AI and the Real Hard Pill to Swallow

At Foundation for Economic Education (“The Ego vs. the Machine,” February 24), self-described “techno-optimist” Dylan Allman dismisses recent controversies over AI as a simple matter of wounded egos. “They feel, on some instinctual level, that if machines can do what they do — only better, faster, and more efficiently — then what value do they hold?” 

But such people stand in the way of progress — a progress, in Allman’s vision, so grandiose as to approach the messianic.

But here’s the hard pill to swallow: Your insecurities should not hold back the tide of innovation…. When you subordinate technological and creative advancement to the preservation of your own self-importance, you engage in a form of collective narcissism that serves no one.

Many people experience a sort of existential crisis when they realize that automation or a new technology could potentially do their job — and possibly do it better. But instead of adapting or improving, some choose to fight progress, using political mechanisms or social outcry to stifle innovation.…

When you react defensively to technological advancements that challenge your skill set, you are acting out of a false sense of self-interest at the expense of broader societal progress that would ultimately benefit you, along with everyone else…. If you can’t win in the marketplace, you are not a victim. You deserve to lose.

Let’s be brutally candid — the quality of work that advanced AI can produce is often higher than that of its human counterparts, and it’s only improving. It can write more persuasively, compose more complex musical scores, generate compelling images and videos, and analyze more data points than any single human ever could. It does so faster, more accurately, and, often, more innovatively.

…What’s threatened by AI is not our purpose or our ability to create but our ego. And in the grand scheme of things, that’s a small price to pay for a world enriched by higher quality, more innovative, and more efficient creative works.

Apparently Allman lives in a different reality, where the actual implementation of AI has taken a far different course than in the world the rest of us live in. Reading his gushing over the promethean promise of AI, it’s hard not to think of the Emperor’s new clothes. Or to use Cory Doctorow’s modern imagery, Allman believes that any pile of shit that big must have a pony under it.

Allman ignores the practical issues involved in the real-world application of new technologies.

For starters, the actual effects of a technology depend on the institutional structure within which it is implemented. 

In particular, they depend on who owns the benefit. Depending on the ownership model, new technologies can either create abundance — reduce labor time with no loss in pay, or reduce costs to the consumer — or their increased productivity can be enclosed within corporate walls as a source of rent extraction, via intellectual property and other artificial property rights.

Peter Frase compared the post-scarcity communism of Star Trek, resulting from replicators and other technologies of abundance, to the alternate “anti-Star Trek” society that would prevail if the Federation had instead enforced artificial scarcity on behalf of a rentier class. 

Anti-Star Trek takes these same technological premises: replicators, free energy, and a post-scarcity economy. But it casts them in a different set of social relations. Anti-Star Trek is an attempt to answer the following question:

• Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?…

Like industrial capitalism, the economy of anti-Star Trek rests on a specific state-enforced regime of property relations. However, the kind of property that is central to anti-Star Trek is not physical but intellectual property, as codified legally in the patent and copyright system….

This is the quality of intellectual property law that provides an economic foundation for anti-Star Trek: the ability to tell others how to use copies of an idea that you “own”. In order to get access to a replicator, you have to buy one from a company that licenses you the right to use a replicator. (Someone can’t give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license). What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. So if the Captain Jean-Luc Picard of anti-Star Trek wanted “tea, Earl Grey, hot”, he would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea. 

It goes without saying that the adoption of AI is following the anti-Star Trek model, enclosed within corporate walls and integrated into production in a way that primarily serves the interests of managerial hierarchies and absentee owners rather than workers or consumers. 

And it’s far from obvious that the adoption of AI, or any other decision by corporate management, is being done in a way that results in actual progress.

Maybe, just maybe, people don’t oppose AI because they’re cartoonish “third-raters” out of an Ayn Rand novel. Maybe they oppose it because AI does a really shitty job at all the tasks where it attempts to replace humans, but is being used by sociopathic corporate managers who think enshittification is a reasonable tradeoff for downsizing their work forces and pocketing the savings for themselves. 

We’re long past the point where, as Marx put it, the social relations of production became incompatible with further development of productive forces.

Even 60 years ago, back before industrial capitalism was supplanted by the FIRE economy and rent extraction, oligopoly market structures enabled industrial firms to cut so-called “creative destruction” to the absolute minimum and ration technical innovation to suit their institutional needs.  As Paul Goodman described the auto industry: “Three or four manufacturers control the automobile market, competing with fixed prices and slowly spooned-out improvements.” 

And with the transition to financial and rentier capitalism from the 1970s on, the mere rationing of technological progress was superseded by the outright destruction of value.

One early hint that such enshittification was the wave of the future was the adoption in the 1990s of automated telephone menus by virtually all large corporations, making the experience of dealing with a company incomparably worse. The right-libertarian talking point of “dollar democracy” is laughable in a case like this, because when all the major players in an industry adopt something consumers hate there’s no way to vote against it. 

