Tech executives have said a lot of wild things over the past few years to justify all the money they’re plowing into generative AI and the effort to force us all to use it. They’ve warned that AI could wipe us all out, that we’d have to geoengineer the planet to make way for their AI future, and that the surface of the earth would end up covered in data centers.
These are outrageous statements. They try to exaggerate the power of the underlying technology to get us to focus our attention on science fictional scenarios over the real harms of how AI is being deployed. But few of them shook me as deeply as a statement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at Blackrock’s US Infrastructure Summit in March.
“We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” said Altman, laying out an intensely dystopian future as just another business development. “One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work, ‘Too cheap to meter.’”
When I first heard what Altman had said, I was shocked and bewildered. How does someone even conceive of metering (and monetizing) intelligence if they’re not a tech billionaire with an intense antipathy toward humanity? It was clearly not something that would ever be achieved in practice. But it did hint at a much deeper issue with these AI tools, what they’re doing to our cognitive capacities, and the broader ideology underpinning the industry’s effort to force AI into every facet of our lives.
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Enclosing intelligence
Since the early days of the generative AI boom, boosters like Altman have been positioning the technology as an additive to human intelligence — if not an outright replacement. It didn’t matter that machine learning and neural networks were not actually displaying intelligence; the simple fact that the technologies were lumped together under the term “artificial intelligence” allowed them to make the false comparison.
Humans have a certain level of intelligence, they told us, and now generative AI tools — or “agents” — would complement that intelligence. In their mind, there was no distinction between human intelligence and supposedly computer-enabled intelligence, meaning the total intelligence in the world and available to the individual was expanding as the technology became more mature. We would all be more intelligent as a result.
It’s an appealing story, as long as you don’t apply any critical thought to the claims of those tech executives. The most obvious point is that chatbots are not intelligent. They rely on pattern recognition to try to produce a response that reflects the prompt they’re given. They do not understand the response, they do not think about the response, and they have no ability to determine the accuracy of the response — hence all the discussion of “hallucinations” these past few years. But the problem goes even deeper.
Chatbots may not be intelligent, but using them seems to affect the cognitive ability of their users. Studies have already found that reliance on chatbots leads students to to perform worse on tests because they’re not retaining as much of the information. Those that used chatbots were also less likely to engage in critical thinking, with researchers finding they “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” compared to peers that did not rely on the technology. A paper that included researchers from Microsoft even found that use of generative AI can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”
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That’s bad enough, but then you consider the even more serious potential implications. Over the past year, we’ve been seeing an escalating series of stories about people experiencing mental breakdowns after developing a dependence on chatbots. Some have been institutionalized, others have disappeared, and some have used the chatbot to get support in ending their lives — occasionally doing so successfully.
There’s clearly a massive gulf between rhetoric and reality. Tech billionaires want the public to believe they’re making the world a better place and enhancing our individual and collective capacities. But they’re actually harming people’s ability to learn and to think for themselves, if not disrupting the course of their very existence. They’re not turning us into unparalleled geniuses; they’re threatening to collectively dumb us down. Once they’ve done so, they’ll try to sell smarts back to us in the form of chatbots that are anything but intelligent.
In a sense, it reminds me of one of the criticisms of Elon Musk’s interest in Mars: if only the billionaires can get us to live in space, they can put a price on the very air we breathe because it will need to be produced by machines. They want to commercialize absolutely everything, and will stop at nothing to do it. But there is one further layer to this problem that gets to the deeper ideology behind trying to enclose intelligence — and who is actually allowed to be smart.
Enclosing the future
Billionaires like Musk have been working to revitalize IQ tests as a trusted way of quantifying intelligence and cognition, despite their questionable reliability and controversial past. Tech founders assert that they deserve their power and wealth because they claim to be more intelligent than regular people, dismissing any notion that luck was involved in their rise. Musk has long talked about “smart” people needing to have more kids and said DOGE needed “super high-IQ” employees.
That quantification of intelligence plays into the desire of CEOs to equate the human intelligence occurring in our brains to the supposed artificial intelligence happening on a vast number of graphics cards. To be clear, they are not at all the same thing, and the latter is not demonstrating any form of real intelligence. But someone like Altman has paid to have his brain frozen once he dies so it can be uploaded to a computer in the future, and has argued that humans need to merge with machines. We can be the “biological bootloader for digital intelligence,” he wrote in 2017, “or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”
These ideas are directly related to the more science fictional ideology of longtermism that tech billionaires have been advocating in the past few years. It asserts that humans alive today are of equal value to humans that could live thousands or millions of years in the future. Longtermists claim to want to maximize the potential future “value” in the universe, and as a result argue that challenges like climate change and global poverty are secondary to developing the technology to colonize space and make computers that can think like humans (often called artificial general intelligence).
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The end point of that that worldview envisions setting up vast computer installations on celestial bodies throughout the galaxy filled with digital “post-humans” — effectively, human minds replicated on computer hardware. It’s a foolish story, but one that provides tech billionaires some form of justification for the harmful and extractive world they’re building, all while telling themselves they’re saving humanity by trying to realize the futures they read about in science fiction books.
There’s one other wrinkle to this story. It’s convenient that Musk is promoting IQ so hard, when the metric was designed in many cases to make white people appear quantifiably more intelligent than people of color. Reviving the use of IQ tests is convenient for the arguments billionaires make around quantifying intelligence in order to try to legitimize their arguments around chatbots, but it also benefits the broader white supremacist project that so many influential people in the tech industry have started openly championing in recent years. At every point, they’re finding ways to make the world a worse place while pretending to do the opposite.
For robots, not for people
Dumbing down the public isn’t just the product of the tech industry. For decades, right-wing political movements have pushed to defund education, leading to declining literacy in the United States, while through-provoking literature and culture has been slowly replaced by entertainment driven by spectacle. AI companies are stepping into societies already at war with critical thought to take advantage of and further propel those trends to their own gain.
Sam Altman proposing to literally meter intelligence is just the most egregious proposal of such an anti-human industry. But he is not the only one with a desire to create a world where buying a tech product is a requirement to be fully engaged in society. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a society where anyone not wearing his AI-enabled smart glasses is at a disadvantage. In some ways, tech billionaires have already pushed us in that direction. It’s become hard to get by in modern society without a smartphone.
Altman’s slip of the tongue at the Infrastructure Summit give us a bit more insight into how these tech billionaires see the world, and how little humanity features in their visions of the future. They will degrade every aspect of society if they feel it will get them one step closer to the realization of intelligent machines and their science fiction dreams. But every time they reveal more of that vision, they further demonstrate why everyone else must work together to stop them.
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