inventive {and professional} employees face displacement. The end result, he mentioned, just isn’t liberation however a redistribution of hurt.

He additionally criticized the ideology driving elite AI narratives, describing it as a type of transhumanism that treats most individuals as disposable.

“They’ve a sort of faith,” Rushkoff mentioned. “The place they take a look at you and me as being within the larval stage of humanity.”

In that worldview, he mentioned, rich technologists think about themselves escaping organic limits via machines whereas the remainder of humanity turns into expendable.

“They’re those which might be sprouting wings and getting off the planet or importing to the cloud,” Rushkoff mentioned, whereas “the remainder of us are solely matter, gasoline for his or her escape.”

Others within the laptop science and know-how discipline rejected the concept that Silicon Valley leaders are knowingly concealing a collapse.

“I’d keep away from extremes, as a result of most likely the reality is within the center,” David Bray advised Decrypt.

Chair of the Accelerator and a distinguished fellow on the Stimson Middle, a nonpartisan assume tank centered on safety, governance, and rising tech, Bray pushed again on the concept that tech leaders are knowingly utilizing utopian AI narratives to cover an impending collapse, warning that such interpretations danger “discarding a very hopeful message for a very dire message.”

Bray did, nonetheless, acknowledge that many optimistic claims about AI oversimplify what’s required to handle large-scale technological change.

“After I hear individuals give a utopian imaginative and prescient, on the one hand, I have fun that it’s not worry mongering,” he mentioned. “However I do fear that it’s lacking the truth that there are issues that must go in place past simply the tech itself.”

Bray echoed Rushkoff’s warning that the prices of AI are sometimes obscured, pointing to the environmental harm and human exploitation embedded within the provide chains that make superior applied sciences potential.

“We’re more and more in an interconnected world, and we want to pay attention to what I’d name a farm-to-table view,” he mentioned.

Bray framed the AI transition as disruptive however acquainted, tracing a line again to the Eighteen Nineties, railroads, telegraph machines, and the economic revolution. “We’ve been right here earlier than,” he mentioned. “We are going to get via this, however there shall be a interval of upheaval.”

In line with Lisa Simon, chief economist at workforce intelligence firm Revelio Labs, labor market knowledge already displays components of that upheaval.

“Probably the most extremely uncovered occupations have seen the most important fall in demand, particularly in entry-level roles,” Simon advised Decrypt, noting that the impact is concentrated the place employees have the least leverage.

On the decrease finish of the wage spectrum, Simon mentioned the dynamics look nearer to direct displacement, and as employees use AI instruments to extend output, employers might merely want fewer individuals.

“We’re seeing this largely in low wage work, the place the complexity of duties is slightly decrease and the flexibility to exchange complete chunks of an occupation via automation is a given,” she mentioned, including that these roles are additionally seeing a number of the weakest wage progress.

Simon additionally mentioned most of the prices tied to AI infrastructure stay poorly accounted for. “I don’t assume the environmental price to those huge knowledge facilities is absolutely appreciated,” she mentioned.

Whereas Simon mentioned she stays broadly optimistic about AI’s long-term potential, she framed the present second as one which calls for coverage intervention. To protect social cohesion amid displacement and uneven good points, she mentioned, governments may have to contemplate “extra redistributionary insurance policies like common fundamental revenue.

“I don’t assume it’s come what may that issues shall be utopian or dystopian,” NYU professor Vasant Dhar advised Decrypt.

Dhar, who teaches on the Stern College of Enterprise and the Middle for Knowledge Science, mentioned AI is more likely to produce uneven outcomes reasonably than a clear post-work future. He warned of what he referred to as a “bifurcation of humanity,” the place the know-how “amplifies some individuals” and “turbo prices productiveness,” whereas others develop into disempowered, utilizing AI “as a crutch versus an amplifier.”

He mentioned these good points additionally carry displacement dangers. “I feel we’ll see loads of job destruction,” Dhar mentioned, including that it stays unclear what sorts of latest jobs will emerge to exchange these losses.

Finally, Dhar mentioned outcomes will rely on governance reasonably than know-how alone. “The outcomes will rely on the alternatives we make,” he mentioned, asking, “Will we govern AI, or will they govern us?”