The AI Dilemma: Capitalism's Influence on Artificial Intelligence Development

Guard rails for capitalism, not AI

Something that happened on Nov 17, 2023, could well shape the future of AI. That day, Sam Altman was fired by OpenAI's board. While he did make a triumphant comeback four days later, that moment decided how AI would be shaped. And, in turn, how it would shape the world. Before Altman's brief exit, there were two competing visions of AI. One, where it was a tool like electricity, drastically improving productivity and bringing even more prosperity for humanity. The other was of a new kind of super-intelligence, which, if harnessed with maturity, could usher in a new era of world peace, universal income and societal good. OpenAI was set up to achieve the latter. After the Altman 'blip', it took a sharp turn towards the former. Parmy Olson, in her 2024 book, 'Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World', describes how the founders of AI superpowers - DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic - started with lofty ideals and independent labs, but sold out to Big Tech. As Kevin Roose wrote in a 2023 NYT article, 'AI Belongs to the Capitalists Now': ' A technology potentially capable of ushering in a Fourth Industrial Revolution was unlikely to be governed over the long term by those who wanted to slow it down - not when so much money was at stake.' Eventually, corporate and shareholder interests won over future worries and public good. The ills of AI are well-known, with dark concerns around privacy, surveillance and deepfakes, its bias against minorities and women; environmental damage it can cause; and the fear of a malevolent super-intelligence. This explains the hyperactivity to build guard rails and contain AI before it disrupts our jobs, society and, perhaps, civilisation itself. But is AI the real problem here? As Nathan J Robinson posits in a 2023 article in Jacobin, 'The problem is that new generative AI is being introduced into a capitalist society that is ill-equipped to handle it.' By all conventional measures, capitalism has been a resounding success. But while overall wealth increased, inequality of its distribution increased even further, leading to the richest 1% owning nearly half the wealth, and the bottom 50% owning just 2%. There are many reasons for this. A famous one highlighted by Thomas Piketty found that the rate of return on investment frequently outstrips overall growth. This discrepancy, with compounding, means that the wealth held by owners of capital will increase far more rapidly than other kinds of earnings (wages, for example). Similarly, tech superiority and the wealth it generates have been concentrated in fewer and fewer companies and individuals. This will get even more pronounced with AI, which requires more money to build than any tech before it - hundreds of billions on Nvidia GPUs to power compute, internet-scale data available only with Google, Meta and the like, and expensive talent to build the models that run AI. Only the moneyed have the money needed to build AI. Companies like IBM, BuzzFeed and Klarna are shedding employees and replacing them with AI, with the stock market rewarding them handsomely for this move. The astonishing progress in tech has not necessarily created a more equal world. Computers have driven up productivity, the internet has democratised information, and now AI promises to make intelligence abundant. But prices of land, education and healthcare have risen faster than inflation. Standards of living may have gone up, but the quality of living has decreased. The problem is not with the technologies but with the economic system. As SF writer Ted Chiang wrote in a 2023 New Yorker article, 'Will AI Become the New McKinsey?': 'The only way that technology can boost the standard of living is if there are economic policies in place to distribute the benefits of technology appropriately.' Capitalism developed as a reaction to feudalism, mercantilism and colonialism in Europe in the 16th century. Now, ironically, a new kind of capital colonialism is being created. It's not tech creating this embarrassing concentration of wealth. It's the economic system that houses it. It's not generative AI that is built to harm humanity. It's the economic incentive that encourages them to deviate from the goals for which they were created. Guard rails around AI were built at the creation stage itself. It is shareholder pressure that forced us to lower them. We do not need guard rails for AI. We need them around capitalism itself. (The writer is founder-MD, The Tech Whisperer)

Why the world needs guardrails around capitalism and not AI

The problem is not with technologies, but with economic systems and policies. November 2022 was a landmark month for AI. That was when OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT upon an unsuspecting world. AI had been brewing in labs and corporations since 1956 when the Dartmouth Conference gave birth to the term Artificial Intelligence, but it was ChatGPT that made it explode into public consciousness. However, it was another explosive event in November of 2023, which could well shape the future of AI. That was the day that Sam Altman,