Brian Merchant: This is the gentle singularity? (eviscerating OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's latest mini-manifesto)

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https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/this-is-the-gentle-singularity

Scathing comments about Altman doing his usual con job about a coming tech utopia at the same time he's soliciting funds from the Saudis, partnering with Trump's military, talking about "harnessing the collective will and wisdom of people" on how to use AI while lobbying for federal legislation to keep any level of government from regulating AI companies for at least ten years, and watching AI slop art and video "used to make protests against state oppression look like war zones, and protestors like thuggish criminals."

-snip-

... It may not be Altman’s worst fabrication yet, but it may be the most insulting. It’s not just that Sam Altman’s touched and humble reluctant prophet schtick is wearing impossibly thin, but the audacity of declaring a “gentle” singularity in service of soliciting funds from a nation that executes dissident journalists, as his company grafts itself onto Donald Trump’s department of defense on the brink of all-out war. Altman wants us to look out the window and be assured that this is the gentle singularity?

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-OpenAI has sought out funding from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two regimes with some of the worst records on human rights in the world. In particular, the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, from which OpenAI is reportedly soliciting investment, has been linked to human rights violations by orgs like Human Rights Watch. Not only does PIF fund deadly megaprojects like NEOM, which has claimed the lives of 21,000 workers, but it was used to help facilitate the Saudis’ murder by of Jamal Khashoggi. Is this the gentle singularity? The same one on the verge of being financed by regimes that bonesaw dissenting journalists and overwork migrants to death in the desert?

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The major players in AI (OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft) are above all bent on concentrating power and capital—again, just take a scroll through the above list of OpenAI’s moves in just the last week or two—as rapidly as they can, and by brute force if necessary. They are doing so by partnering with governments embracing authoritarianism and crushing dissent, signing contracts with a military preparing for—or at the very least—abetting, war, and teaming up with fossil fuel companies in the time of climate crisis. And AI-generated art is a pillar, as Gareth Watkins put it, of the modern aesthetics of fascism. It can be used to bend depictions of reality to whatever whims one desires; warped as the product may be, it’s fundamentally truth-proof.

We cannot separate the AI products—text and image generators capable of producing cheap and voluminous content—or the companies building them, from these contexts. Or from the fact that they are at root automation products that are not yet close to being profitable, and thus demand new mass markets and exemption from regulation. Thus OpenAI heralding the wisdom of crowds to decide how to use AI out of one corner of its mouth while lobbying to shut down any lawmaking around AI period from the other. Thus OpenAI’s enthusiastic partnering up with an administration that uses its image-generating tools to mock and degrade the powerless.

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I looked at Sam's silly manifesto

https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

in which he declares that "ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived." Think how important that makes him as CEO of the company that created ChatGPT. No wonder he said in a recent interview that he has the coolest and most important job in history: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220304330

He promises utopia after a rough patch of a few decades:

The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.

If history is any guide, we will figure out new things to do and new things to want, and assimilate new tools quickly (job change after the industrial revolution is a good recent example). Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other. People have a long-term important and curious advantage over AI: we are hard-wired to care about other people and what they think and do, and we don’t care very much about machines.

Remember, he's talking about tech lords and the wonderful Saudi and Trump regimes who "care about other people" and will be "so much richer" they'll be "able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before."

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