Siliconsciousness: Getting a Grip When It Comes to AI Dread

The DSR Network

The episode explores the phenomenon of 'AI dread,' where prominent tech leaders warn of existential risks to humanity. Guest Paul Barrett ar

Key takeaways

• Paul Barrett suggests AI moguls use existential threats as a 'misdirection play' to forestall standard industry regulation.
• The term 'doom marketing' is used to describe how making AI products sound ominous attracts venture capital and public attention.

Main topics

• AI existential dread
• Regulatory capture in Silicon Valley

Notable quotes

The current confusion over AI is just the latest illustration of how... the leaders of this industry are distinctively duplicitous.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a call for rational, science-based regulation th

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) Welcome to Scylla Consciousness, the DSR Network podcast focusing on the artificial intelligence revolution, politics and policy. Hello Speaker 3 (0:19) and welcome to Scylla Consciousness. I'm your host, David Rothkopf. And this week, as every week, we're going to talk about AI-related tech, what it means. And of course, at this moment, one of the big things on everybody's mind is AI dread. And we are very fortunate to have with us Paul Barrett, who's an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law and previously served as deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU Stern School of Business. Prior to his time at NYU, Paul worked as a journalist for more than 30 years. And he has written an article in the Tech Policy Press called Making Sense of AI Dread. Don't get distracted by Doomer CEOs or the China canard. And of course, the China canard is big in the news these days. But hey, Doomer CEOs are big in the news these days. They all got invited to the White House last night. Speaker 4 (1:17) Did you get invited to the White House last night, Paul? I think I missed the invitation in the mail if it was that. Yeah. Speaker 3 (1:24) Well, you're too commonsensical for those guys. But I thought your article made three great points about this dread. I guess this is almost inevitable in sort of any big tech transitional moment where you sort of go from nobody knows what's happening to everybody overreacting. And hopefully you get from that to something more sensible. But maybe you could start just simply by... explaining, as you did in the article, why you chose this moment to take up the pen and write this article. Speaker 4 (2:05) Well, the most immediate inspiration was my wife and I went, as we sometimes do, to a meeting with our member of Congress with a bunch of neighbors, donuts and coffee and so forth. And everyone was talking about AI and the hugging face episode involving open AI. And I found that extraordinary, Speaker 3 (2:24) you Speaker 4 (2:25) know, in an environment where you're normally talking about very mundane local issues or maybe talking about. Donald Trump and his latest depredations. But here we were talking about open AI and anthropic and all the rest. And so I thought- Speaker 3 (2:39) This is Speaker 4 (2:39) kind Speaker 3 (2:39) of suburban New Jersey over donuts kind of thing. Speaker 4 (2:43) That is exactly right. Northern New Jersey suburbs. And to me, that was a measure of how anxious everybody is. And I think one of the main reasons people had become anxious just in recent weeks was the- continued pronouncements by various AI moguls. Again, you know, the CEO of Anthropic, the CEO of OpenAI, who seemed to toggle back and forth between telling us that AI superintelligence is going to change everything everywhere all the time, make everything perfect in the future, solve climate change, cancer and the rest, but at the same time may also just eliminate humankind. And this confusion that this combination of utopianism and existential dread, I think, has got people really on edge. So I thought it would be good to sit down and try to sort it out. Speaker 3 (3:43) Wait a minute. You're saying that the benevolent guys behind the rise of all these AI companies may not be transparent in their motives? I'm shocked. I'm glad I'm seated. Speaker 4 (3:57) Right. Well, you know, I, after a long journalistic career focusing on a wide variety of issues, came to focus on tech policy beginning in 2017 and wrote a lot about... social media and its effects on democracy and then began looking at artificial intelligence as well. And, you know, one of the basic discoveries in all this was that Silicon Valley has produced a generation of tech tycoons who are distinctly disingenuous in how they talk about their own products and how those products. interact with society. And when you combine that with our failure, our collective failure as a society to figure out rational ways to regulate these products, the way we regulate so many other products, pharmaceuticals, airplanes, the securities industry, name your industry. The current confusion over AI is just the latest illustration. of how, in my view, sad to say, the leaders of this industry are distinctively duplicitous. Speaker 3 (5:14) Oh my gosh, duplicitous. Don't you think there's a deep Eliam-Massonary impulse within them and that they're looking and saying, well, this thing that I've helped develop could end the world and that's not a good thing and let's save ourselves? Speaker 4 (5:32) No, I don't think that's to be taken at face value at all. That's a distinctive way of thinking and expressing oneself and having two o'clock in the morning conversations, having taken psychedelic mushrooms. That's quite distinctive to Silicon Valley. This is a, you know, an initial observation is this is a strange group Speaker 3 (5:57) of dudes. Okay, these Speaker 4 (6:00) are not ordinary people who have come up through ordinary channels They were absolutely ahead of the curve beginning in the late 1990s in seeing certain technological trends in Inventing certain types of products that made them billionaires practically overnight and this has led them to all kinds of pseudo philosophical musings and wondering about transferring humankind to Mars or to communities floating on the ocean. This is a very science fiction addled, strange group of super wealthy, super influential people who we need to think about in the very particular way that they're influencing. Culture politics and industry and so that's my perspective on these guys and we can take them one by one or continue to talk about them collectively But they think that by dint of their wealth and the influence that they are exerting right now that their ideas Are coherent and matter when in fact their ideas matter, but their ideas are completely not coherent and the dread that they are exacerbating in connection with this particular generation of AI products, needs to be viewed very analytically and not taken at a literal or face value level. Speaker 3 (7:33) Yeah, no, I think we all can get our heads around the idea that the combination of science fiction, ketamine, billions of dollars, being surrounded by people who want to say you're right because they want some of that action. and a lot of greed is a toxic cocktail, and it gets you to these statements. Now, I've heard a number of explanations for these statements, and I will begin by acknowledging there are dangers associated with AI, and one of the reasons the statements get traction is because they contain a grain of truth. But among the more compelling Speaker 3 (8:18) rationales that I've seen are associated with regulatory capture. In other words, they want to do two things at the same time, and these statements do the two things. One, they want everybody to focus on the existential issue rather than the smaller issues, which may be, or the apparently smaller issues, which are very significant to their businesses. Issues like IP, privacy, data theft, their own finances, et cetera, et cetera. The things that regulators normally take care of. The other side of this is that they would like to say, well, you guys don't understand AI. We do. Let us handle the regulation. And frankly, You know, the president of the United States is going along with that. Florida Senator Rick Scott said, well, we don't understand this, so why don't we just leave it to these guys? And, you know, I think it's worth noting that there is no industry in the world that works that way. Your toothpaste is regulated. The taxicab you get in is regulated. The reason things are regulated is. because the businesses are supposed to be serving the public interest and things like public safety are supposed to be prioritized. But do you buy the regulatory capture Speaker 4 (9:52) arguments? Speaker 4 (9:55) I completely sign off on the first piece of your statement that at least in part, what we're seeing is just a misdirection play that in order to avoid engaging in significant self-regulation and in order to forestall the standard type of industry regulation