Article URL: https://observer.co.uk/news/science-technology/article/silicon-valley-sees-ai-as-the-solution-for-everyone-else-its-the-problem Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.…

‘It’s like a companion’: AI robot army joins Burnham’s planned revolution in elderly social care Why do tech moguls seem so disconnected from the real world? Think, for example, of Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei saying that half of entry-level jobs could be wiped out by AI in a few years, while also predicting a 95% reduction in cancer mortality and incidence in the same time period. Or Elon Musk burbling on about how AI will make work “optional”. Why do these guys talk such nonsense? Is it just ignorance of the world? Or is it the arrogance that comes from the reality distortion field that surrounds the unimaginably wealthy; those who inhabit a zone in which nobody dares to disagree with them, so they wind up thinking they are geniuses? Answer: a bit of both, but the main reason is that they are, overwhelmingly, males who come from narrow Stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) backgrounds and are trapped in a particular mindset that the technology writer Evgeny Morozov called “solutionism”. This is an ideology that recasts complex social phenomena such as politics, public health, education and law enforcement as “neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimised – if only the right algorithms are in place!” Solutionism has been endemic in Silicon Valley from its earliest days, but the arrival of AI has dramatically turbocharged it. This technology, we are told, will enable us to solve the climate crisis, eliminate cancer, boost productivity, quadruple gross domestic product, transform education and so on. In short, AI will change the world. Which naturally leads you to wonder what the transformed world envisaged by the tech industry may look like. With impeccable timing, the economist Branko Milanović, an expert well known for his work on income distribution and inequality, has helpfully provided us with an outline sketch of this brave new nirvana envisaged by Silicon Valley. Puzzles people and the stories behind them - trends, histories, insights and brain teasers all in one place.