It’s the 1970s and a man in his mid-30s is the head of a successful cigarette company. You could argue he was born into it; his father was an executive with the company, and encouraged his passion for the trade when he was just a child. As he grew up, he showed promise as a salesman, and of course, he had a love for all things tobacco and smoking that was not rivaled. So, as a young man he began working for the company under his father and quickly demonstrated his ability to whip up an incredible marketing team. After the untimely death of his father, he took over the business, and and helped it scale it’s operations to a nationwide commodity.
One day, on a routine visit to the doctor, the doctor asks the man: “do you smoke”?
“Of course” the man replies.
The doctor gives raises an eyebrow and scribbled something on his clipboard.
The doctor’s reaction causes the man laugh defensively. “You don’t actually smoking is dangerous?” the man laughs defensively.
And at this point, it no matter what the doctor could have said to the man about whether or not the cigarettes pose a valid health hazard to him and millions of other smokers, the belief that tobacco is unhealthy poses an existential threat to the man’s livelihood. And so, like hundreds of other tobacco producers in that era, he went on the defensive. For the next 30 years, the tobacco industry would spend billions on the influence they needed to stay afloat. There were congressional hearings, countered by some of the best lobbyists in the business. They used celebrity endorsements and product placement in movies to normalize smoking. And of course, they got a little help from the news media and the education system into to sharing the belief that cigarettes were “safe enough” for mass consumption.
This is not a unique story. Many similar accounts can be found across all disruptive industries. Fossil fuels lobbied for years to keep leaded gasoline legal as it empirically lowered the IQ of an entire generation. Oil companies today continue to lobby against climate change regulations. Technology companies like Microsoft and Google lobbied school systems across the country; who bought into everything from quickly outdated computer labs, to “smart boards” –and most recently, the rapid shift to online learning. And lets not even start with the pharmaceutical industry.
There are countless instances where US society has bought (and continues to buy) into things against their interest in the past. I would argue that the story is no different than what we are seeing with AI now. Less than a decade ago, Sam Altman, was working along side some of the brightest people in the field of machine learning and computer science at a small non-profit. Today, he frequents congressional hearings, reassuring an elderly cast of powerful people who can barely utilize a smartphone without help that “AI will create more jobs… eventually”.
Is it ok to be skeptical of AI now? because every time I hear any discourse related to “slowing down” or “proceeding carefully” there is an air of dismissal. That’s a decision up to the Stanford PhD grads to decide and the 0.0005% of the US population who works at Google.
Mr. Altman did recently state that there is a need for more people involved in the decision making of OpenAI’s technologies. But I can’t help but hear a rhetoric that is no different than Amazon saying they need to make their operations more sustainable, despite remaining one of the top emitters of carbon. Oil companies themselves have used this tactic religiously. You can build an entire arena and call it “OpenAI Loves AI Safety Stadium”, but that doesn’t do anything to make AI safety a reality.
I’m not suggesting there are any good solutions to this concern. Most people I’ve talked with usually suggest it would be worse if an authoritarian power like China developed the kind of AI that companies like Google, Meta, X, OpenAI, Microsoft, (and now Apple) are developing; which they would presumably use against their own citizens and “free” societies worldwide, undermining human liberties in the process. Apparently, unregulated American Big Tech companies have a much better ethical reputation.
In reality, I think the only solution to this issue is increased concern from the people at the cusp of AI development. I myself am not an expert; although I’ve have had the privilege to study and work with the transformer architecture fuelling the large language model boom. It is comical how little people who talk about this technology actually know about it.
And so when a nurse or a farmer or anyone else completely removed from the technology expresses anything but optimism on the topic, I can see why people involved who work with it might
The man who started the business that would become Marlboro cigarettes died of lung cancer.