Pushing Visions of Grandeur
Tech Bros Turning To Writing Manifestos To Sell You More Stuff
In an essay titled Machines of Loving Grace, How AI Could Transform the World for the Better (https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace.) Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, provides us with his view of what he believes the future must look like for his company to succeed. The essay is a disingenuous attempt to shape the public narrative and sell you more stuff. But it’s just another bogus self-serving vision of an “AI-accelerated future” from the tech bro universe. It’s audacious, not compelling and with more holes than Swiss Cheese. There is an increasing trend of tech bros trying to play public intellectuals — using their wealth as credibility to write nonsense in the furtherance of their business objectives.
Amodei declares, “I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be.” He goes on to sketch out a sketchy, self-serving view of what he needs us to believe about the future that will help Anthropic. He does acknowledge that everything in his predictions must go right; however, as we know, predictions are a fool’s game, but Amodei is no fool, so this essay is nothing more than hubris — hyped-up marketing narratives. And, of course, in support of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) tech bro narrative, a sign of desperation to stem the momentum of people becoming wise to the AGI con.
Like OpenAI’s snake oil salesman, Sam Altman, Amodei is just another tech bro hyping large language models (LLMs.) Both he and Altman are pushing their own versions of LLMs/AGI. Fantasy narratives serving to promote their products and gain market share. OpenAI is fooling Microsoft, so trying to fool the general public only makes sense.
However, when you apply some applied intelligence (ai), things start to fall apart, skepticism and scrutiny are your intelligence superpowers. The difference between Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is non-material, the same thing with different features. Anthropic aims to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) by combining machine learning, neuroscience, and cognitive science. OpenAI focuses on creating artificial intelligence for all of humanity, ya right!
Both were the two early front runners in generative AI, features differ and just reflect their creators’ broader philosophies about AGI. Both use powerful LLMs, offering the appearance of intelligence. But they are still annoying chatbots at the end of the day.
Just different shades of pale greys by a small group of equally pale tech-bros with tons of cash, bullshitting their way through with bogus narratives and science fiction.
A closed and F’…d up world of groupthink where everyone is doing the same thing, supported by Big Tech: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Facebook, and more — the usual suspects. AKA the new tech aristocracy.
A world where massive cash and power allow billionaires to exert their wealth and influence through brute force and arrogantly believing that they are the arbiters of our lives and only they know what’s best for society. Maximizing their wealth and power in the tech aristocracy network as a divine right to rule over others.
Like in feudal times, Overlords crafted the narrative that suited their wealth agenda best and excluded the peasants and anyone else outside the aristocracy from generating prosperity. Modern times are no different; the new tech aristocracy Overlords are the same. Times change, but human nature stays the same. History is important because historical analysis/comparisons provide insights into the reality of our existence versus the stories we are fed by the powerful.
Aristocracy networks, then and now, serve where wealth concentrates, in Silicon Valley, in the hands of the few, allowing them to make all the rules. This creates an anti-competition and anti-capitalism environment, stifling innovation, creativity and diversity of thinking — differences in how others see the world. Setting up civilizations, economies, societies, and humanity to regress.
Amodei’s essay is over 50 pages long, a manifesto diatribe which exposes how unread he really is, not intellectual, particularly when it comes to the history of technology and progress. He fails to provide any meaningful or insightful research and analysis that could support his points. But we do get a lot of hubris, arrogance, and ignorance.
Amodei gives the standard…AI might radically transform society over the next 10–20 years, with no specifics or evidence and objectivity — a set of bold but unsubstantiated self-serving predictions
Everything comes from the perspective of benefiting the AGI story, like his tech bro Sam Altman does too, going on and on about how artificial intelligence could accelerate progress and transform the world. Oh ya, but they just need us to hand over billions of dollars before they get the job done.
Amodei doesn’t pose any insightful questions for us to ponder, he arrogantly assumes that broader society must go along with his future worldview. Nevertheless, people are lazy and don’t read, so the nice stories and hype strategy have worked before.
However, with the plateauing of ChatGPT and competition from Google and Facebook giving away LLM-based products for free, the sector looks increasingly to be on its way to becoming a commodity.
This 50-page, page-turner (joke) is typical and similar to The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by VC Marc Andreessen, a stupid and petulant diatribe by a tech Overlord writing it seems amid a hyper-mania episode, separated from reality and filled with grandeur.
