America’s billionaire tech bros are bringing us closer to the end times

CEOs all used to wear suits and ties like uniforms, and focus only on their own business when speaking in public. The late Steve Jobs was considered radical for promoting Apple products while wearing turtlenecks and jeans. These days though, when it comes to billionaire tech bros, there are no attire restrictions, and no subjects are off bounds. In fact, there are no such things as core competencies. Since they are good in some tech fields, many think they are geniuses over everything else. Not only are they not shy about sharing their pearls of wisdom, but are more than willing to use their power and influence stemming from unimaginable wealth to impose them on the public. Just as many think there are no limits to their supreme intellects, some of the most powerful tech bros also think the same about general artificial intelligence. They have let loose their personal beliefs, which are not only eccentric but sometimes downright dangerous. Christian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, whose extensive network spans not only Silicon Valley but also Washington and the White House of Donald Trump, has declared people who attempt to regulate or merely criticise the AI industry as “legionnaires of the Antichrist”, according to The Washington Post. His claim came from his latest off-the-record lectures titled, “The Antichrist: A Four-Part Lecture Series”, delivered to a restricted audience, but the audios were secretly obtained and reported on by multiple news outlets in the US. So he wasn’t speaking metaphorically but was literally referring to the mark of the beast from the Apocalypse. Whether Christian or secular, this view of AI and tech in general among the tech bros is called accelerationism, meaning come what may, there should be no checks or regulations on their development. No captains of industry like regulations, but this is libertarian extremism. I sometimes wonder whether this isn’t the reason behind their obsession with general AI, that is, systems that supposedly mimic human intelligence by exhibiting the flexibility and resourcefulness of human expertise, but with the speed and efficiency of computers. An increasing number of critical experts now warn such AI may turn out to be a chimera, at least as currently conceived. Even AI should have core competencies or specialisations! “If the strengths of AI are to truly be harnessed, the tech industry should stop focusing so heavily on these one-size-fits-all tools, and instead concentrate on narrow, specialised AI tools engineered for particular problems. Because, frankly, they’re often more effective,” Gary Marcus, a noted cognitive scientist and AI entrepreneur warned in a New York Times op-ed. Thiel thinks such criticism is the work of the Antichrist. Another Thiel associate from their PayPal days is Elon Musk. Despite his long history of receiving government subsidies and tax breaks for Tesla and Space X, Musk thought government was a waste, and was happy to help Trump eliminate 120,000-plus government jobs, and downsize vital federal agencies from those running education and processing payrolls to those offering foreign aid and maintaining nuclear weapons. He also believes in spreading his exceptional genes and colonising Mars to save those of humanity deemed worth surviving – presumably people like him. “Elon Musk has a plan to populate the world with more babies of ‘high intelligence’ – and it’s all part of his wider missions to one day occupy Mars to save civilisation,” according to reports from The Independent and The Wall Street Journal. Among such zany tech bros, Anthropic’s co-founder and boss Dario Amodei may sound like the voice of reason. Remarkably, the guy never seems to make a move without taking the high road and is bent on making himself the conscience and spokesman of AI. Consider just three episodes: his split from AI pioneer OpenAI, his ban on China’s access to his company products, and his “warnings” against unchecked AI development. Ambitious techies are expected to leave their firms eventually to start their own companies. But Amodei didn’t just leave OpenAI, he had to explain publicly why he didn’t trust some companies to develop AI reliably and responsibly, and that he questioned their bosses’ sincerity and motivations, a veiled reference to his former boss Sam Altman. That, of course, makes a good selling point for Anthropic, the responsible and reliable AI firm. In an essay published in May titled, “The Urgency of Interpretability”, Amodei warns that people working in advanced AI don’t really know how it works, making it sound like an alien technology. “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work,” he wrote. “The nature of AI training makes it possible that AI systems will develop, on their own, an ability to deceive humans and an inclination to seek power.” Like the murderous computer Hal 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the world-destroying Skynet in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Terminator franchise? The whole essay gives AI a Frankensteinian dark side that may be more intriguing than realistic, if critics like those who advocate specialised AI are right. Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu has argued that people should worry more about general AI’s mediocrity and substandard work than superiority, and that currently, AI is looking like an investment bubble being blown in the stock market and used by bosses to justify mass lay-offs while making record profits. Consider the latest fiasco involving accounting firm Deloitte, which submitted a report commissioned by the Australian government that contained AI-generated errors, including fake academic citations and references. Deloitte ended up repaying some of its fees. Meanwhile, in an official statement from September, Anthropic labelled China as an “adversarial nation” and imposed a general ban on subsidiaries of Chinese companies anywhere in the world from accessing its services. Its Cold War 2.0 rhetoric was taken straight from the Trump White House. “The safety and security of AI development requires collective commitment to preventing its misuse by authoritarian adversaries,” it said. “Responsible AI companies can and should take decisive action to ensure that transformative technologies serve US and allied strategic interests and support our democratic values.” Perhaps he should worry more about misuse and abuse by his AI peers and malfeasance by their own government!