The Old Left Recognizes the Danger of AI, Where’s Everybody Else? |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
The Old Left Recognizes the Danger of AI, Where’s Everybody Else?
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
It’s time for the so-called new left to wake up to the existential threat posed by AI. The only U.S. politician cognizant of this stupendous danger is old left Bernie Sanders, who recognizes the late-capitalist AI tsunami coming for us all. He’s the only one asking questions about what happens once governments and corporations turn everything over to AI, because the only way to compete is to rely on a technology that functions at the level of “the best humans” and will soon develop beyond and surpass the best and smartest humans.
This is the overall danger posed by AI. More specific ones have been making headlines lately, namely the AI corporation Anthropic’s imbroglio with Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth. With breathtaking arrogance, Hegseth threatened to ditch Anthropic’s $200 million defense department contract for its AI called Claude, if Claude could not be used for certain despicable and frankly illegal purposes: in autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input and allowing Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance. To his credit, Anthropic’s ceo Dario Amodei resisted Pentagon pressure. But these horrifying demands reveal AI’s monstrously anti-human and homicidal potential. On the evening of February 27, before Anthropic and the Pentagon could release their final positions, Trump, in a fit of pique, banned all government agencies from doing business with Anthropic. So I guess we know where the white house stands on potential abuses of AI. But in the end, this hullaballoo between an AI corporation and the Pentagon is only one aspect of the broader danger AI poses to humanity.
So what happens when, in a few years, the labor portion of the economy is zero percent and the capital portion is 100 percent? And that’s coming fast, because Donald Trump has unleashed AI. The situation might be manageable if the U.S. and China slapped some controls on this monster – so that creating AI superior to the best and smartest humans is delayed – and China would probably be willing to do that. But Trump’s........