The AI freakout has formally begun. Let’s pull on our big-girl pants and get real about robots.
Panic engulfed the ecosphere this summer when it was revealed that some naughty little bundles of text had escaped their sandbox (doesn’t the imagery call up baby spies, running around the playground?). Turned out the tech lords had been slow to fess up about this.
Then we heard what must surely be the strangest damage control move in the annals of PR: Sam Altman and Dario Amodie announced that maybe their labs should pump the brakes a little bit, given that AI could, you know, extinguish life on Earth.
Yet we couldn’t help but notice that the lads weren’t saying the process should stop entirely. Apparently, AI was still on target to end drudgery and fix global warming.
So which is it, guys? Are your bots going to cure cancer, or kill us all?
Our best bet is to distrust both scenarios.
Predictably, the media went to town on the image of bot monsters escaping the lab. But there was also renewed curiosity about the dudes playing Dr Frankenstein.
The broligarchs already had a worrisome reputation, for being nihilistically inclined, not to mention personality-disordered. So people couldn’t help but wonder whether Sam and Dario’s alarm calls came less from humanitarian concern than from cutthroat rivalry.
Not international rivalry, necessarily, although the “But China!” card was being played at every turn. No, the more essential rivalry here seems to be amongst themselves.
The vibe between them is one of teenage nerds competing against each other at a science fair.
Remember “Move Fast and Break Things” Zuckerberg when he was just starting out? He was the daring young bull 
crashing through the china shop. Twenty+ years later, with a toxic media culture as his claim to fame, he is mostly known for his failure to clean up the shards.
Where there is no inner growth, eccentricity does not age well. Taking responsibility is something that’s supposed to come with maturity, but Zuck and his buddies seem to resist maturity to the teeth (no surprise that Thiel, Ellison and Altman are pumping millions into immortality research.) Psychologically, they are still in their childhood basements, reading sci-fi comic books.
Jeff Bezos, bald and Botox’d within an inch of his life, tells us he built his whole empire just so he could build spaceships. Elon Musk, ketamine-jazzed and ready to roll, hopes to spread his sperm to Mars. Perhaps he hopes to have better luck there, in the relationship department.
The trouble is, as their tools have grown more powerful, the bros’ lack of responsibility has grown more consequential. The bot debacles have exposed how blinkered their priorities are.
They aren’t designing guardrails that work, because they don’t take safety as seriously as they take maximizing profit and winning an ego-fueled arms race.
Stars of the showA recent episode of South Park, hilariously scathing as usual, makes the point that old-school billionaires used to keep to the shadows, discreetly shielding themselves from the public’s rage.
By contrast, the new breed of techno-feudalists, whose wealth rivals that of entire nation-states, like to go on podcasts and talk about peptides. On Joe Rogan, their arrogance and flat-out weirdness is on full display.
Recall that these same fellows were front and center at Trump’s 2025 inauguration – the astrological birthday of his second term – sitting next to the big man, like dark lords at the Hunger Games. Above them in the sky, Mars was opposed to Pluto: the might-makes-right aspect (“To the victor belong the spoils,” said Trump last week at, of all places, the UN.)
At the Equinox, there they were again, honored guests at the Xi dinner and AI summit.
It was like the Last Supper, if everyone there believed they were the son of God. – Jordan Klepper
Very soon, my fellow Americans, we will find ourselves engulfed in a media horserace. It will be the only story in town: Who will be Donald Trump’s heir? But that won’t be the real story. The real story is who writes his checks.
It’ll be these guys. 
But the tech titans know they’re in trouble. Their labs are losing billions of dollars a year, and they know their investment circle jerk could implode like a house of cards.
Open AI …only makes sense if you’re willing to ignore the worst economics in the history of capitalism. – Ed Zitron
Meanwhile, the country is tech-lashing itself into a frenzy over data centers. The New York Times says “Fear of AI is the most bipartisan issue since beer.”
If you’re into the big picture, you might see this AI catastrophizing as a cosmic positive. It has gotten us thinking about our trajectory as a species.
When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. – Samuel Johnson
And it’s not just the future we’re thinking about. It’s gotten people thinking about what AI’s doing right now.
The extinction narrative has been nothing if not compelling. But no less so are AI’s current abominations.
Such as its role in the massacre at that Iranian girls’ school. Or its use by non-state hackers, who can shut down a country’s administration, agriculture and industry without firing a single shot.
We don’t need dystopian warnings to notice that AI is replacing human jobs, destroying the environment and filling our screens with mind-rotting slop. We don’t need an eschatologic panic about superintelligence to see that we don’t want a world where our children can’t read and literary prizes are given to robots.
People or plutocrats?In the language of Deep Time, we are at the cusp of the Anthropocene, the epoch that decides what humanity is going to do with itself.
Last week, with Mars once again opposed to Pluto in the sky, a meeting took place between Trump and the plutocrats. We are told that these ethically commendable gentlemen came up with “morally binding agreements,” whereby the labs would monitor themselves, fox-guarding-the-hen-house-style.
This is a particularly dark version of Pluto (absolute power) in Aquarius (technology). Let us try for a more enlightened version.
AI is a collaboration of people, not an entity. — Jaron Lanier
What would the power of AI look like if it were not being used this way — for social media without socializing, dating without lovers, work without workers? How might the planet of power in the sign of homo sapiens express itself, if it weren’t distorted by end-times capitalism? Perhaps it would look something like Binyamin Appelbaum’s proposal for a constitution for AI, written by the people.
These are questions for the next twenty years. Will we be the ones to decide what happens with these wily lines of code, or will we leave everything to a handful of disconnected man-boys?
If the general population stopped allowing these companies to have all this wealth and power they’d stop having it. The best time to act was 13 years ago, after Snowden. The second best time is now. – Corey Doctorow
Images
FOSA robot
Frankenstein robot, Rhode Montijo
tech bubble, CPRAM
Robot genesis, Time Magazine
