AI Utopianism Masks Tech Billionaires’ Fear: Douglas Rushkoff

For media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, the shiny guarantees of a silicon-powered utopia are little greater than a smokescreen for an elitist exit technique.

Rushkoff, a professor of media idea and digital economics at Queens Faculty/CUNY, and the writer of Survival of the Richest and Workforce Human, made the remarks throughout a current interview on the Repatterning Podcast with host Arden Leigh. Within the interview, he provided a scathing critique of the tech billionaire class, arguing that these evangelizing synthetic intelligence are much less keen on “saving the world” than in surviving its potential collapse introduced on by the know-how they unleashed.

“The billionaires are afraid of being hoisted on their very own petard,” Rushkoff stated. “They’re afraid of getting to cope with the repercussions of their actions.”

He pointed to tech titans, together with Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, reportedly investing in bunker building, whereas on the similar time SpaceX CEO Elon Musk preaches house colonization, betraying their public optimism, and secretly they anticipate social and environmental collapse somewhat than a technological golden age.



“What they’ve completed by constructing their bunkers and revealing their numerous house plans is that they’ve uncovered the truth that they don’t consider that the issues they’re making are going to avoid wasting the world,” Rushkoff stated. “They consider that the issues they’re making may save them and that the remainder of us are happening.”

Rushkoff additionally challenged the notion that AI is decreasing human labor. Fairly, he stated, the know-how shifts work into much less seen and extra exploitative varieties somewhat than eliminating it.

“We’re not really seeing a discount in labor due to AI,” Rushkoff stated. “What we’re seeing is a downskilling of labor.”

Whereas technologists, together with Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev, argue that AI will gas a surge of recent jobs and industries. Rushkoff stated the worldwide infrastructure required to maintain AI programs, from mining to knowledge preparation, is a core contradiction in claims about the advantages automation will carry.

“You want a lot of slaves to get uncommon earth medals, and also you want a lot of individuals in China and Pakistan to tag all this knowledge,” Rushkoff stated. “There are hundreds and hundreds of individuals behind AI. We’re going to must have individuals constructing energy crops and determining new power sources and digging up extra coal and getting extra oil. To this point, there are heaps and plenty of jobs—simply not jobs that we wish to have.”

Rushkoff argued that this hidden labor undercuts guarantees of a post-work future, at the same time as inventive {and professional} staff face displacement. The outcome, he stated, just isn’t liberation however a redistribution of hurt.

He additionally criticized the ideology driving elite AI narratives, describing it as a type of transhumanism that treats most individuals as disposable.

“They’ve a type of faith,” Rushkoff stated. “The place they have a look at you and me as being within the larval stage of humanity.”

In that worldview, he stated, rich technologists think about themselves escaping organic limits by means of machines whereas the remainder of humanity turns into expendable.

“They’re those which might be sprouting wings and getting off the planet or importing to the cloud,” Rushkoff stated, whereas “the remainder of us are solely matter, gas for his or her escape.”

Others within the laptop science and know-how discipline rejected the concept that Silicon Valley leaders are knowingly concealing a collapse.

“I’d keep away from extremes, as a result of most likely the reality is within the center,” David Bray instructed Decrypt.

Chair of the Accelerator and a distinguished fellow on the Stimson Middle, a nonpartisan assume tank centered on safety, governance, and rising tech, Bray pushed again on the concept that tech leaders are knowingly utilizing utopian AI narratives to cover an impending collapse, warning that such interpretations danger “discarding a very hopeful message for a very dire message.”

Bray did, nonetheless, acknowledge that many optimistic claims about AI oversimplify what’s required to handle large-scale technological change.

“Once I hear individuals give a utopian imaginative and prescient, on the one hand, I have a good time that it’s not concern mongering,” he stated. “However I do fear that it’s lacking the truth that there are issues that have to go in place past simply the tech itself.”

Bray echoed Rushkoff’s warning that the prices of AI are sometimes obscured, pointing to the environmental injury and human exploitation embedded within the provide chains that make superior applied sciences doable.

“We’re more and more in an interconnected world, and we want to pay attention to what I’d name a farm-to-table view,” he stated.

Bray framed the AI transition as disruptive however acquainted, tracing a line again to the Eighteen Nineties, railroads, telegraph machines, and the economic revolution. “We’ve been right here earlier than,” he stated. “We’ll get by means of this, however there will likely be a interval of upheaval.”

In line with Lisa Simon, chief economist at workforce intelligence firm Revelio Labs, labor market knowledge already displays elements of that upheaval.

“Probably the most extremely uncovered occupations have seen the largest fall in demand, particularly in entry-level roles,” Simon instructed Decrypt, noting that the impact is concentrated the place staff have the least leverage.

On the decrease finish of the wage spectrum, Simon stated the dynamics look nearer to direct displacement, and as staff use AI instruments to extend output, employers might merely want fewer individuals.

“We’re seeing this largely in low wage work, the place the complexity of duties is slightly decrease and the power to switch whole chunks of an occupation by means of automation is a given,” she stated, including that these roles are additionally seeing among the weakest wage development.

Simon additionally stated most of the prices tied to AI infrastructure stay poorly accounted for. “I don’t assume the environmental price to those large knowledge facilities is totally appreciated,” she stated.

Whereas Simon stated she stays broadly optimistic about AI’s long-term potential, she framed the present second as one which calls for coverage intervention. To protect social cohesion amid displacement and uneven positive aspects, she stated, governments may have to think about “extra redistributionary insurance policies like common primary revenue.

“I don’t assume it’s by hook or by crook that issues will likely be utopian or dystopian,” NYU professor Vasant Dhar instructed Decrypt.

Dhar, who teaches on the Stern College of Enterprise and the Middle for Information Science, stated AI is prone to produce uneven outcomes somewhat than a clear post-work future. He warned of what he known as a “bifurcation of humanity,” the place the know-how “amplifies some individuals” and “turbo costs productiveness,” whereas others turn out to be disempowered, utilizing AI “as a crutch versus an amplifier.”

He stated these positive aspects additionally carry displacement dangers. “I feel we’ll see loads of job destruction,” Dhar stated, including that it stays unclear what varieties of recent jobs will emerge to switch these losses.

In the end, Dhar stated outcomes will depend upon governance somewhat than know-how alone. “The outcomes will depend upon the alternatives we make,” he stated, asking, “Will we govern AI, or will they govern us?”