Joel Kotkin

Artificial Intelligence is the crack cocaine of the digital age

Can we expect algorithms to increase productivity?

Credit: Getty images

The rise of artificial intelligence may be rescuing the tech oligarchy, but its current trajectory could hasten our steps towards what virtual reality guru Rony Abovitz calls ‘computational autocracy’. The new possibilities posed by AI represent a force multiplier for the large tech firms. Musk, Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft already seem poised to dominate the field.

Yet the emerging politics of AI are likely to be confusing. Even its architects like Sam Altman, chairman and CEO of OpenAI, the company which developed ChatGPT, recently warned that about an ‘existential risk’ to humanity. This could become even more serious when AI morphs into what is referred to ‘artificial general intelligence’, where ever more autonomous ‘smarter than human’ machines perform more tasks without human input.  

The current trajectory of AI seems to be as a force multiplier for bad things

Of course, most tech oligarchs themselves – Reid Hoffman, John Doerr and much of the venture ‘community’ – see AI as what may ‘save humanity’. This is the line taken by the Financial Times, suggesting the dawn of a new boom that will benefit humanity, albeit with the loss of a mere 300 million jobs.

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