The worrying ideologies behind Big Tech - pt 1
What are the ideologies behind Big Tech?
New ideologies – alongside neo-liberal and capitalist worldviews - are very influential among ‘Big Tech’ leaders: those who basically decide how AI develops.
JAAG has very strong concerns about these viewpoints, which are explained in Part 2, but first we consider the ideologies themselves.
1 Effective Altruism (EA)
EA advocates using reason and evidence to figure out how to help others as effectively as possible. Key aspects include parity in location: choosing to help strangers in other countries with greater needs rather than local people, and earning to give: make as much money as possible (e.g. as a tech entrepreneur or banker) in order to donate it to charities believed to do the most good.
EA people talk about AI safety, how AI is beneficial to humanity, shaping the future of AI governance. They give grants and career advice for people to enter these fields.
EA fuels the AI research agenda, notably Large Language Models (LLMs).
2 Long-termism
This view, often associated with EA, attaches great importance to the interests of future people. ‘Strong long-termism’ posits that future people are just as important as those living today.
Therefore, its adherents judge actions on the basis of their (assumed) impact many years ahead; they advocate boosting economic growth and minimising the risk to humanity posed by rogue artificial intelligence. More and more, EA funds long-termist projects, e.g. preparation for space colonization and existential threats.
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are among the founders of Open AI, whose ostensible mission was to build beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI). Musk says long-termism is a close match to his philosophy. Five years after its founding, Open AI released a large language model (LLM) called GPT-3. The ‘race to the bottom’ continues, with LLMs and text-to-image models etc., without anyone addressing any of the identified harms.
Elon Musk also helped found a long-termist organization called ‘The Future of Life institute’.
He also donated £1M to the Future of Humanity Institute affiliated to Oxford University and run by Nick Bostrom. However Oxford University decided to shut it down in April 2024 after 19 years of operation.
The long-termist view of anthropomorphic machines taking control and civilisational destruction can be seen as AI hype. It is taking attention away from the very real problems we have here and now from corporations and people deploying automated systems.
3 Effective Accelerationism (e/acc)
Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and a proponent of e/acc has stated: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives … Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” In this context, Andreessen opposes “sustainability”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, the “Precautionary Principle”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “socialism”, “and “depopulation” among many others.
Andreessen Harrowitz venture capital investments are backing a ‘heathcare’ start up called Ciitizen that wants to make it easy to collect patient data by persuading patients to ask for their data, store it in their platform and share it with 3rd parties. It is incredibly naive to think that this will lead to safe outcomes.
Andreessen has released the ‘Techno-Optimist manifesto’ in which he writes that technology makes the world not only a better place but also a good place. Andreessen has stated that society cannot progress without (economic) growth, and growth must come from technology: “there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology … Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it”.
4 Neo-liberalism
Technology is often used by politicians to fit their political narrative. Governments of all persuasions may espouse the use of AI and other technologies in order to get more power and control, for political manipulation or mass surveillance, etc; in China, AI is already being used for authoritarian purposes.
The Neo-liberal ideology – which aims need to dismantle the state and allow maximum freedom to entrepreneurs – gave birth to the UK’s Universal Credit system and Australia’s Robodebt scheme, which have been catastrophic for so many of the least well-off. Governments are also commissioning algorithms to control migration or to limit legitimate protests.
When technology is created with a focus on increasing profit, companies are reluctant to take an ethical approach in its development. Safeguarding measures are costly, as is content moderation. The first people who got fired when Musk took over Twitter were the ethics team working to stop abusive tweets.
Neo-liberal ideology has created a tiny, unrepresentative billionaire class who decide what technology we should have, who decide which societal problems are worth focusing on, who control the technological narrative, and who can spend millions lobbying governments to see things their way.