Charlie Stross has just published the text of a talk he gave earlier this week to a conference in Stuttgart. Titled "We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus", it has a theme similar to a recent newsletter post by Karl Schroeder (who he cites in the talk) — how we shouldn't rely on the ideas espoused by 20th-century science fiction. Like Schroeder, he believes those ideas are leading society in a direction that we probably don't want to go.
The hype and boosterism of the AI marketers collided with the Rationalist obsession in the public perception a couple of weeks ago, in the Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. This conference hatched the Bletchley Declaration, calling for international co-operation to manage the challenges and risks of artificial intelligence. It featured Elon Musk being interviewed by Rishi Sunak on stage, and was attended by Kamala Harris, vice-president of the United States, among other leading politicians. And the whole panicky agenda seems to be driven by an agenda that has emerged from science fiction stories written by popular entertainers like me, writers trying to earn a living.
Anyway, for what my opinion is worth: I think this is bullshit. There are very rich people trying to manipulate investment markets into giving them even more money, using shadow puppets they dreamed up on the basis of half-remembered fictions they read in their teens. They are inadvertently driving state-level policy making on subjects like privacy protection, data mining, face recognition, and generative language models, on the basis of assumptions about how society should be organized that are frankly misguided and crankish, because there's no crank like a writer idly dreaming up fun thought experiments in fictional form. They're building space programs—one of them is up front about wanting to colonize Mars, and he was briefly the world's richest man, so we ought to take him as seriously as he deserves—and throwing medical resources at their own personal immortality rather than, say, a wide-spectrum sterilizing vaccine against COVID19. Meanwhile our public infrastructure is rotting, national assets are being sold off and looted by private equity companies, their social networks are spreading hatred and lies in order to farm advertising clicks, and other billionaires are using those networks to either buy political clout or suck up ever more money from the savings of the poor.
Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?
It's long but I strongly recommend taking the time to read it.
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