A Closer Look: The True Threat of AI

A recent opinion piece featured in the New York Times caught our attention. In it, the influential researcher and intellectual Evgeny Morozov described what he called ‘The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence.’

Morozov argued that technology and its acceptance as a panacea for all problems – what he calls solutionism - is inhibiting our ability as humans to creatively and imaginatively problem-solve.

By his definition, solutionism is the belief that every problem has a solution in technology, which in turn fosters the provision of a solution or solutions to a customer sometimes before a problem has even been identified.

According to Morozov, solutionism doesn’t solve problems; it simply monetizes the behavioral change of an individual. He argues that organizations are under-producing solutions because the sort of structural solutions that are not favorable to capital never come into existence. This ultimately goes back to the belief that the only thing that matters to organizations is shareholder value.

Morozov believes that the only way to decrease risk is to take the time to think ahead about things that might go wrong – but this is not something that technology advocates are necessarily taught to do. As he puts it:

“Solutionism presumes rather than investigates the problems that it is trying to solve, reaching for the answer before the questions have been fully asked. How problems are composed matters every bit as much as how problems are.”

The argument here is that not only do the numbers produced by machine algorithms not provide an adequate representation of the world but today they are being used to displace all other possible representations. To put it bluntly, binary solutions are beginning to crowd out human imagination.

"It's this imperialistic streak of quantification - its propensity to displace other meaningful and possibly intangible ways of talking about a phenomenon- that is so troubling," writes Morozov. This, in turn, leads to what he calls a "narrowing of vision."

Concerning the Unregulated Rise of AGI

Morozov points out that in May 2023, more than 350 technology executives, researchers, and academics signed a statement warning of the existential dangers of artificial intelligence, saying that, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

The main point of the article was not to raise the global alarm on generative applications like GPT-4, but rather that the unregulated rise of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is most worrying to those who monitor technology. Morozov acknowledges that discussions of AGI are rife with apocalyptic scenarios. Conversely, a lobby of academics, investors, and entrepreneurs argue that, once made safe, AGI would be a boon to civilization. Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, can think of no better alternatives for fixing humanity and expanding its intelligence.

However, the core of Morozov’s concern is that AGI is an ally for what he calls capitalism’s most destructive creed of neoliberalism. In other words, the efforts to transform a stagnant economy through deregulation, which he attributes to the great recession and financial crisis, Brexit, and much else.

So how did he reach such a conclusion? In a nutshell, the bias of what he calls AGI-ism will reinforce and replicate neoliberalism in digital clothing, given that private actors outperform public ones (the market bias), that adapting to reality beats transforming it (the adaptation bias) and that efficiency will always trump social concerns (the efficiency bias).

Morozov concludes that instead of saving the world, the quest to build Artificial General Intelligence could only worsen things. He points out that hospitals, police departments, and even the Pentagon increasingly rely on Silicon Valley to accomplish their missions, and that with AGI, this reliance will only deepen because AGI is unbounded in its scope and ambition. After all, advocates will claim that augmenting intelligence is primarily a technological problem. To quote, “First, the charm offensive of heavily subsidized services. Then the ugly retrenchment, with the overdependent users and agencies shouldering the costs of making them profitable.”

In summary, Morozov argues that while AGI may or may not prove to be an existential threat, it is essential now to seriously question its antisocial bent and its neoliberal biases before the idea that there’s no alternative to AGI becomes acceptable.