Our Spreadsheet Overlords

[Celerity]

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/our-spreadsheet-overlords/





Two years have passed since OpenAI released ChatGPT and the panic set in. Two years of above-the-fold headlines about “AI”—a subaltern specialty topic and the preserve of goofy sci-fi films for some 80 years prior—and two years of confusing, rank speculation about “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), a loosely defined idea of “human-level” yet machinic reasoning. Large Language Models, or LLMs, capture and generate what we have long taken to be an essentially human thing, language, shaking our historical sense of our own species to the core. But their abilities are matched by a lack of intelligence, and even a lack of the consistency we have long expected from computing machines. 

As a new surge of AGI has taken over the airwaves in the third year of LLMs, a deeply revealing form of Actually Existing AI speaks against the hype: Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency, a sloppy, violent-yet-banal attack on the codebase and massive personal data dragnet of the federal government. While we wait for AGI—and while we’re distracted by endless, ungrounded debates about it—the reality of modern AI is parading in plain sight in the form of the most boring constitutional crisis imaginable. Rather than machine intelligence, AI is an avant-garde form of digital bureaucracy, one that deepens our culture’s dependence on the spreadsheet. 

The discourse is providing cover for this disastrous attack. Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for the New York Times, recently explained why he’s “feeling the AGI.” (Unfortunately, Roose’s reasons seem to boil down to, “I live in San Francisco.”) Similarly, Ezra Klein, of the paper’s Opinion pages, thinks the government knows AGI is coming. And the statistician Nate Silver suggests we have to “come to grips with AI.” The internet ethnographer and journalist Max Read has dubbed this surge of AI believers the “AI backlash backlash,” a reaction to the anti-tech skepticism we’ve seen over the past few years. The position, according to Read, is that AI “is quite powerful and useful, and even if you hate that, lots of money and resources are being expended on it, so it’s important to take it seriously rather than dismissing it out of hand.” That’s a far cry from the derisive characterization of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as “stochastic parrots” (which remix and repeat human language) or “fancy autocomplete.” These systems are far more capable—and more dangerous—than the skeptics make them out to be. Dispelling the myth of their intelligence does not excuse us from paying close attention to their power.

Rather than providing the much-vaunted innovation and efficiency associated with Silicon Valley, AI systems create more confusion than clarity. They are a coping mechanism for a global society that runs on digital data sets too vast to make sense of, too complex to disentangle manually. Feeding off a staggering amount of digitized data, they are a tool specified to that data and its tabular format. When we think of AI, we should think less of Terminator 2 and more of the TV show Severance, in which office workers search for “bad numbers” on the strength of vibes alone.

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