If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Lest anyone accuse me of bargaining in bad faith here, let me start with this admission: I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence. I think worrying about what we'll do if AI becomes intelligent is at best a distraction and at worst a cynical marketing ploy:
Now, that said: among some of the "AI doomers," I recognize kindred spirits. I, too, worry about technologies controlled by corporations that have grown so powerful that they defy regulation. I worry about how those technologies are used against us, and about how the corporations that make them are fusing with authoritarian states to create a totalitarian nightmare. I worry that technology is used to spy on and immiserate workers.
I just don't think we need AI to do those things. I think we should already be worried about those things.
Last week, I had a version of this discussion in front of several hundred people at the Bronfman Lecture in Montreal, where I appeared with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (co-winner of the Turing Prize for his work creating the "deep learning" techniques powering today's AI surge), on a panel moderated by CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed:
It's safe to say that Bengio and I mostly disagree about AI. He's running an initiative called "Lawzero," whose goal is to create an international AI consortium that produces AI as a "digital public good" that is designed to be open, auditable, transparent and safe:
http://lawzero.org
Bengio said he'd started Lawzero because he was convinced that AI was going to get a lot more powerful, and, in the absence of some public-spirited version of AI, we would be subject to all kinds of manipulation and surveillance, and that the resulting chaos would present a civilizational risk.
Now, as I've stated (and as I said onstage) I am not worried about any of this. I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).
I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism:
I worry that the workers who did those jobs will be scattered to the four winds, retrained or "discouraged" or retired, and that the priceless process knowledge they developed over generations will be wiped out and we will have to rebuild it amidst the economic and political chaos of the burst AI bubble:
But Bengio disagrees. He's very smart, and very accomplished, and he's very certain that AI is about to become "superhuman" and do horrible things to us if we don't get a handle on it. Several times at our events, he insisted that the existence of this possibility made it wildly irresponsible not to take measures to mitigate this risk.
Though I didn't say so at the time, this struck me as an AI-inflected version of Pascal's wager:
A rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God… if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
Smarter people than me have been poking holes in Pascal's wager for more than 350 years. But when it comes to this modern Pascal's AI Wager, I have my own objection: how do you know when you've lost?
As of this moment, the human race has lit more than $1.4t on fire to immanentize this eschaton, and it remains stubbornly disimmanentized. How much more do we need to spend before we're certain that god isn't lurking in the word-guessing program? Sam Altman says it'll take another $2-3t – call it six months' worth of all US federal spending. If we do that and we still haven't met god, are we done? Can we call it a day?
Not according to Elon Musk. Musk says we need to deconstruct the solar system and build a Dyson sphere out of all the planets to completely encase the sun, so we can harvest every photon it emits to power our word-guessing programs:
So let's say we do that and we still haven't met god – are we done? I don't see why we would be. After all, Musk's contention isn't that our sun emits one eschaton's worth of immanentizing particles. Musk just thinks that we need a lot of these sunbeams to coax god into our plane of existence. If one sun won't do it, perhaps two? Or two hundred? Or two thousand? Once we've committed the entire human species to this god-bothering project to the extent of putting two kilosuns into harness, wouldn't we be nuts to stop there? What if god is lurking in the two thousand and first sun? Making god out of algorithms is like spelling "banana" – easy to start, hard to stop.
But as Bengio and I got into it together on stage at the Montreal Centre, it occurred to me that maybe there was some common ground between us. After all, when someone starts talking about "humane technology" that respects our privacy and works for people rather than their bosses, my ears grow points. Throw in the phrase "international digital public goods" and you've got my undivided attention.
Because there's a sense in which Bengio and I are worried about exactly the same thing. I'm terrified that our planet has been colonized by artificial lifeforms that we constructed, but which have slipped our control. I'm terrified that these lifeforms corrupt our knowledge-creation process, making it impossible for us to know what's true and what isn't. I'm terrified that these lifeforms have conquered our apparatus of state – our legislatures, agencies and courts – and so that these public bodies work against the public and for our colonizing alien overlords.
The difference is, the artificial lifeforms that worry me aren't hypothetical – they're here today, amongst us, endangering the very survival of our species. These artificial lifeforms are called "limited liability corporations" and they are a concrete, imminent risk to the human race:
What's more, challenging these artificial lifeforms will require us to build massive, "international, digital public goods": a post-American internet of free/open, auditable, transparent, enshittification-resistant platforms and firmware for every purpose and device currently in service:
And even after we've built that massive, international, digital public good, we'll still face the challenge of migrating all of our systems and loved ones out of the enshitternet of defective, spying, controlling American tech exports:
Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country:
He doesn't need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark's access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he'd control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice:
These aren't risks that could develop in the future. They're the risks we're confronted with today and frankly, they're fucking terrifying.
So here's my side-bet on Pascal's Wager. If you think we need to build "international digital public goods" to head off the future risk of a colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeform, then let us agree that the prototype for that project is the "international digital public goods" we need right now to usher in the post-American internet and save ourselves from the colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeforms that have already got their blood-funnels jammed down our throats.
