AI’s Dirty Secret
In the loudly proclaimed ethical and safety-conscious deliberations of leading AI-capitalists, attention is now given to AI as an ‘existential risk’ (Bostrom 2014: 4). Such risk arises largely because of the possibility of an AGI evolving into an ASI beyond human control. The issue is not malevolence (Skynet) but rather efficiency. Nick Bostrom’s (2014: 123–5) famous example is of an AI instructed to make paper clips that attains superintelligence and uses its ever-extrapolating powers to convert the entire universe into paper clips, obliterating humanity as collateral damage. The point is a serious one, even if currently (we hope) remote; not only could ASI’s ‘integral accidents’ – Paul Virilio’s (2000) term for malfunctions so intrinsic to a given techno-system they must be considered a feature, not a bug – be devastating, they might not be ‘accidents’ at all.
However, Bostrom’s prediction – and other similar warnings, such as that of nanotechnologist Eric K. Drexler’s (1987) earlier ‘grey goo’ scenario, in which out-of-control self-replicating nano-robots consume all biomass on Earth while building more of themselves – can also be interpreted in a wider sense. This is to understand them not literally but metaphorically, or rather both literally and metaphorically, as simultaneously identifying a concrete hazard and providing a parable of runaway economic growth and universal commodification. The real ‘paper clip is profit, and the manifest danger of AI is not only that of an ‘integral accident’ but equally or more of its intended use as a means of intensifying and accelerating the production and circulation of goods that is destroying the environment, annihilating species, and, for humans, heating the planet to civilizational, perhaps existential, limits. This untrammelled economic growth is of course the very profit-maximizing process that would lie behind an unlimited order of paper clips, or of self-replicating automata, so the specific and general form of ‘accident’, or rather efficiency, are related – capital itself constitutes an existential risk.
conclusion: communist ai
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