It’s not a new concept for corrupt billionaires to wield power over the common people’s heads, but that doesn’t make it right. We are well within our rights to react accordingly when these individuals encourage us to accept what benefits them and harms us.
In a recent Politico interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits,” referring to artificial intelligence.
Altman didn’t include that these “bad things” consist of harming the world’s water and energy supply, stealing human work and usurping human intelligence while furthering income inequality. He also didn’t mention that his own AI agents have gone rogue, meddling with government websites, public health data and other AI hubs without the company’s knowledge.
Why, then, should we care about the benefits of AI over the benefits of the people?
What are the benefits of AI, even? Altman didn’t detail this either. He said AI technology is for democracy but only meant that people should have access to it rather than a say in how l it’s developed.
Altman solidified this point by adding that further regulation of AI would be harmful because, “that’s a completely unacceptable trade-off from a perspective of liberty and human agency and people self-determining the future.”
It’s easy for him to say that as someone who gets to self-determine the future. We aren’t as lucky, as us smallfolk have not participated in direct public referendums or ballot measures to vote on or pass AI regulations. AI technology has not been “for democracy,” as Altman claims.
Altman also said his light-touch regulatory stance comes with an acceptance of the fact that some bad things are going to happen. He added that he “wouldn’t take a trade of saying, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no kind of like misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all of the other bad things that will happen.’”
This is ironic considering that, in September, AI researchers warned that AI could kill us by the end of the decade. Altman acknowledged these fears, supporting the proposal for slowing AI development, “We need to pace the frontier” Altman said.
Conversely, Altman suspended two teams at OpenAI responsible for studying the long-term risks of AI technology. It seems as though not even the potential end of humanity was enough to get Altman to care beyond acknowledging dangers to the public. He is still focused on concentrating more wealth among people like him.
Billionaires like Altman, Larry Fink and Alex Karp, have spoken out about how AI will widen the wealth gap between themselves and middle-class workers.
“The vast majority of wealth has flowed to people who owned assets, not to people who earned their money by working,” Fink wrote in his annual letter to BlackRock shareholders. “Now AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale.”
Fink added AI-driven productivity has raised wages in a relatively small pool of jobs, while excitement surrounding the technology has boosted stock markets.
Karp’s net worth, for example, has been pushed to about $15 billion with the AI boom. The market value for his company Palantir has propelled to roughly $322 billion.
With this, he has warned that AI wealth imbalance is a problem for society. He called the disparity “a complete decoupling of unimaginable wealth and normal wealth.”
Fink said, “Transformative technologies create enormous value — and much of that value accrues to the companies that build and deploy them, and to the investors who own them. The companies with the data, infrastructure and capital to deploy AI at scale are positioned to benefit disproportionately.”
We are being asked to do more than “accept AI.” We are being asked to pay the price of the harms of AI so corporations can profit off of the good. This is unfair and unjust. Our lives cannot be risks that the rich are willing to take.
There needs to be a concern for mitigating AI’s “bad things.” There needs to be proof of AI’s “benefits.” There needs to be a concrete reason for the middle- and lower-class to embrace AI; as it stands, there isn’t one, and our fears stand justified.
AI does need heavy regulation, and so do the people in charge of it. AI is a product. If a company makes a defective or dangerous product, they must be held accountable.
Cars, for example, were a massive breakthrough for transportation, just as corporations claim AI is a massive breakthrough for technology. But with cars, we regulate everyone who makes and uses them.
Let the same be said for AI. Those in power should be held accountable by some ethical organization, an unbiased third party, that is an outsider from the industry to guardrail the industry itself. No more empty promises, talks to save face or money-fueled bargaining.
Whoever profits from AI should be liable for the “bad things” that AI does. It is not up to us as people to accept this bad, but for these corporations to face consequences for their actions.
Humanity should take precedence over inhuman artificial intelligence models, forever and always. We cannot accept that multimillionaires and billionaires have no empathy for us. We need to hold them accountable and protect ourselves because AI and its creators have no concern for us and every concern for their wallets.
Lauren Johnson is a 20-year-old journalism major from New Orleans.