It looks like the SPCAI (the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to AI) is going to have its work cut out. So many people have turned on AI recently, and the hatred just keeps growing. Who would have thought that people would object to having their lives turned into the equivalent of being stuck in a lift with muzak on a loop?
Wired has reported extensively on this building antipathy to AI and to the fleshly robot overlords such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Grok’s fratboy genius Elon Musk. In a recent Gallup poll in the US, it turns out that “increased familiarity with generative AI coincides with negative attitudes about the technology”. It’s almost like the more you understand AI, the more you see what’s about to happen to your life, and you know it’s not going to be good. The poll shows “this is especially true for young Americans between 18 and 29, where almost half see generative AI as doing more harm than good”.
I won’t recycle all the laughable prognostications that the AI shahs come up with when they’re trying to defend their goal of taking away everyone’s jobs. The most absurd is Musk’s notion that “AI and robots will replace all jobs”, and that “working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables instead of buying them from the store”.
In the classic science fiction of the English-speaking world, it was uncanny how the aliens always seemed to land in America and not, let’s say, Somalia. It’s the same with the predictions of the apex AI boosters. Have they really considered how an AI-led jobs bloodbath will land in places that aren’t the Global North, or the overdeveloped world, as it’s also known? Have they thought about what it will be like taking away the jobs of people who live in places where you can’t actually buy vegetables from a store and where subsistence farming isn’t a lifestyle choice, it’s actual life?
The idea that AI will be an unalloyed, immaculate benefit to those messy, fractious and often corrupt African countries struggling to survive a normal postcolonial capitalist ecosystem, one rigged to benefit the economic superpowers of the world, would be ridiculous even if it held true for the rest of the world. The truth is, the AI barons haven’t thought through how it’s going to affect the developed world. Or, more likely, they have, but their for-profit messaging ignores the uncomfortable questions and even more disturbing answers.
The ‘messy middle’
In a recent Substack, economist Molly Kinder wrote about the “messy middle”, which is her term for a prolonged, turbulent transition period in the AI era where many, many people suffer. She’s actually writing about Americans, but on the basis that Americans are people too, we can extrapolate her argument for Africa as well.
The predictions of AI evangelists and AI doomsdayers generally involve two polar opposites. One is a perfect, AI-as-benevolent-deity future, where nobody has to work, and your robot butler will bring you a mint julep as you tend your garden. The other is a sci-fi apocalypse where people are hunted by robots called Elons. Kinder writes about two other realities posited by the evangelists.
The first is what we’re experiencing today: “AI is everywhere, the displacement headlines are everywhere, but the aggregate labour market data is mostly fine.” The second reality is “the post-AGI [artificial general intelligence] world where AI and robotics can do essentially everything humans do, the economy is producing enormous surplus, and the main questions are about how to redistribute it, how to make sure democracy survives, and what people should do with their time”. Again, you can see how this scenario doesn’t fit well into a majority world reality. And if we really believe that democracies as we know them can survive AI, we aren’t paying enough attention.
Kinder thinks neither of these realities is likely and that what is going to happen isn’t a jobs apocalypse. “Instead, it is a hard, messy period of concentrated pain with job losses clustered in specific, desirable jobs.” Her message to the US is one that we in South Africa would do well to heed. We either build institutions, policies and norms capable of holding the political and economic order together through the hard transition that is coming, or our reality will end up being shaped by populist backlash.
The current climate of loathing towards AI and specifically AI slop, the dung with which it marks its territory, is healthy. But the unfortunate truth is that AI is also an incredibly useful technology, and we won’t get to keep the good bits and throw out the bad. We need a survival strategy.
