Will GenAI Survive Capitalism?
(draft) It's traveling a familiar path.
Insane amounts of money are chasing Generative AI. We're in frenzy territory.
Meanwhile, we've given this new software considerable autonomy, giving it access to the Internet, APIs and apps, login credentials, and the ability to act as humans clicking a mouse and typing at a keyboard. It can credibly imitate human voices in real time and knows more than most of us about hacking and cracking. How exciting!
We appear to have thrown the keys to the Hummer to an impulsive, obsessive, occasionally devious twelve-year-old. And boy, do I wish the problem had as limited negative consequences as that little analogy implies.
To complicate matters, we're having trouble finding the brake pedal. While many voices are shouting about the growing threat of p(doom), actual efforts seem either sincere but toothless or dishearteningly impractical.
The approach voiced by President Trump is to let the market and the environment take its course, to trust minimally fettered Capitalism and the Captains of Industry to do the right thing.
This post is a short story of how Capitalism has warped several promising ideas, not destroying them, but damaging their credibility and creating new threats to society. The examples I'll use are:
- Microfinance
- The Sharing Economy
- Social Media
Other useful technologies haven't fared so well.
Capitalism has a way of messing up good things.
We've seen this show before.
Multiple Promising Technologies Were Warped by Capitalism
I fear the outcomes.
When too much money chases initially good ideas, bad things often happen.
The Commons loses. We lose.
Capitalism, at least in its current flavor, is greedy and insatiable. There are many flavors of capitalism.
Whether we can fix Capitalism is a subject for future posts.
OpenAI's flight from open
Remember Sam Altman's Crazy Weekend in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired him, then everyone resigned, then he was rehired and the board was fired? Weird, wasn't it? Oh, but before he was rehired, Microsoft hired him! Then not. The whole thing was a surreal, real-time soap opera, played out in the public sphere.
My interpretation of that weekend was that OpenAI was shaking off its higher purpose, and settling in to capitalism. Sort of like an insect, snake or crab shedding the carapace or skin it had outgrown, except not that positive. Later, OpenAI opted to become a for-profit company.
The Crazy Weekend wasn't the first major sign of this shedding: Earlier, many of the early OpenAI staffers who believed in the company's higher calling quit, founding Anthropic, which still seems to hew to the open mission. In the face of the temptations I'm describing, this deserves extra praise.
#OpenAI, #critiquesofcapitalism, #innovation, #Anthropic,
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.