The dominant trend of capitalism in the 21st century has been the buying up of productive enterprises by private equity, followed by asset-stripping and hollowing out of their productive capacity. Corporation after corporation like Sears and Toys R Us have been loaded up with acquisition debt and their assets sold to line the pockets of managers with bonuses and shareholders with short-term profits, and the empty husks thrown away. Property management companies have bought up billions of dollars worth of apartment complexes, deferred basic maintenance, and rack-rented tenants. Private equity has bought out newspapers, followed by mass firing of journalists and a shift to infotainment.

To date the textbook example of enshittification, when it comes to the world of digital information, was the so-called “pivot to video” — which was hyped by its apostles at the time as mindlessly as Allman is doing for AI today.

Since then, social media walled gardens, based on intellectual property enclosure, have degraded the functionality and user experience of one platform after another, all in the interest of milking them of value for short-term profit.  We’ve watched, in real-time, the enshittification of social media platforms like Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter, and had formerly useful tools like the search functions on Google and Amazon turned into garbage.   

The current pivot to AI, for which Allman is such an uncritically enthusiastic shill, promises to be a farcical replay of the pivot to video, on an even larger scale. For Allman, the machine-generated crap at Sports Illustrated may be “more persuasive,” or “higher in quality” than human-generated content. And the AI-generated monstrosities with eight-fingered hands and body parts bleeding into each other may, in his view, rival Rembrandt. But I suspect the view of Amy Castor and David Gerard is more representative:

OpenAI’s AI-powered text generators fueled a lot of the hype around AI — but the real-world use case for large language models is overwhelmingly to generate content for spamming.  

The use case for AI is spam web pages filled with ads. Google considers LLM-based ad landing pages to be spam, but seems unable or unwilling to detect and penalize it. 

The use case for AI is spam books on Amazon Kindle. Most are “free” Kindle Unlimited titles earning money through subscriber pageviews rather than outright purchases. 

The use case for AI is spam news sites for ad revenue. 

The use case for AI is spam phone calls for automated scamming — using AI to clone people’s voices. 

The use case for AI is spam Amazon reviews and spam tweets. 

The use case for AI is spam videos that advertise malware. 

The use case for AI is spam sales sites on Etsy. 

The use case for AI is spam science fiction story submissions. Clarkesworld had to close submissions because of the flood of unusable generated garbage. The robot apocalypse in action. 

To take just one thing that Allman gushes about — the quality of AI writing — in particular:

…some have also noticed a new type of gig is emerging, one that pays a lot less: fixing the robots’ shoddy writing….

Cowart says the AI-humanising often takes longer than writing a piece from scratch, but the pay is worse….

“It’s tedious, horrible work, and they pay you next to nothing for it,” Cowart says.

Allman’s mindless cheerleading notwithstanding, I don’t think AI will give Hemingway a run for his money any time soon.

The hype around increasing worker productivity is equally spurious. In one survey, 77% of workers said “AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way.”

With everybody currently jumping on the bandwagon — LinkedIn has a “try writing with AI” option — AI has become as mindlessly trendy as crypto was a few years back.

In 2017, the hot buzzword was “blockchain” — because the price of bitcoin was going up. Struggling businesses would add the word “blockchain” to their name or their mission statement, in the hope their stock price would go up. Long Island Iced Tea became Long Blockchain and saw its shares surge 394%. Shares in biotech company Bioptix doubled in price when it changed its name to Riot Blockchain and pivoted to bitcoin mining.

But with the possible exception of obnoxious Twitter bluecheck bitcoinbros — “brah, you just gotta zoom out, brah!” — everyone knows how that turned out.

The pivot to AI is likely to be every bit as much of a bubble as the pivot to video and the cryptocurrency fad — but the long-term damage it does is apt to be at least as great as what the pivot to video did to online journalism.

Commenting on the recent fiasco in which the New York City AI chatbot told business owners to break the law, Sean T. Collins commented on Bluesky: “AI feels like a real mania, a genuine collective break from reality among the ruling class. They might as well be pouring billions of dollars into an attempt to replace all jobs and knowledge with a large bronze idol of Dagon.” 

The problem is greatly exacerbated because bosses are so damned dumb. AI is just the latest shiny object they’re being distracted by. As Cory Doctorow puts it, your boss is “such an easy mark for AI pitchmen” because he’s so greedy:

Bosses are Bizarro-world Marxists. Like Marxists, your boss’s worldview is organized around the principle that every dollar you take home in wages is a dollar that isn’t available for executive bonuses, stock buybacks or dividends. That’s why you boss is insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with software. Software is cheaper, and it doesn’t advocate for higher wages.

It’s not the critics of AI whose motives need to be analyzed. AI shills like Allman need so badly to believe that there’s a John Galt out there who keeps the motor of the world running, and that all the naysayers are just envy-driven mediocrities, that they’re easy pickings for every new techbro conman who comes along.

Here’s the REAL hard pill to swallow: Under monopoly capitalism, it’s often more profitable to make things worse than to make them better — if the MBAs making the decisions are even smart enough to tell the difference.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative