The Monkey's Paw Inside the Iron Glove

"And tell yourself, you know?
You're not really what you know you are
[...]
Oh, burn motherfucker!
Carry the carcass and throw it on
Pull up a chair and watch
The flies come roaring out
And will surround the entire world
And blacken out the sky and every last one of you
Like a plague of locusts
Like an exit
Like an end"

 

NIN - Burning Bright (Field on Fire)

 

 

Regardless of wars and elections, the news these days keep cycling back to whether or not the AI investment bubble may finally be bursting, first in China then in Western markets. Remains to be seen. For anyone who also saw the Y2K-era dot-com bubble collapse, it brings back all those "what does your company actually make?" jokes with an added twist: and who's gonna buy it?

 

From years ago it was already obvious a product which destroys the consumer market's purchasing power cannot be meant to justify its existence by selling to that market. Nobody's really promising you a rocket car and robot maid. Moreover, though all industries tend toward monopolization, it seems as though with bots especially, an infinitely copied software product, what one can do so can the others or will in a month. Whichever bribes its way to government approval, it will still mean trillions upon trillions of dollars in vaporized investments in its exterminated competitors. How many countries' economies will that crash? Nobody cares. More insanely, data center construction seems to presume investment will continue to ramp up - to do what?

 

Sure, there's some minor chance all this new computing power is being used to create a truly generally-intelligent Skynet that'll wipe us all out. Or maybe handing over too much manufacturing to automation will get us rendered for iron by a paperclip maximizer. But the real threat remains the human element. Not to repeat myself, but the main impediment to any dictator is a need for collaborators. At some point a soldier will refuse to pull the trigger on his own brother, knowing he's next, and then you're headed for rebellion. LLMs promise an entire self-building army, tireless, with unflinching reaction time a thousand times faster than any soldier's, utterly obedient to a single commander, a single Imperator in the truest sense of a word, who need but say "make it so" for the computer to find the fastest way to hold you and everyone else in the world at gunpoint in perpetuity. Even Chinese slave labor can't compete with that.

 

You're worried about losing jobs? Don't worry, there will still be one job only humans can fill, one role in which an obedient machine will never satisfy: to suffer. Because enough power is never enough. Enough control is never enough. The Great Dictator will start by putting you in a Pleasantville but soon get bored and insecure that control may be slipping. It'll gradually turn into more of a zoo, demeaning but livable. The real fun will start by mandatory rallies to praise the Dear Leader, it'll ramp up with maybe an auto da fe here and there, making you hack your neighbour apart with a machete while a quad-rotor machine gun merely observes, then you'll be starved and hunted for sport and skinned alive and be fed your children's still throbbing entrails and it will never be enough to satisfy the runaway human need for ever more power and control over other humans. Every Caligula and Inquisition and Auschwitz and Killing Fields that's proven that point over our history is just the beginning.

 

That's the real market for AI. Consumer products or bureaucratic automation are a smokescreen. That's why crashing the world economy simply does not matter. The first overentitled rich fuck to command a self-constructing private fleet answerable to a single voice wins the world, and that's the only customer to whom the tech bros are really marketing. It might buy them a few more years of life under the new dictatorship.