You could be forgiven for thinking the robots have taken over already.
Your boss’ boss can’t stop talking about ChatGPT. The world’s most famous artificial intelligence developer, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is apparently unfireable by his human handlers. Long-term thinkers have given us a couple of options about how to consider AI’s future, though in the short term, they don’t seem like options at all.
Option A: The marketplace could develop AI capable of civilization-scale tasks like interplanetary colonization. We must build AI that serves humanity!
Option B: The marketplace could develop AI capable of civilization-scale tasks like enslaving — or exterminating — people. We must build AI that serves humanity!
AI might be new, but some philosophies of its inevitability are a bit older and don’t like revealing their age. Many people once believed it was their job to help usher human history toward its scientifically rational destination. We called them Marxists. Today, it’s the venture capitalists with the accelerationist manifestos, the accusations of false consciousness and the impatience with the bourgeois sentimentalists (novelists and journalists, for example) who stand in the future’s way.