The Washington Post said, “Marc Andreessen’s new manifesto is a self-serving cry for help; rambling and at times incoherent, the document is likely to have the opposite effect of what the writer intended: It might well remind policymakers and regular citizens of the dangers of unbridled technology — and its unaccountable cheerleaders.”
Amodei’s is much less hyperbolic and bombastic to his credit, but his essay is still pretty much annoying and nonsensical, I found.
The substance of Amodei’s thoughts and ideas is fleeting. He subtly attempts to use camouflage language, using “powerful AI” instead of AGI, to tell us that AI will transform the world over the next 5–10 year period. But we can still see the AGI sell coming from a mile away.
Both Altman, Amodei, and Andreessen make bold claims without substantiation — to keep people on the line as long as possible so they can expand their businesses and grow their wealth.
Much of Amodei’s essay hinges on the idea that AI progress can be “compressed,” ramped up by a factor of 10, whatever that means, and going beyond what humans are capable of. But the more he writes, the more fragile his notions become.
He argues that we can compress the next 100 years of human innovation and progress into around ten years. Again, it is audacious, without any real coherent explanation or even conviction on his part, is the vibe I picked up.
Authentic innovation has an inherent or natural evolutionary process and period to go through; it requires learning, trial and error and relentless iteration. A programmed machine can’t innovate because it does not have general human intelligence and no a priori and empirically-based knowledge functionality.
Amodei’s essay is one of shameless and desperate self-promotion. Simplistic, superficial and anti-intellectual, optimistic as hell but sinister of sorts, and disconnected from reality.
Like Altman and Andreessen, he also says that AI/tech bros will solve all problems: human biology and physical and mental health, neuroscience, economic development and inequality, peace and prosperity, governance, and the future of work. Again, all in about 5–10 years, just like Elon Musk has been saying that we’ll have a driverless car world in a couple of years, but he’s been saying that for at least the last 14 years.
His essay is filled with huge logical chasms, particularly about the history of technology and society, as mentioned earlier, relative to how civilizations have evolved and transformed with technology.
Recommended reading for Amodei is Power And Progress — Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity, by MIT professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. The book comprehensively explains how technology is all too often promoted by and benefiting mainly the elites. “And a thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear: progress depends more on the choices we make about technology.” Technology is here to serve humanity and not the other way around.
With examples from the agricultural revolutions and the European Middle Ages to the industrial revolutions, the elite, nobility, aristocracy, etc., have all pursued similar narratives to build their wealth via technology and on the backs of the less informed or willfully ignorant. And they ended up with great wealth, building “grand cathedrals, while peasants remained on the edge of starvation,” as the industrialization in England delivered stagnant incomes for the urban working poor.
In modern times, we must pay attention to the similarities between then and now. The tech bros aristocracy has gained extraordinary wealth, power and influence, enough to shape society and influence governments to their liking. We need to understand how the real world works, not buy into false narratives that are aimed at controlling how we think and what we consume. We must seek to empower our minds and become the arbiters of our own lives by making our own choices about the value of the technologies we might decide to use.
Power and Progress demonstrate the path of technology was once — and may again — be brought under control. Via authentic democratizing tools, that can take all the major decisions out of the hands of a few hubristic tech bro leaders. Redirecting innovation once again to benefit most people.
In the end, Dario Amodei’s essay is superfluous.
As The Washington Post writer Adam Lashinsky put it in his October 19, 2023 article, titled Marc Andreessen’s new manifesto is a self-serving cry for help:
“Oh, please. The opposite is true. Our society has rightly celebrated the epic achievements of inventors and builders of products that have brought us much joy and convenience. But we’ve long grown wary of self-serving tech bros (and their manifesti), who are more interested in making their next buck than the general welfare of those who buy their wares.”
So whether it’s “Powerful AI,” “AGI,” or now, “Super Intelligence,” which is the latest and new company recently founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. They’ve raised $1 billion essentially overnight to help develop “safe artificial intelligence systems that far surpass human capabilities,” the company executives told Reuters. Again, be skeptical and apply our intelligence critically. The descriptions and storytelling might appear to be different, but it’s all spin. It’s the same bullshit at the end of the day. Don’t be a sucker, be well-informed!
