Our tech overlords say artificial intelligence will soon create a world of abundance while solving major problems such as climate change. To be clear about the term, I have previously defined our tech overlords as "a grab bag of technology companies, technology scientists and inventors, and technology investors and journalists who have bewitched the modern world through inventions that speed up our daily lives without necessarily making them better."

In a recent interview with The Economist magazine, tech overlord-in-chief Elon Musk said that "[i]f you have vast numbers of robots with vast amounts of digital intelligence, you have a sort of a quasi-infinite economy." In such an economy, "anyone can have anything they think of." He added that "money won't matter in 2036" because everyone will have a high income without working. Musk described this as a Star Trek version of the future.

Musk's comments reflect a familiar tech-industry fantasy: a push-button, voice-activated future of abundance, much like the world depicted in the Star Trek television series and films. As any serious viewer knows, the Star Trek future is one in which poverty has been eliminated, money is no longer needed, and everything you want or need is available.

A friend of mine once asked, "If you have a replicator and a holodeck, why would you need to go anywhere?" But Star Trek characters do travel quite a bit in order "to seek out new life and new civilizations. To explore brave new worlds, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” That line was later updated in Star Trek: The Next Generation to say "where no one has gone before."

Musk said that in his future of abundance, some people may still choose to work, in the same way some people choose to have gardens in their backyards even though they can get all the food they need from the grocery store.

The central question in this imagined future is this: in 10 years, AI will be running the world without humans. If that happens, the interviewer asked, how will companies make money? How will they even exist? Musk did not have an answer.

That leads to a second question: how will people get money to buy what they need? Musk said the government could simply issue checks to people. That is an interesting view from a man who joined the Trump administration to cut government spending while heading its ill-defined and ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency. What Musk appears to be proposing is a form of AI-induced socialism. Years ago, he styled himself as a socialist, but that claim is difficult to take seriously now given his publicly demonstrated political views, actions and the political candidates he is funding.

It is important to test this fantasy of the future with what I will call the "will" test, an idea invented by AI critic Ed Zitron. He asks AI boosters to explain what current AI models can do without using the word "will." Those advocates have little they can point to.

The tech fantasy described above depends entirely on the word "will" when it comes to AI. Nothing current AI models can do remotely supports this vision. These models—known as Large Language Models, or LLMs—produce so many errors that handing mission-critical systems across the economy over to AI, as Musk suggests, would almost certainly create catastrophe rather than prosperity. The problem of so-called "hallucinations" is an inherent feature of how LLMs operate and cannot be eliminated. And the kind of intelligence needed to run most mission-critical systems—human intelligence—simply is not achievable with LLMs.

The idea that the large tech companies currently controlling AI development will become extinct as worldwide prosperity spreads appears to be a story designed to lull the public into passivity. The narrative is appealing to the industry, especially since the emerging literal killer apps for AI are surveillance and military weapons systems. Governments appear willing to pay the high cost of AI in order to obtain more effective surveillance of citizens and more effective weapons. The fact that such systems will inevitably make many mistakes seems not especially consequential to the governments that use them.

Businesses and consumers may be finding some benefit from AI, especially in enhanced internet search. But the true costs of those limited benefits are many times what users are currently paying. And because AI requires additional data center capacity for each new user, there are no real economies of scale that will bring costs down. In simple terms, each new user costs the AI provider more money. As currently conceived, AI is unlikely to be profitable except for niche users who find its output worth paying the true costs for.

The tech overlords have been repeating the same message for years: trust us, sit back, and let us take you into an ever grander techno-utopian future. New claims that AI will be the vehicle for that future are part of a propaganda campaign designed to keep the public from having a say in AI and its uses. In practice, that debate is already underway, with many communities saying they do not want to bear the costs and disruptions of new data centers tied to the AI build-out. That concern also extends to how AI is deployed, who controls it, and what public safeguards are in place as the technology spreads.

By Kurt Cobb via Resource Insights

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