In the book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, co-authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna argue that the term AI (acronym for Artificial Intelligence) is marketing hype. Google defines the word hype as “promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits.” The implication is that without the exaggerated claim of benefit, and if people knew what they were REALLY getting with widespread adoption of these technologies bundled under the AI moniker, they quite likely would reject the product or idea altogether. The other pertinent question is, benefit to WHOM? Does the average consumer really benefit more than the cost imposed and the harm potentially incurred? The authors argue NO, the use of the term AI is really a bait and switch for increased AUTOMATION across the board. Automation that will decrease the demand for labor and remove human judgment from decision-making and categorizing. It will end up benefiting the ownership and finance classes at the expense of everyone else. What is Creator’s perspective?

Unfortunately, we do agree with this overall broad-based conclusion. It is quite an indictment of a huge area of human endeavor underway with perhaps one of the largest capital investments in history already being devoted to the pursuit of a kind of folly. All of the negative examples, and there are many in both of the books you will be citing in your questions here today, are a very astute and accurate indictment that AI is not truly ready for prime time nor will it be in the foreseeable future. There are many parallel examples of something that has curb appeal as well as a huge positive reward, but if that reward comes with a poison pill of some kind that more than takes away from the benefits, there is a need for retrenchment to think long and hard about what one is getting into and whether it is worth putting so many chips in play, so to speak, betting on an ultimate victory and financial gains commensurate with a successful technology and its implementation in ways that will be heralded by humanity as a true advance and not a disastrous mistake that might backfire and end up triggering a kind of reckoning akin to a witch hunt. Much will be determined by humans and their choices in how blind they remain to the downsides and uncertainties and how recklessly they reach out to embrace false promises, systems that may have some practical benefit but, in the end, will be creating a lesser offering, and thus the tremendous cost savings will be a Pyrrhic victory if what the company is marketing, through their AI systems, underperforms and ultimately is rejected in the end by consumers who see through the holes in coverage and the dilution of quality to offer speed as the only benefit for the consumer. There are many hidden costs here, the chief among them being the potential to put so many human beings out of work by making their careers categorically infeasible, from a financial perspective, if AI can be accepted as taking over as a substitute for human workers. We predict that will rarely work out to an overall advantage to society, but that does not mean that corporate heads, and those they rely on for decision-making, will not embrace AI wholeheartedly and ride it out to the bitter end, believing in it all the way. The reason we think this could well happen is that AI is heavily supported by the darkness, knowing that it will cheapen your world and undermine human progress, ultimately. It is already clear to those in the know that AI systems create as much work as they save; it is simply a question of who ends up doing it. Workers on the AI side, for example, babysitting the systems that are flawed and inherently substandard, are an unseen cost burden. The uncertainties of long-term marketing and continued support by corporate clients persuaded to buy into the technologies being offered, which are truly not ready for performing at a high enough level of reliability to not ultimately be rejected by consumers, will see their short-term gains, even though considerable, be given up and then some in many, many cases. So it is useful, as you are doing, to look in some detail at the advent of AI, and its meaning, and the likely trajectory here in terms of the overall impact, whether good or bad, and especially in terms of the bad, because we see that as being ultimately the dominant consequence, as is true of all technologies being embraced by humanity, lulled into a false sense of security that you are figuring things out and all is working well when such is not really the case. You are seeing currently a crest of a wave, a rising tide, but it's really a kind of bubble being created. Everyone is along for the ride, and it will be exhilarating at first, and will make many people rich. But, as all bubbles burst, there will come a day of reckoning, just as with the tulip mania of old.