A lot has changed since 2015. That was, arguably, the last year where there was some optimism about the internet and social media as a force for good, when the fight for the now discarded notion of \u201cnet neutrality\u201d was more than a quixotic tilting at windmills. Starting from 2016, with the Cambridge Analytica revelations, accusations of Big Tech subverting elections, people\u2019s choices, and even the free market became commonplace. 2015 was also the last year Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google. Perhaps that\u2019s why he didn\u2019t realise that what would have been, a decade ago, a pro forma speech from a titan of Silicon Valley at a University of Arizona convocation is now a provocation.<\/p>\n
Schmidt\u2019s speech at the University of Arizona on Sunday, in which he claimed to understand students\u2019 \u201crational fear\u201d around AI and \u201cthat the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating\u201d. He went on to say, though, that the future is unwritten and would be shaped by the young. His was the sort of speech that is applauded in conference rooms, summits, and shareholder meetings. The booing crowd, it seems, wasn\u2019t in the mood for bulls**t.<\/p>\n
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About five days before Schmidt\u2019s tone-deaf address, an episode of Hacks<\/a>, a TV show about two women comedians \u2014 a boomer legend and a Gen Z writer \u2014 dealt with AI. A tech mogul wants to use legendary stand-up Deborah Vance\u2019s life\u2019s work to train a model that will help people craft funny speeches, emails, etc, with just a prompt or two. Ava, the young writer and Deborah\u2019s creative partner and closest friend, delivers a monologue to the tech bro that captures the anger of a generation, of people across ages, really, at a social, ecological and economic crisis in which we had no authorship and which robs us of our agency: \u201cSee, that is a big part of why I hate it [AI]. This forced inevitability. People like you are always saying that it\u2019s happening whether you like it or not, but you\u2019re the ones making it happen, okay? And you could easily stop it if people could say they didn\u2019t want it, but you don\u2019t want to give people a choice. So you just say, \u2018Oh, the train\u2019s already on the tracks,\u2019 and you don\u2019t let people decide for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n To be fair, unlike the caricatured villain of a comedy show, Schmidt appeared to be making his point in good faith. The billionaire rose to success at a time when tech oligarchs were seen as self-made disruptors who changed the world with innovations made in their college dorms or off-campus garages. His exhortation to students to not be despondent, to shape the world rather than be victims of it \u2014 to, in essence, be the next Eric Schmidt or Mark Zuckerberg \u2014 may even have been inspiring some years ago. However, unlike with the industrial revolution, computers, the internet and even the early days of social media, the AI boom is not a result of market forces in the traditional sense. Rather, over a trillion US dollars have been spent to make something that no one asked for, both indispensable and inevitable. Another key difference between the earlier innovations and the AI boom is that its harms are being both felt and projected forward in real time, while its benefits remain elusive and vaguely defined.<\/p>\n Already, the effects of LLMs can be seen in the job market and in the classroom. In fact, some of the best universities in the world, including America\u2019s prestigious Ivy League colleges, are returning to pre-internet ways of assessing students, even going back to pen-and-paper \u2014 a time-tested, \u201cunhackable\u201d technology. Students, especially in the first world, are rethinking what to study to become hireable \u2014 stats and engineering are now becoming less attractive while human-centric disciplines are seen as more \u201cAI-proof\u201d. On the other hand, the purported benefits of AI, such as in medical research, remain vaguely defined. As Karen Hao (among others) argued in the Indian Express Idea Exchange last year, there are several more modest AI models that are not LLMs, and do not seek to achieve Artificial General Intelligence<\/a>, that may be more effective \u2014 and far cheaper and less harmful to the environment \u2014 that could serve those purposes.<\/p>\n The young people who booed Eric Schmidt are not an aberration. A survey by Pew Research suggests that half of all Americans (the figure may not be as high elsewhere, but it is far from negligible) \u201care more concerned than excited\u201d by AI. So far, few major political parties in democracies have articulated their concerns. It\u2019s time they did. And part of the way to do that is not to speak of \u201cguardrails\u201d and mitigation, but rather to ask \u201cwho benefits\u201d. Schmidt, Zuckerberg, and Altman do. The young and the desperate \u2014 the voters, really \u2014 do not.<\/p>\n The writer is deputy associate editor, The Indian Express. aakash.joshi@expressindia.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A lot has changed since 2015. 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