Technology Does Not Belong to the Technologists

Sam Altman just published a set of principles for OpenAI, in which he asserts, “AI will dwarf what people could do with steam engines or electricity.” Uh, history would like a word, Sam. Sam believes that his talkative tool will dwarf powered transportation, powered industry, lighting, electronic communication, amplification, even computation. This is the hubris of the present tense. What follows in his principles is the kind of sophomoric banality only an LLM could produce. He speaks of democratization. That occurs through the institutions of government and the vote, not companies. He leaps to the conclusions that he will build the mythical AGI and that it will yield “universal prosperity” the demands “huge infrastructure” to get there. And what does this even mean? “While we are quite confident that universal prosperity will remain really important, we can imagine periods in the future where we have to trade off some empowerment for more resilience.” In other words, he’ll hold onto…