They are a trying lot, spruiking their overvalued, loss-making firms, sowing discord and fear, and then seeking state collaboration that will serve to implicate all the parties concerned should things sour.  And what will the rest of us get?  Hardly the promised land.  But the United Nations, for the first time in history, became a centre stage for the propagandists from Artificial Intelligence firms during the September deliberations, diplomats hanging off the banal declarations from such figures as Sam Altman, the CEO from OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, his equivalent from Anthropic.

In his September 23 address to the UN Security Council, no less, Altman slipped into that familiar messianic tone about choices to be made, largely because these choices are being made for the rest of humanity by his ilk.  “We have a choice in front of us.  AI can either be more like a new Renaissance of creativity and discovery, or more like a new Industrial Revolution of upheaval and disarray.”  Why the binary proposition?  And why the need for the choice in the first place?

Altman is irritatingly condescending, suggesting that “people are much more capable than they imagine themselves to be, but have been held back by limited technology that was meant to empower but instead distracts and often steals attention.”  Examples are not forthcoming, but the monotonous tone is set: AI, like the son of the good Lord, is a gift to humankind.  “It is about giving people more agency in an ever more complex world: more ability to learn, to create, discover, build, participate.”

This is drivel, since AI, even as this is being penned, is imposing disabilities on learning by turning the process into one of lazy, numbing consumption, negating creativity by stealing it from creative human sources, not so much discovering as synthesising what has been scraped and not so much building as demolishing and removing the human subject from participation. The agenda is distinctly anti-human.

This is drivel, since AI, even as this is being penned, is imposing disabilities on learning by turning the process into one of lazy, numbing consumption, negating creativity by stealing it from creative human sources, not so much discovering as synthesising what has been scraped and not so much building as demolishing and removing the human subject from participation. The agenda is distinctly anti-human.

Altman, however, had hit his stride, saying that, “AI should be built for the people, not simply to turn the crank of the machines faster for their own sake. Some of the........

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