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AI? No… AYou! On Learned Helplessness and the AI Ouroboros

Alex Sayf Cummings

There’s an old joke that says, “You can’t be half pregnant.” This came to mind when I saw the headline “AI’s $2.2 trillion deficit fix is already half fake, economists say.” Being half fake feels, to me, like being a little bit unique. As the epistemic philosopher Inigo Montoya once said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Anybody who’s been a journalist or written for mainstream media in general knows that the title you give to a piece almost invariably gets changed before it is published. And editors are not always the best at rewording (or completely rewriting) the titles of articles in a way that capture’s the original author’s intent. In his Yahoo Finance piece, Tristan Bove starts out by saying:

AI could shave $2.2 trillion off the U.S. deficit by 2036. But according to a new working paper from economists at Brookings and the Federal Reserve, more than half of that savings could vanish — canceled out by the very disruption AI itself would cause.

Fair enough. But the headline itself is baffling — a reasonable reader might take away the impression that AI (whatever that means) has a $2.2 trillion deficit that needs to be fixed. (Oh no!). Not that AI technology will reduce the government’s deficit by some wonderful amount by some unspecified time.

To Bove’s credit, the overall intent of the piece is to cast a critical eye. But the article as a whole never really nods to the self-interest of Silicon Valley in making this kind of extravagant claim about tech’s potential to save society — such as Mr. Egg’s 2025 contention that “AI Will Be So Powerful ‘Everything That Costs $100 Will Sell For A Penny’ In A Hyper-Deflation Era.” (I wonder: would that help with the deficit?). And ironically enough, the unspoken reality is that it is the AI companies that arguably have a massive deficit on their own hands, because their sky-high valuations and endless font of VC money is keeping their companies aloft on a skein of cotton candy. Despite their self-ascribed god-like powers, there ought to be serious doubt about whether it’s remotely possible for them to deliver on their revolutionary promises.

A founding partner at Sequoia Capital

We have been told the tech industry needs to “move fast and break things,” but also that technology is “moving too fast” to be regulated. What are we to make of this? Silicon Valley has long intoned that they alone can understand the tech and its promise for the future. But you’re telling me that, in the meantime, homie, you and your boys should just be able to go around with a wrecking ball to all life on Earth and eventually, at some halcyon point in the future, we’ll see that it all worked out. But…. also, as Sam Altman joked in 2015, “AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies…”

Sounds trustworthy.

It’s been a bee in my bonnet for years how the likes of Altman, Andreessen, and Musk (the world’s worst law firm) have been able to play the media and hype AI as an unstoppable force that we ought to surrender to. I have seen it in almost all my social circles — it’s done. It’s all over, man. AI will take over the world and lay everyone off, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. When I’ve voiced skepticism about AI hype, numerous friends have basically said, “Are you kidding me? Wake up and face reality!”

Learned helplessness is a very profound strategy for bad actors. If you’ve been convinced you’ve already lost, you won’t fight for anything. But we shouldn’t take a lot of PR horseshit as the only possible horizon of our collective futures.

Anyhow, there are things happening in the world other than Sam Altman’s farts. Here are our reading recommendations for the week, collected by our esteemed editors from across the Web:

ADDENDUM: Just to belabor the point, here is Mr. Egg speaking about his wild fantasies. He has apparently never heard of the concept of a deflationary spiral, because these guys know nothing about history or, frankly, economics:

The Andreessen Horowitz co-founder described a future in which “the price of business services will collapse, and things that today cost a lot of money will all of a sudden all be cheap or free,” he told the “Cheeky Pint” podcast earlier this month, arguing that fears of mass impoverishment miss the bigger picture. Andreessen opened the discussion by rejecting the notion that AI’s success would devastate employment. He said it’s a “great economic fallacy” to assume that hyper-productivity must result in poverty. The real outcome, he suggested, would be massive oversupply and price collapse. 

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