We were promised something grander than a tool for control. The appeal for the people building them and funding them alike is a scaling intelligence that one day shatters the glass ceiling of our own brains. That’s the road to the “world of abundance” — Musk’s phrase for a future where work itself becomes irrelevant. You must have a strong belief that intelligence is a single-track walk to a utopia. But the real world is chaotic and cutthroat. The part worth arguing about isn’t the superintelligence that might show up someday. It’s the ordinary economics that’s already here.
Computer scientists live in a world where rigid principles and layered abstractions let us conjure the magic everyone else sees as apps and agents. We build these systems, tear them down, prod at them, retrain them, and hand them over wrapped in neat bows. In practice that means we live in an age of abundant research. We’ve built a scientific flywheel that keeps spinning faster as we feed it more of our ideas (data) and resources (data centers). It lives in a vacuum untouched by the machinations of economic greed, military hubris, or political ideology.
We build the tools that change the way the world works then hand them over to the groups that tech culture has historically snubbed. We don’t understand the societal implications of the systems we build because a tool is at the behest of the wielder.
Any artificial intelligence will never be free, so in reality it has become politicized and financialized. News about China vs. the USA or the latest fundraising round dominates the major news cycles. It’s common to see headlines about AI taking people’s jobs and decimating entire sectors as the intelligence keeps growing. Our abstractions to replace specific jobs will eventually balloon to larger platitudes. Have we not considered that the economic weapon of the future is already here?
Imagine a developing country in 2050 needing to bootstrap an AI strategy from scratch (choose your own adventure for the how and why). We tout AI as a revolutionary technology who you either stay lock step with or get left in the dust. The buildout of infrastructure for any technology is never free. So the country faces a exorbitant cost to just have a chance at competing. Where will it turn to fund and build this? It will have to be a superpower or mega corporation - we already see this in practice with global partnerships on shipping ports, EV cars and military technology.
Importantly, money is a transactional entity. You can’t brainwash a dollar but you can censor and steer an AI. The price of getting that hook into a society is worth more than what we have fought over in the past. When you can augment a nation’s economic output is that not itself a weapon too?