It’s not just a figure of speech to say tech titans are indifferent to humanity. From Peter Thiel to Elon Musk, many are adherents of a worldview that envisions humans being replaced by digital post-humans and sees this as progress.
Yes. We hear the cautionary tale about the imaginary AI that is tasked with manufacturing as many paperclips as it can and ends up consuming all the world’s resources to turn into paperclips, while humans are helpless to stop it. But it’s not always appreciated that we already built such a twisted intelligence in the form of capitalist economies. Just as the paperclip machine doesn’t understand that paperclips are only valuable for how they help people to live, so the capitalist system forgets that money was only supposed to be a useful tool to help us get on with actual life. And we seem similarly unable to stop this machine that is destroying the world to make some imaginary lines go up.
Yes. We hear the cautionary tale about the imaginary AI that is tasked with manufacturing as many paperclips as it can and ends up consuming all the world’s resources to turn into paperclips, while humans are helpless to stop it. But it’s not always appreciated that we already built such a twisted intelligence in the form of capitalist economies. Just as the paperclip machine doesn’t understand that paperclips are only valuable for how they help people to live, so the capitalist system forgets that money was only supposed to be a useful tool to help us get on with actual life. And we seem similarly unable to stop this machine that is destroying the world to make some imaginary lines go up.
Right on. We are the paperclip machine.
It’s because money is the scorecard in their game, and they want to win at any cost. We should have made their scorecard bagels or something.