Once we defeat those alien invaders, we may find that all the people who are trying to summon the evil god have lost the wherewithal to do so, and your crisis will have been averted. But if that's not the case and the evil god still looms on our horizon, then I will make it my business to help you mobilize the legions of skilled international digital public goods producers who are still flush from their victory over the limited liability corporation, and together, we will fight the evil god you swear is in our future.
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Trump's conspiratorial base are hugely and reliably animated by stories about impunity for elite sex predators. As well they should be! Elite sex predators get away with all kinds of crimes -- not just Epstein, but the whole universe of powerful men, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump, who systematically abused women for decades and got away with it -- bragged about it, even!
But despite these very real abusers, the conspiracists in the Trump base are mostly concerned with imaginary abusers -- Qanon's shadowy cabal of adrenochrome-guzzling pedophiles, tirelessly freighting trafficked children from one nonexistent pizza parlor basement to the next, packed inside of very mid Wayfair home furnishings....
— Cory Doctorow, Conspiratorialism and neoliberalism
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Crises precipitate change. That's no reason to induce a crisis, but you'd be a fool to let a crisis go to waste. Donald Trump is the greatest crisis of our young century, and the EU looks set to squander the opportunity, to its own terrible detriment.
For more than a decade, it's been clear that the American internet was not fit for purpose. The whistleblowers Mark Klein and Edward Snowden revealed that the US had weaponized its status as the world's transoceanic fiber-optic hub to spy on the entire planet:
American companies repurposed their over-the-air software update capabilities to remotely brick expensive machinery in service to geopolitical priorities:
Then Trump and his tech companies started attacking key public institutions around the world, shutting down access for senior judges who attempted to hold Trump's international authoritarian allies to account for their crimes:
If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won't give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world's majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice.
Now, these latent offensive capabilities were obvious long before Trump, but the presidents who weaponized them in the pre-Trump era did so in subtle and deniable ways, or under a state of exception (e.g. in response to spectacular terrorist attacks or in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine) that let bystanders assure themselves that this wouldn't become a routine policy.
After all, America profited so much from the status quo in which America and its trading partners all pretended that US tech wouldn't be weaponized for geopolitical aims, so a US president would be a fool to shatter the illusion. And even if the president was so emotionally incontinent that he demanded the naked weaponization of America's defective, boobytrapped tech exports, the power blocs that the president relies on would stop him, because they are so marinated in the rich broth that America drained from the world using Big Tech.
This is "status quo bias" in action. No one wants to let go of the vine they're swinging from until they have a new vine firmly in their grasp – but you can't reach the next vine unless you release your death-grip on your current one. So it was that, year after year, the world allowed itself to become more dependent on America's easily weaponizable tech, making the tech both more dangerous and harder to escape.
Enter Trump (a crisis) (and crises precipitate change). Under Trump, the illusion of a safe interdependence crumbled. Every day, in new and increasingly alarming ways, Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only adversaries and rivals. Every day, Trump proves to the world that American tech isn't merely untrustworthy – it's a live, dire, urgent danger to your state, your companies, and your people. The best time to get shut of the American internet was 15 years ago. The second best time is right fucking now.
NOW!
The result is the burgeoning movement to build a "post-American internet." In Canada, PM Mark Carney's announcement of a "rupture" has the country rethinking its deep connections to the American internet and asking what it could do to escape it:
Europe, meanwhile, has multiple, advanced, well-funded initiatives to leave the American internet behind and migrate to a post-American internet, like "Eurostack" and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium:
But status quo bias exerts a powerful gravity. A reactionary counterrevolution is being waged in the European Commission – the permanent bureaucracy that executes Europe's laws and regulations. Within the EC, an ascendant faction has announced plans for a "dialogue" with representatives from the Trump regime to let them direct the enforcement of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), Europe's landmark 2024 anti-Big Tech regulations:
The DMA and DSA require America's tech giants to open up their platforms in ways that would halt the plunder of Europeans' private data and cash. US tech giants have flatly refused to comply with these rules, relying on Trump to get them out of any obligations under EU law:
That's a sound bet. After all, the last thing Trump did before his inauguration was publicly announce his intention to destroy any country that attempted to enforce these laws:
And he's ordered his tech companies to turn over the private emails and messages of other European officials, so he can identify the ones most dangerous to US tech plunder and sanction them, too:
The quislings and appeasers in the Commission who've been spooked by Trump's belligerence (or tempted by offers of cushy jobs in Big Tech after they leave public service) are selling out the EU's future. Caving to Trump won't make him more favorably disposed to Europe or Europeans. Trump treats every capitulation as a sign of weakness that signals that he can safely ignore his end of the bargain and demand twice as much. For Trump, the "art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: reneging.
Within the EU, there's fury at the Commission's announcement of "dialogue." As Politico's Milena Wälde reports, lawmakers like Alexandra Geese (Greens) say that this is a move that eliminates the "sovereign path for Europe" by letting tech giants "grade their own homework." She calls it a "fatal decision for our companies and our democracy."
Moving to the post-American internet is hard – but it will only get harder. Sure, Europe could wait for the next crisis to let go of the Big Tech vine and grab the Eurostack one, but that next crisis will be far, far worse. The EU can't afford to wait for Trump to brick one or more of its member states to (finally, at long last) take this threat seriously:
