(Photo by Christian Wiediger | Unsplash)
Last week one of Anthropic’s departing AI researchers Jacob Coxon gave an interview to WIRED, saying that in his view, and in the view of his former colleagues, there’s a non-zero chance that AI wipes out every human on earth within the next decade.
In a sane world, claiming you created a doomsday device with a ten-year timer would get your ass hauled to a Congressional hearing, maybe even the Hague for shits and giggles. Instead, the big question (at least according to the spiritual husks in my LinkedIn newsfeed) about the book-shredding, earth-cooking, porn-churning death machine that Coxon helped spring to life was: how will this affect Anthropic’s IPO?
Cool.
To be clear, I think Coxon’s prophecies are utterly hollow. For one thing, you don’t have to wait a decade to experience the life-altering devastation of genAI. You could live in a disenfranchised neighborhood that is now forced to host the vibrating, brutalist monstrosity that is an AI data center, as it feasts on electricity and defecates in your ground water. You could lose a loved one to the abyssal entanglement of chat-induced psychosis. You could have your job cut, your work scraped, your voice mimicked, your nudes fabricated, your life hacked. And if that fails, you can enjoy being locked in the backseat of a slow-rolling climate disaster, now with a brick on the gas pedal because your grandma in south Florida wanted a few more pics of Jesus petting her shih tzu.
There’s no need to worry about genAI creating hell on earth in the future. As an AI-hallucinated Jesus might say (after he’s done ruffling Fifi’s little mop top): hell is already at hand.
Secondly, nothing Coxon said in that interview was more substantial than the weird, reckless, apocalypse cult-coded PR campaigns that his former bosses at OpenAI and Anthropic have been hawking since day one. And as somebody with almost two decades of PR and marketing work under his belt, may I ask: what the fuck? Why is any company allowed to advertise the world-ending, unpredictable deadliness of their product with this level of impunity? “This will destroy you, buy it anyway” has never been great advertising.
The reality is, they feel this impunity because we, the everyday computer user, are not their customer, if we ever were. A dangerous system is a powerful system, and to many corporations and governments, the words “dangerous” and “power” both equate to domination. Never mind whether or not an LLM is actually either of those things, so long as Wall Street buys the grift for a little bit longer. Sure, stoking fears of annihilation in the general populace is a shame, but what’s a little psychological collateral damage, compared to the payout of an inflated IPO, before the bubble finally bursts?
No hard feelings, right, humanity? You should have seen the look on your faces.