Nearly everyone misses the danger of artificial intelligence we’re sleepwalking into
When people predict what artificial intelligence will do, they tend to go in a few directions: how it will change their jobs, if it will become intelligent or conscious, if it will take over the world, or if it will solve some problem they face.
Technology is a tool that augments people’s and culture’s abilities. It will tend to accelerate what its users already do.
Whom will artificial intelligence help? It will help those with greatest access, which is Silicon Valley firms.
What do Silicon Valley types do? The Silicon Valley firms that dominate got there by creating products and services that create emotions that keep you coming back: craving, outrage, etc. Think Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. They create barriers to entry for competitors and captivity for their customers.
In short, they addict consumers and lock out competitors.
It seems obvious that artificial intelligence will evolve to addict people. That business model is what works in our culture. I’d guess it will start with things that bring people back: gossip, shopping, outrage at other groups, porn, gambling, etc.

They won’t start by saying they intend to addict us. They’ll offer tools that help some group we have sympathy for and can’t deny deserve help, like people in palliative care or with learning disabilities. People will see how much they help those groups and start using it themselves.
I searched artificial intelligence will addict us and found fewer articles than I expected. Their tone is speculating what AI might do and warn of the dangers, but miss the most important point: our culture is like a terrain where water has flowed for long enough that new water will simply flow downhill to where the old water went. More search results talked about how people will use AI to kick addictions—one of the patterns I mentioned above: they’re imagining how it will solve a problem they face.
No one will feel like they did anything wrong, yet we’ll more than reproduce what the Sacklers did with Oxycontin. One day many people will just stop going outside or interacting with others because they’re too addicted with whatever app addicts them. Or they’ll lose all their money shopping, gambling, etc.
A piece in The Hill, Open AI exec warns AI can become ‘extremely addictive’, wrote
OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati urged the conducting of close research on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technology as it advances to mitigate risks of it becoming addictive and dangerous.
Murati, a top executive at the company behind the popular ChatGPT AI tool, warned during an interview Thursday at The Atlantic Festival that as AI advances, it can become “even more addictive” than the systems that exist today.
…
“With the capability and this enhanced capability comes the other side, the possibility that we design them in the wrong way and they become extremely addictive and we sort of become enslaved to them,” she said.
Saying it can become addictive or the possibility that we design them in the wrong way misses the culture driving their development. Culture beats strategy or individual intent. Our culture promotes addiction. Many dominant firms became dominant by addicting so existing dominant firms with addictive products and services will extend their offerings with more addiction, augmented with artificial intelligence.
Unless we do something about it. We can change culture, which is what I’m doing, as I write in Sustainability Simplified.
Here’s another piece that gets the danger but not that how gung-ho our culture is driving it: Here’s Why AI May Be Extremely Dangerous—Whether It’s Conscious or Not. If we don’t change our culture, whatever prevention we try, we’ll overcome them. We’ll blame it on AI or something other than ourselves, but it will be us. Not just programmers but everyone using AI, especially those paying for it—that is, funding its development.
Also, artificial intelligence pollutes and depletes like crazy, so while it addicts us it will augment our environmental problems and symptoms.
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