When Technologists Misunderstand Human Relationship

Some Increasingly Feisty Thoughts on AI and Friendship

Those of you who have been around these parts for a while will know that sometimes I like to make sarcastic-if-serious comments about our technological overlords, as I did about Google’s AI Visionary Ray Kurzweil in “Longevity Escape Velocity.” If you enjoy that sort of thing, well, keep reading. If you don’t, keep reading anyway, because these technologists shape our communities in profound ways, and—to be blunt—they don’t understand what a humans are made for. Like, at all. If we don’t pay attention, if we lack awareness of what is happening and miss the hints about where these folks hope to take us, the wave will crest and crash over us before we know it’s coming.

Photo by Ling App on Unsplash (cropped)

This is a post about where prominent people in technological spaces think human life is heading, and why that will, by and large, be very bad in ways these prominent people seem unable to conceptualize.

A couple weeks ago a friend of mine pointed me to The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future, a book co-authored by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of both DeepMind and Inflection AI, and currently CEO of Microsoft AI. Suleyman is a big deal, and the book is a New York Times bestseller. It is…fine.

In a way, I appreciate the upshot of the book. Suleyman aims at two points. First, he displays what is coming from the AI revolution. Mostly, he seems bent on creating a bit of panic, or at least alarm, at what will be possible in the relatively near future. Second, he issues a call for communities to respond. Suleyman thinks we must work together to contain AI in a way that makes in productive rather than destructive, beneficial rather than harmful.

That much is okay. Good, even. Indeed, I appreciate that Suleyman recognizes, if only implicitly, that technology does not supply its own goals. We must be the ones to direct technology toward appropriate ends. For example, Suleyman notes that AIs trained to perform tasks like driving or mastering the game Go can strategize, but only given they’ve been told the goal: