The mythology of Technology has a special altar for AI, artificial intelligence , which is reverently worshiped as the source of astonishing cost reductions (as human labor is replaced by AI) and the limitless expansion of consumption and profits. AI is the blissful perfection of technology’s natural advance to ever greater powers.
The consensus holds that the advance of AI will lead to a utopia of essentially limitless control of Nature and a cornucopia of leisure and abundance.
If we pull aside the mythology’s curtain, we find that AI mimics human intelligence , and this mimicry is so enthralling that we take it as evidence of actual intelligence. But mimicry of intelligence isn’t intelligence, and so while AI mimicry is a powerful tool, it isn’t intelligent.
The AI programs have limited capacity to discern truth from falsehood , hence their propensity to hallucinate fictions as facts. They are incapable of discerning the difference between statistical variations and fatal errors, and layering on precautionary measures adds additional complexity that becomes another point of failure.
There is also the systemic risk generated by relying on black-box AI to operate systems to the point that humans lose the capacity to modify or rebuild the systems. This over-reliance on AI programs creates the risk of cascading failure not just of digital systems but the real-world infrastructure that now depends on digital systems.
While the neofeudal corporate-state cheers the profits to be reaped by culling human labor on a mass scale, the mining / mimicry of human knowledge has limits. Relying on the AI programs to eliminate all fatal errors is itself a fatal error, and so humans must remain in the decision loop (the OODA loop of observe, orient, decide, act).
If we boil off the mythology and hyperbole, we’re left with another neofeudal structure: the wealthy will be served by humans, and the rest of us will be stuck with low-quality, error-prone AI service with no recourse.
The promoters claim the mass culling of jobs will magically be offset by entire new industries created by AI , echoing the transition from farm labor to factory jobs. But the AI dragon will eat its own tail, for it creates few jobs or profits that can be taxed to pay people for not working (Universal Basic Income).
Perhaps the most consequential limit to AI is that it will do nothing to reverse humanity’s most pressing problems. It can’t clean up the Great Pacific Trash Gyre , or limit the 450 million tons of mostly unrecycled plastic spewed every year, or reverse climate change, or clean low-Earth orbits of the thousands of high-velocity bits of dangerous detritus, or remake the highly profitable waste is growth Landfill Economy into a sustainable global system, or eliminate all the sources of what I term Anti-Progress . It will simply add new sources of systemic risk, waste and neofeudal exploitation.