Log in
One of my long-running arguments on this blog (and in the forthcoming book!) is that Silicon Valley in general, and the AI industry in particular, runs on futurity.
Futurity is the ambient, collective sense of what sort of technologies and business look and feel like the future. It’s just vibes, but with trillions of dollars on the line. The futurity side of Silicon Valley is much bigger than the engineering side of Silicon Valley. SpaceX and Palantir’s market caps aren’t dictated by their product lines or profit margins; they're determined by the companies’ ability to seem like they’re building the next-big-thing.
Futurity is a fickle thing. You have it until you don’t. (The metaverse was the future, and then it very much was not.) All of the big AI players recognize this. So they work very hard to keep up appearances that (1) the AI revolution will be bigger than the industrial revolution, and (2) the AI revolution is coming so very very soon.
This takes the form of a communications campaign. The purpose of the campaign is quite simple: whenever it starts to feel like progress in AI is slowing down, there needs to be another announcement or product demo that makes it feel like the future is fast-arriving.
(The comms campaign, mind you, is separate from the engineering effort. So long as you maintain the aura of futurity, your engineers get limitless resources to build impressive things. It can both be the case that Claude Fable has far more capabilities than last year’s top-of-the-line models, and that wholesale transformation of the economy remains a fairy tale for investors and discussion board maniacs.)
The AI industry’s comms campaign isn’t particularly complicated. All they do is maintain a drumbeat of gee-whiz stories. If a couple months go by without a public conversation about the radical pace of AI change, then you manufacture one through the publication of another online manifesto or a sign-on letter.
Which brings me to Monday’s AI news. Here’s the NYTimes headline: “Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats.” It’s a story about a new sign-on letter, titled “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy.” Some very big names signed on to this letter, including 16 Nobel laureates. Sounds pretty newsworthy, no?
Except, when you read the letter itself, it is just about the most anodyne document imaginable. Here is the text, in full:
AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.
Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.
That’s… nothing at all. AI might become radically more powerful over the next decade (sure). This could be a big deal for the economy (uh huh, yup yup). So economists, policymakers and tech leaders should do a lot of thinking about this stuff. (wait. What?)
This isn’t a call-to-arms. It’s a request for research funding.
In 2023, the Future of Life Institute published the AI Pause Letter, demanding a 6-month moratorium on the development of new foundation models so that policymakers could catch up with the radical pace of AI development. There was no AI pause. Current models are far more powerful than GPT4, and we are not noticeably closer either to the AI jobs apocalypse or the posthuman future.
In 2025, the AI 2027 scenario predicted that the AI future was barreling towards us, and that by 2027 (next year!) Superintelligent AI would likely doom all of humanity in the absence of extremely competent diplomatic coordination among international governments. I could write a long post about how none of this is actually happening the way they predicted, but that would be beside the point. The strategic purpose of the scenario was to contribute to the steady cadence of AI futurity hype. The scenario did what it was intended to do.
By comparison, this economist letter is remarkably anodyne. What academic economist would disagree that (1) AI might keep improving, (2) this might have economic impacts, and (3) economists and policymakers ought to devote some quality brainpower to this sort of thing?
(The equivalent in my field, political science, would be a mass sign-on letter saying (1) American elections might become more polarized and less competitive over the next decade, (2) this could have implications for democracy, so (3) governments should fund a lot of political science research and listen to the recommendations of political scientists. Practically all political scientists would agree that there should be more research funding for political science, and that policymakers ought to listen to us.)
From a strategic comms perspective, the point of this letter isn’t the substance of the letter. It is substance-free. The point of the letter is to combine the title (We Must Act Now!) with the signatories (A bunch of Nobel laureates, several of whom are skeptics). Because that’s how you maintain the cadence of public conversations about the AI future.
It sure would be nice if mainstream journalism outlets stopped falling for it.
