The inevitability fetish

AI time

A folksy adage is that nothing is inevitable except death and taxes. These days it seems like “and AI.” Even people on the Left who should know better fall for this. Drunk on AI Kool-Aid, they offer visions of the world where our actions are limited to minor alterations of the conditions of our exploitation, immiseration, and decapacitation. Maybe we can get a token allowance, UBI check, and agent of our own to take care of the endless stupid email.

Silicon Valley’s billionaire tech lords emphasize that AI is inevitable all the time. It’s essential to their fundraising. How else can they get investors to pour billions into developing a technology the uses and purposes of which also remain to be developed? Education repeats this language even as it undermines every aspect of the academic enterprise, from K-12 through the university. Students have to be “AI ready.” Because AI is inevitable. As stated on The Convivial Society five years ago:

All assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimize resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future.

More than the alternative of “jobs-apocalypse” or “proliferation of new jobs managing hordes of agents” (and be aware that messaging from the frontier labs and their financiers is changing in response to the negative attitudes of the majority of the US; just yesterday Sam Altman adopted a rosier tone on the basis of no evidence whatsoever — other than the fact that OpenAI will soon IPO and a number of companies have started to notice that AI is most expensive than human labor), the fundamental ideological core of AI is its claim to inevitability.

How did technological determinism become the dominant ideology? No one has a crystal ball, and we can’t predict the future. The acceptance of AI inevitability is especially weird given how chaotic and uncertain the world has become over the last decades: the end of the USSR, 9/11, global climate change, 2008, Trump becoming president, Brexit, COVID, January 6, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, October 7, Trump becoming president again, and so on. Maybe people are starved for certainty and technological determinism is filling this existential void. To be sure, some try to fill the void by emphasizing chance, betting on outcomes that are in no way certain. More bets, less void.

Why would any specific technology and set of technologies be inevitable? I’m surprised that phones are cameras, calendars, video players, address books, photo albums, books, mail systems, game providers, plane tickets, ways to pay for things, etc. We’ve seen the rise and fall of all sorts of devices and platforms: 8 track players, the Concorde, VCRs, AOL, the measles vaccine, and so on. Was Facebook inevitable? The i-phone? Online gaming and prediction markets? The form that technologies take is not given in advance by some kind of technological DNA (and even then it would not be fully determined since environmental factors make a difference in gene expression). Was the development of graphics cards for video games inevitably going to lead to advances in deep learning? And would this inevitably lead to the drive to scale up as fast as possible? Karen Hao’s book makes a powerful argument for the different paths that AI development could have taken.

Inevitability is a fetish. If we don’t develop it, someone else will, whether that someone is another country, another firm, or an unknown malevolent hacker with criminal designs. AI is inevitable, and so there is, there must be, a race to get there first. The fetish is used to bring into being the thing whose being it claims is inevitable. It thereby holds in place an absence, the lack of its own certainty. If the tech lords don’t emphasize inevitability, they won’t have the money — the data, compute, energy — to build what they are telling us is inevitable, which makes it less inevitable.

What sort of belief or claim is “inevitability”? On the one hand, it’s disempowering: you can’t stop this; it’s happening whether you like it or not. On the other hand, it can empower: because this is inevitable, you can make it; it’s not a pipe dream or the alchemist’s stone. It’s real, so don’t worry about breaking a few eggs. It’s worth every risk you will take.

You can’t stop it. You should not stop it. You should make it and adopt it and extend it as fast as you can. Those are three different shadings of inevitability that get collapsed into the AI fetish. Contrast this with death: you can’t stop it (although Silicon Valley tech lords call this into question; I hope someone is creating a company that will happily take all their brains right now, freeze them, and blast them into space). You can temporarily postpone death, so few of us move to the second point “you should not stop it.” Debates it medical ethics concern how far this should go: should life be preserved even when that prolongs suffering? And only the monstrous, genocidal, and perverse think the fact of death means death should be extended as fast as it can. Notice as well: that something is inevitable tells us nothing about the shape that it takes.

Perhaps what supports the AI inevitability fetish is not technological determinism at all. Technological determinism is the ideology overlaying something else, a belief about human nature. It’s human nature to want power. It’s human nature for the strong to pursue strength, the wealthy to pursue wealth. What has been chaotic over the last decades is less a matter of unpredictability than it is of the reemergence of the Hobbesian state of nature as a state of war, a war of all against all, human nature laid bare where the worth of man is his price and the buyer decides. When the tech lords say that AI is inevitable they are saying that the capacity to develop an extraordinarily powerful technology has developed. Because something new is possible, something that will increase wealth and power, those who have the capacity to bring it into being will. The statement of inevitability is a statement of the strong: we can do this and will do this.

We are in world of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Nietzsche. AI is fundamentally about power, not technology. Technology does not have a logic of its own apart from human political and social relations. Notice how even the techno-utopians and AI optimists can’t tell us how we get from now to the glorious future, from our here of neofeudalizing capital with tech lords, extreme inequality, and genocide to the there of widespread abundance, end of disease, solution of all social ills, and elimination of drudgery. They don’t because they can’t. They are building for wealth and power, sucking up all the resources and creating an infrastructure for eliminating thought, capacity, creativity, and critique.

When people on the Left attach themselves to the inevitability fetish, they are echoing the will and desire of the strong.