You need to bear with me on this long post; skip it if you are not interested in a completely different analysis of GAI risk.

It has been a couple of weeks since I posted on GAI, during which time the public discourse has rehashed prior issues; a cover story in The Economist, a publication usually with something to add, managed to find no new ground.  Patient readers of the Sunday New York Times, however, might have come across an interesting new perspective buried on page 6 of the Opinion section: an economic critique of the risk of GAI from the neoliberal policy makers who allegedly actually control our lives.

Neoliberalism is described as free market capitalism, its  attributes including free trade and  deregulation.  Simply put by the writer — indeed simplistically put by the writer — neoliberalism says that private enterprise is more efficient than government and the economy should be left to market dynamics.

But, it is asserted by this author, all the market does is maximize profit and all decisions ultimately lead to increased prices for all goods and services, and not to the promised economies and the  promised improvement of the life of our society. The market is the quick fix for the symptoms of our problems: lack of social equality and justice.  What is needed is solution to the problems themselves.

Without now engaging the inherent policy analysis, what the devil has this to do with the GAI risk?

GAI is the same con as, for example,  Theranos and Uber: each promised solutions to fundamental problems (public health and urban transportation, two matters ill-served by governments and regulated markets). (Also chastised: Tesla, TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Soylent and Facebook.)

After the “charming” tech innovation hits the marketplace, there always is “the ugly retrenchment” where the customers and government must shoulder the costs of making that innovation profitable.  This result is inevitable because at the start  “[a] always, Silicon Valley mavens play down the Market’s role.”  The description by uber-investor Marc Andreessen that AI “is owned by people and controlled by people, like any other technology” is described as an “exquisite euphemism.” The writer’s theme is that this neoliberal world view reframes social problems in light of for-profit tech solutions.

Whether you consider the author a communist or a social dreamer, or a prophet, is up to you the reader.  But the author’s message is that the market will in fact cause AGI to be developed for profit, and that AGI’s major risk is not political slavery, not robots shooting people, but rather the conning of the general population to the enrichment of the people who even now, assures the author, are pushing the development of AGI not for the public good but for market profit.

“A.G.I.-ism” is the clone of neoliberalism.  Companies need profit, having raised billions from investors and needing return on investment.  The company Open AI is  contemplating raising “another $100 billion to build A.G.I.” even as its CEO seems to be courting government control of the putative risks of war and dictatorship–but not the risk of the marketplace itself.