AI Utopianism Masks Tech Billionaires’ Fear: Douglas Rushkoff

For media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, the shiny guarantees of a silicon-powered utopia are little greater than a smokescreen for an elitist exit technique.

Rushkoff, a professor of media principle and digital economics at Queens School/CUNY, and the creator of Survival of the Richest and Workforce Human, made the remarks throughout a latest interview on the Repatterning Podcast with host Arden Leigh. Within the interview, he supplied a scathing critique of the tech billionaire class, arguing that these evangelizing synthetic intelligence are much less excited about “saving the world” than in surviving its potential collapse introduced on by the expertise they unleashed.

“The billionaires are afraid of being hoisted on their very own petard,” Rushkoff stated. “They’re afraid of getting to take care of the repercussions of their actions.”

He pointed to tech titans, together with Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, reportedly investing in bunker development, whereas on the similar time SpaceX CEO Elon Musk preaches area colonization, betraying their public optimism, and secretly they anticipate social and environmental collapse reasonably than a technological golden age.



“What they’ve accomplished by constructing their bunkers and revealing their numerous area plans is that they’ve uncovered the truth that they don’t imagine that the issues they’re making are going to save lots of the world,” Rushkoff stated. “They imagine that the issues they’re making may save them and that the remainder of us are happening.”

Rushkoff additionally challenged the notion that AI is decreasing human labor. Somewhat, he stated, the expertise shifts work into much less seen and extra exploitative varieties reasonably than eliminating it.

“We’re not truly seeing a discount in labor due to AI,” Rushkoff stated. “What we’re seeing is a downskilling of labor.”

Whereas technologists, together with Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev, argue that AI will gas a surge of latest jobs and industries. Rushkoff stated the worldwide infrastructure required to maintain AI techniques, from mining to information preparation, is a core contradiction in claims about the advantages automation will carry.

“You want plenty of slaves to get uncommon earth medals, and also you want plenty of individuals in China and Pakistan to tag all this information,” Rushkoff stated. “There are 1000’s and 1000’s of individuals behind AI. We’re going to must have individuals constructing energy vegetation and determining new vitality sources and digging up extra coal and getting extra oil. To date, there are tons and plenty of jobs—simply not jobs that we need to have.”

Rushkoff argued that this hidden labor undercuts guarantees of a post-work future, whilst artistic {and professional} employees face displacement. The outcome, he stated, will not be liberation however a redistribution of hurt.

He additionally criticized the ideology driving elite AI narratives, describing it as a type of transhumanism that treats most individuals as disposable.

“They’ve a sort of faith,” Rushkoff stated. “The place they take a look at you and me as being within the larval stage of humanity.”

In that worldview, he stated, rich technologists think about themselves escaping organic limits via machines whereas the remainder of humanity turns into expendable.

“They’re those which can be sprouting wings and getting off the planet or importing to the cloud,” Rushkoff stated, whereas “the remainder of us are solely matter, gas for his or her escape.”

Others within the laptop science and expertise area rejected the concept Silicon Valley leaders are knowingly concealing a collapse.

“I might keep away from extremes, as a result of most likely the reality is within the center,” David Bray informed Decrypt.

Chair of the Accelerator and a distinguished fellow on the Stimson Middle, a nonpartisan suppose tank centered on safety, governance, and rising tech, Bray pushed again on the concept tech leaders are knowingly utilizing utopian AI narratives to cover an impending collapse, warning that such interpretations danger “discarding an excessively hopeful message for an excessively dire message.”

Bray did, nonetheless, acknowledge that many optimistic claims about AI oversimplify what’s required to handle large-scale technological change.

“Once I hear individuals give a utopian imaginative and prescient, on the one hand, I have fun that it’s not worry mongering,” he stated. “However I do fear that it’s lacking the truth that there are issues that have to go in place past simply the tech itself.”

Bray echoed Rushkoff’s warning that the prices of AI are sometimes obscured, pointing to the environmental harm and human exploitation embedded within the provide chains that make superior applied sciences doable.

“We’re more and more in an interconnected world, and we’d like to pay attention to what I might name a farm-to-table view,” he stated.

Bray framed the AI transition as disruptive however acquainted, tracing a line again to the Nineties, railroads, telegraph machines, and the economic revolution. “We’ve been right here earlier than,” he stated. “We’ll get via this, however there shall be a interval of upheaval.”

Based on Lisa Simon, chief economist at workforce intelligence firm Revelio Labs, labor market information already displays elements of that upheaval.

“Probably the most extremely uncovered occupations have seen the largest fall in demand, particularly in entry-level roles,” Simon informed Decrypt, noting that the impact is concentrated the place employees have the least leverage.

On the decrease finish of the wage spectrum, Simon stated the dynamics look nearer to direct displacement, and as employees use AI instruments to extend output, employers might merely want fewer individuals.

“We’re seeing this principally in low wage work, the place the complexity of duties is a bit of decrease and the power to switch whole chunks of an occupation via automation is a given,” she stated, including that these roles are additionally seeing among the weakest wage development.

Simon additionally stated most of the prices tied to AI infrastructure stay poorly accounted for. “I don’t suppose the environmental value to those large information facilities is totally appreciated,” she stated.

Whereas Simon stated she stays broadly optimistic about AI’s long-term potential, she framed the present second as one which calls for coverage intervention. To protect social cohesion amid displacement and uneven beneficial properties, she stated, governments may have to contemplate “extra redistributionary insurance policies like common fundamental earnings.

“I don’t suppose it’s come what may that issues shall be utopian or dystopian,” NYU professor Vasant Dhar informed Decrypt.

Dhar, who teaches on the Stern Faculty of Enterprise and the Middle for Knowledge Science, stated AI is more likely to produce uneven outcomes reasonably than a clear post-work future. He warned of what he referred to as a “bifurcation of humanity,” the place the expertise “amplifies some individuals” and “turbo expenses productiveness,” whereas others change into disempowered, utilizing AI “as a crutch versus an amplifier.”

He stated these beneficial properties additionally carry displacement dangers. “I believe we’ll see loads of job destruction,” Dhar stated, including that it stays unclear what varieties of latest jobs will emerge to switch these losses.

In the end, Dhar stated outcomes will depend upon governance reasonably than expertise alone. “The outcomes will depend upon the alternatives we make,” he stated, asking, “Will we govern AI, or will they govern us?”