The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here | Compact

Americans do not care for artificial intelligence. Recent polling shows that their attitudes mostly range from ambivalence to horror. Some observers have suggested that opposition to AI is due to poor PR from industry leaders. If tech titans hadn’t been so convinced that boasting of their apocalyptic powers was the best way to raise capital, the argument goes, then the American public would be on board. Chinese public opinion, for instance, is considerably more favorable.<br>But these discrepancies can be read another way. The taste for liberty is not independent of culture and history. China has not known freedom for some time, but citizens of the United States have a long experience of it. It is a testament to Americans’ retention of the spirit of liberty that they mistrust AI so much. The various gripes against AI are manifestations of a largely inarticulate intuition that its widespread adoption cannot be reconciled with a free society. Americans are groping toward the realization that, even if AI does not end life on earth, it will destroy our way of life.<br>In order to make the case against AI, one need only quote the industry’s leaders. They have foretold the creation of a “permanent underclass” once AI agents (imminently, they think) surpass us in all cognitive capacities, and have long warned that misaligned AI could even lead to the extinction of humanity. This is a far cry from anything America has seen before from its captains of industry. Andrew Carnegie never promised to bring on the apocalypse. While industry leaders have softened their rhetoric of late, now disavowing the goal of complete human economic obsolescence, the major AI corporations remain officially committed to the development of artificial general intelligence, defined as an AI system that “outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” Already, AI is outpacing what humans can do in many research areas, and AI-generated text and music are overwhelming the digital landscape.<br>It is impossible to know what will actually come to pass. But given the extraordinary pace at which the technology is progressing, it would be foolish to underrate AI’s disruptive capacity. The present moment is awash in schemes for regulating AI, some in radical ways. Plans for partial nationalization of the AI companies, endorsed by figures from right-populist guru Steve Bannon to leftist hero Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.); Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s (R.-Tenn.) sketch of regulations that will protect “children, creators, conservatives, and communities”; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D.-NY) proposed moratorium on data center construction; the Trump administration’s recent interventions to halt the distribution of new models deemed to jeopardize national security; the escalating calls for an international treaty to ban superintelligence—these are all salutary signs of an awakening to the threats that AI poses.<br>And yet even these critics do not seem fully to reckon with the fact that AI portends not merely adverse economic or security impacts, but an irrevocable change in human life. Even now, AI is having deleterious effects that legislation to redistribute income or transfer control of the technology will do little to address. In particular, the most vocal skeptics have not fully reckoned with how anthropomorphic AI—models that mimic human personality traits, emotional states, and patterns of thought, as currently commercially available generative AI models do—is currently in the process of unsettling human psychology and the social fabric.<br>“There are also good reasons to oppose generative AI as we already know it.”<br>In other words, the present AI resistance speaks almost entirely of preventing risks still to come. But there are also good reasons to oppose generative AI as we already know it. It is necessary to oppose not just what AI may become and will likely do to the country, but what it is now and is already doing to our society.<br>Given what we have already seen of AI, we can be confident that its widespread adoption will create a less free society, a less virtuous people, and a degraded culture. A movement recognizing these facts would not call merely for caution and regulation, but for limiting the diffusion throughout civil society of anthropomorphic AI that competes with human authors and artists in creating new text, audio, and images, and for ending the pursuit of superintelligence.<br>So far, opponents of AI have overwhelmingly focused on predicting its economic effects. But AI is more than just another industrial revolution. It is—already—a moral and cosmological cataclysm. For generative AI has done nothing less than change the place of human beings in the cosmos. More than the printing press or the internet, perhaps more than anything since the rise of agriculture, AI alters the relationship of human beings to their world by undermining our status as the distinctive bearers of language. While Bernie...