More specifically the tech tycoon preferred implementation of AI is not inevitable.
No tech boondoggle is inevitable but the people making money on this, and leveraging power, want everyone to believe it’s inevitable and put up no fuss.
25 05 22 [#277] Generative AI is Not Inevitable Alex Hanna, Emily M. Bender“There’s this inevitability narrative that we hear from the tech companies all the time and that is a bid to steal our agency.” – Emily Bender
On Democracy Now, author and journalist Karen Hao describes how OpenAI and this chatbot stuff is just one type of AI that these tech tycoons saw as the most likely to sell so as to attempt to build an empire.
I feel like it was chosen because it was the most likely to dupe people and had many of the key ingredients of social media, video games, and online gambling, and therefore could be monetized.
Sam Altman @sama 8:19 PM · Oct 24, 2023 i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes
We must resist repeating this nonsense that we have no say in how this happens. This claim of “inevitable” has been used to allow powerful people to get away with atrocious things throughout history.
The Modern Luddite – What can a common person do about generative AI? 4.6.2025 1. Understand that no technology is inevitable. Technology is not a linear progression that follows a predetermined path towards “progress”, like in a tech tree of a video game. Technological inventions don’t magically follow from each others: people make technology. People decide what technology to research, what research to fund, what products to produce and so on. Furthermore, it can be argued that generative AI is not even primarily a technological breakthrough, but a social and economic one: the major invention of the generative AI industry was the idea that they could get away with stealing everyones stuff and raise insane amounts of money by promising to make god.
And we know that things can change because they change all the time.
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
– David Graeber
Elon Musk’s job has already been automated – Musk may never be welcome in the White House again, but DOGE’s AI programs sure will be. Plus: A roadmap for resisting AI, the WaPo AI editor disaster, and more in the weekly Critical AI Report Brian Merchant Jun 05, 2025 – How to resist AI in 2025 It can be a daunting question, to say the least. Big tech is all-in on AI, firms like OpenAI have amassed historic amounts of venture capital, and Silicon Valley AI products are inundating and often eroding our institutions, our workplaces, our daily lives. So how do we fight back? The AI Now Institute—where I hold a journalist in residence honorific—issued its 2025 landscape report this week, and I could not recommend spending some time with heartily enough. It does a deft job of breaking down the key harms inflicted by AI companies, and the biggest threats to society if the current trajectory Silicon Valley is taking holds. The report, parts of which I reviewed, and parts of which I contributed to, explains how AI is entrenching power for big tech and the oligarch class, speeding deregulation, dislodging human expertise and threatening workers—and how there’s still time to refuse all that. It delves into the recent history of “AGI” and how it’s wielded by AI companies—a topic I investigated at length in my last AI Now report, too.