What If the AI Bulls Are Wrong?

By Kevin Barrett, for American Free Press, posted in full here for my paid Substack subscribers only

Sam Altman is bullish on artificial intelligence (AI). He has good reason to be. Altman is a 30-something billionaire who made his fortune raking in investment dollars for his start-up, OpenAI.

Altman claims that AI will, within just a few years, radically transform human life—for the better, or so he hopes. But the OpenAI CEO acknowledges that rapid human extinction is a real possibility, with the odds somewhere between one in 500 and 50/50. He hopes, and claims to believe, that the actual chances that AI will quickly murder every human being on earth are closer to the former estimate than the latter. But since taking even a one in 500 chance of murdering eight billion people is, mathematically speaking, equivalent to actually murdering 16 million people, Altman is, by his own admittedly optimistic acknowledgement, already the happy perpetrator of over two-and-a-half Holocausts.

Why are people like Altman taking a chance on killing us all?

.Because, they say, the potential benefits of AI are so enormous. Thanks to AI, they say, some day soon we may all live like pampered princes. Within a few years, or a few decades at most, we will inhabit AI-built palaces, gorge on AI-produced banquets, enjoy AI-generated art and literature, laugh at AI jokes, have emotionally fulfilling relationships with AI robots, and live longer and healthier AI-extended lives. Scientific knowledge will be enormously augmented. Environmental problems will be solved. Political conflicts will be resolved. Scarcity, and the war it drives, will become increasingly distant memories.

When evaluating the claims of people like Altman, we should remember that they are psychologically predisposed to exaggerate the benefits, and downplay the risks, of the technologies they build and from which they profit. Among the countless examples of self-interested techno-optimism, the one that has gotten the most attention recently is technological medicine in general and vaccines in particular.

In 2021, when ultra-experimental mRNA vaccines were rolled out en masse, with billions of people playing the role of guinea pigs, the interwoven scientific, medical and pharmaceutical establishments were wildly optimistic. The COVID mRNA vaccines, they said, would stop the pandemic in its tracks if enough people got enough shots. Then mRNA technology would move on to conquer other maladies.

As it turned out, the vaccines didn’t stop COVID transmission, and may even have slightly enhanced it. Their long-term effects on health and mortality are still being debated, but almost certainly have not lived up to the early optimistic projections.

Why were the mRNA vax-makers such Pollyannas? Because that’s their job—just like being over-optimistic about AI is Sam Altman’s job. At the top of the medical/big pharma/biowar complex, techno-hucksters garner billions of dollars based on the often grossly exaggerated fantasies they wave in the faces of investors and governments.

But it isn’t just the CEOs. Their techno-over-optimism trickles down. Everyone whose salary derives from the medical/big pharma/biowar industry has a powerful psychological motivation to get with the program and jump on the vaccine bandwagon. Then the ordinary folks “trust the experts.” Only a minority of critical thinkers doesn’t get taken in.

The same dynamic applies to vaccines in general, not just mRNA ones. During the past century, vaccine makers built a myth crediting their concoctions with eradicating a whole host of endemic diseases. According to them, modern improvements in health and life expectancy are vaccine-driven, and concerns about harmful side-effects are baseless.

But that’s just not true. Vaccines are responsible for only a minuscule fraction (at best) of improved health and wellness since the 19^th century. Nutrition and sanitation are vastly bigger factors. And vaccines’ harmful side effects, which are all too real, have been systematically covered up by the big pharma-owned medical and scientific establishments. For details, read Turtles All the Way Down.

The benefits of technological medicine as a whole have also been exaggerated by self-interested parties. By some estimates, medical mistakes or accidents are the leading cause of death in the US. In Medical Nemesis, Ivan Ilich persuasively argues that if the entire medical establishment disappeared tomorrow, human health would remain about the same as it is now. The harms of technological medicine, Ilich shows, roughly equal the benefits.

So when someone who massively profits from a developing technology, like Sam Altman, discusses that technology’s future prospects, we should assume that he is heavily skewing his prognostications towards optimism. The truth will probably turn out to match much more pessimistic projections.

Does Altman know this? Does he realize, if only half-consciously, that his public AI bullishness is really just AI bullsh*t? Is that why he is a survivalist who has spent millions on a bunker in the woods to flee to when his Frankenstein monster starts slaying humanity?*

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*Several years ago, Altman revealed a disturbingly specific evacuation plan he’d developed. He told The New Yorker that he had “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur” he could fly to in case AI attacks.