Some of America’s wealthiest individuals are starting to worry about pitchforks. Alex Karp, the billionaire chief executive of Palantir Technologies, which builds artificial intelligence-powered data-analysis platforms for companies and governments, told a recent Labour + AI Summit in Washington that the biggest challenge for AI in the US was “political unrest”.
He said: “All of that, ‘Can you make more money?’ — it’s all irrelevant if the country blows up. So, if I was sitting here in private with my peers, I’d be telling them, you guys … the country could blow up politically — and none of us are going to make any money when the country blows up.”
Or, in other words, if the technologists getting wealthier thanks to AI do create tools that lead to swathes of job losses, then the US government’s laissez-faire approach to AI regulation and the wealth accumulation of tech bosses will come under threat from social and political upheaval.
Even Lloyd Blankfein, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, who knows what it’s like to see protesters wielding his head on a stick, last week raised the alarm over economic inequality in the US.
Blankfein, who steered the US investment bank through the global financial crisis, told Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night: “The economic system that we have has done a great job at creating wealth. Now, it’s created wealth by increasing the value of assets, and so people with assets have gotten a lot richer, but the people without assets haven’t participated.”
Has the Iran War with increased gasoline heighten the risk of pitch forks & torches?
In my neck of the woods gasoline is up a buck from 2 or 3 months ago.