Increasingly, the message being presented to the States is that their future well-being hinges on the successful development and deployment of AI.  But there is another chorus of voices, which is singing a different tune:  that AI will bring about a lot of pain for people whether it succeeds or fails.

Failure will mean financial pain, as a giant investment bubble bursts:

‘For good reason, it feels that the only major discussion in markets is whether AI is in a bubble or whether it’s actually the early innings of a revolutionary phrase.

‘So here’s another one, decidedly from the pessimistic camp. It’s a take from independent research firm the MacroStrategy Partnership, which advises 220 institutional clients, in a note written by analysts including Julien Garran, who previously led UBS’s commodities strategy team.

‘Let’s start with the boldest claim first — it’s that AI is not just in a bubble, but one 17 times the size of the dot-com bubble, and even four times bigger than the 2008 global real-estate bubble.

‘ . . . LLMs, he argues, already are at the scaling limits. “We don’t know exactly when LLMs might hit diminishing returns hard, because we don’t have a measure of the statistical complexity of language. To find out whether we have hit a wall we have to watch the LLM developers. If they release a model that cost 10x more, likely using 20x more compute than the previous one, and it’s not much better than what’s out there, then we’ve hit a wall,” he says.

‘And that’s what has happened: ChatGPT-3 cost $50 million, ChatGPT-4 cost $500 million and ChatGPT-5, costing $5 billion, was delayed and when released wasn’t noticeably better than the last version. It’s also easy for competitors to catch up.

‘ . . . His conclusion is very stark: not just that an economy already at stall speed will fall into recession as both the data-center and wealth effects plateau, but that they’ll reverse, just as they did in the dot-com bubble in 2001.

‘“The danger is not only that this pushes us into a zone 4 deflationary bust on our investment clock, but that it also makes it hard for the Fed and the Trump administration to stimulate the economy out of it. This means a much longer effort at reflation, a bit like what we saw in the early 1990s, after the S&L crisis, and likely special measures as well, as the Trump administration seeks to devalue the US$ in an effort to onshore jobs,” he says’ (Steve Goldstein, ‘The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble, analyst says,’ marketwatch.com).

Success will mean political pain – the loss of freedom – as Brazil is about to learn.  Her national government is deploying AI to scour the web for ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation,’ and will file criminal charges against the accused:

‘President Lula da Silva’s Brazil has taken another step towards totalitarianism with the launch of a massive platform designed to streamline the prosecution of those who criticize LGBT ideology. With Orwellian irony, it has been called the ‘Platform of Respect.’

‘“The Ministry of Human Rights, in partnership with the NGO Aliança Nacional LGBTI+, launched a platform aimed at holding legally accountable authors of publications considered to be disinformation or hate speech against LGBTI+ people and other gender identities,” reported Gp1, a major Brazilian news outlet.

‘The ‘Platform of Respect’ initiative was funded by a R$300,000 (around €50,000) parliamentary amendment sponsored by Erika Hilton, a trans-identifying male politician. According to Gp1, the “system uses an artificial intelligence tool called Aletheia, which, according to its official website, seeks to ‘track the origin of disinformation, report its impact, and enable accountability for authors and disseminators.’”

‘ . . . “Initially, the project presents itself as a hybrid fact-checking agency, bringing together legal and communications professionals to work over 18 months to combat fake news on social media,” reported Gp1. “During the launch, held in Brasília on September 16, Jean Muksen, the platform’s coordinator, explained that the main objective is to continuously monitor profiles and media outlets, identifying ‘problematic’ content and eventually filing criminal complaints.”

‘“We created a platform with several artificial intelligence tools that continuously monitor pages, profiles, websites, and blogs,” Muksen said. He noted that “the technology analyzes discourse, intentions, and nuances of the Portuguese language, including irony and sarcasm, which traditional methods don’t automatically detect” and “when it identifies alleged fake news or a post containing hate speech, the system stores the content in a repository, which can be forwarded to the courts after evaluation by a lawyer hired by the NGO.”

‘In short, the new system will constantly scan online conversations and, when it identifies an interaction that might constitute “disinformation” or “hate speech” as defined by the state—which includes affirming the sex binary and rejecting the idea that men can become women—it sends the “evidence” to be reviewed for potential criminal prosecution. It is a fusion of totalitarian LGBT ideology and AI technology’ (Jonathon Van Maren, ‘Brazil Launches AI Platform To Identify and Prosecute Critics of LGBT Ideology,’ europeanconservative.com).

Succeed or fail, AI is a daunting threat to society.  Having gotten to this point where one technology holds so much sway for good or ill, it is necessary to reassess our view of technology in general so we can find our way out of this threatening situation.  In an essay about Paul Kingsnorth’s timely new book Against the Machine, Herman Middleton offers advice along that line:

‘Kingsnorth repeatedly makes a point I have been emphasizing for a long time: regardless of the particular dangers of any given technology, we should be more concerned about the underlying techno-scientific project (and its philosophical-theological presuppositions) that brings dangerous technologies to life and deforms the world it encounters.

‘ . . . In many ways, Against The Machine continues in this tradition of extreme realism: rather than sugarcoat the problem, Kingsnorth makes a compelling case that unless we change fundamental things about the way we view the world (which should in turn change the way we live our lives) there is little hope for society on its current trajectory’ (‘A Brief Anti-Machine History,’ gadflyacademy.substack.com).

For now, however, we remain hung on the horns of an AI dilemma of our own making, facing hardships and dangers whether we accept that technology or reject it.