Venture Capitalists Are Gaslighting Us About AI

LMFAO watching this entire artificial intelligence debate about threats to humanity has been truly surreal. It has been a master class in media manipulation, fabrication and FUD from venture capitalists. We are not actually engaged in a debate with them about AI; we are succumbing to their games and manipulations and gaslighting, their opportunistic grasps at government contracts and appealing regulation, their weird incel bullying of their own workers to create far-right extremists, and just generally lies lies lies. Venture capitalists absolutely love to lie and in this case they have been able to lie like never before. 

Please remember that it was venture capitalists, and OpenAI specifically, who have kept the fear and anxiety and philosophizing about AI, focused on “existential/catastrophic/mass death/nuclear war/civilization collapse/ threat/risk”. It was OpenAI and Sam Altman who went out there and made that a specific core talking point, coming up over and over again in the nauseatingly long global tour around its launch. Sam Altman has said frequently that AI might lead to human extinction and wipe us all out and kill everyone and create biological warfare and take over all computing systems and blah blah blah. This is an individual who is scared of his own fucking shadow and spent most of the early money he made on building an underground bunker with IDF masks. But this does not negate the fact that this obsession with artificial intelligence doomsday scenarios, has been specifically pushed out of a huge player in the AI space, that they have made this a core pillar of their marketing strategy. 

These talking points do not emerge in a vacuum and the CEO of OpenAI is not on global tour consistently talking about the end days coming with AI for no fucking reason; these things are designed by teams of specialists and marketers and partners and CIA agents and road tested and workshopped and blah blah blah. There’s a lot of money on the line here and a lot of interests that go into a cornerstone startup like OpenAI; they DECIDED to move forward with this messaging, they came up with it, they disseminated it, and they continue to. They are CREATING an existential fear of AI.  

So even as they are now trying to set up an absurd notion of “AI doomers”, THEY WERE THE ONES who are, and have been, telling us that AI could doom us. And this continues: in the last few weeks, OpenAI made yet another highly finessed marketing move of announcing that it has assembled a new team to address “catastrophic” AI risks including nuclear, bioweapons, etc. CONTINUING to harp on this bullshit, KNOWING it will create a media sensation.

I personally do not believe that venture capitalists or any of these individuals believe what they are saying. I believe that they are saying these things strategically. Part of it has to do with controlling the narrative and with their attempts to secure regulatory capture, to be the ones who are shaping the regulations, and the talk of existential risk provides a sense of urgency that can be leveraged into, in this case, OpenAI’s many delegations to the American, EU and other governments. As the first mover in the AI space, and with governments being generally fucking clueless about technology for a variety of reasons, this puts them in a position to shape all the regulations germane to them by freaking people out really bad.  

This has a lot to do with China and the venture capitalist’s new cold war against them, as it manufactures dozens of weapons startups, heavy on lethal drone swarms and AI, for proxy war with China and re-armament of allies around the new cold war. If AI could become powerful enough for these catastrophic results, then we absolutely must not let China develop those capabilities! is the reasoning here. Indeed, the venture capitalist insists on the back of his own manufactured FUD, AI is a massive national security threat and the government must support the venture capitalist’s artificial intelligence program without bounds in order to make sure that if the communists come up with something catastrophic, WE come up with something even more catastrophic; this is also a call to an arms race, and one that venture capitalists are perfectly positioned to benefit from, and thus they aggravate it. I wrote more in recent articles how venture capital is specifically inflaming nuclear-level tensions with China over technology and military development, as well as AI chips and semi-conductors with Taiwan a key ground. 

Of great interest to me beyond that, is what this has meant for understanding and structuring the threat and resistance to venture capital, and the public dialogue about AI. What has happened is that, they have told everyone that AI could kill us all, and so people were like, holy shit, it could kill us?!?!?! WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING WE HAVE TO STOP THAT. And this of course is a very reasonable response and totally expected and what you would hope to see from society when a bunch of fascist freaks tell you they are building AI weapons of mass destruction with all our stolen shit.

So THEN what venture capital has done with that anxiety and stress, that they needlessly created, is turn it around and start smearing these concerned people as hysterics, as “doomers”, as anti-technology, as anti-innovation, and anti-progress. And so in order to counter the doomers, they have come up with a counter-movement of sorts, designed to marginalize and demean public concern, research groups, analysts, journalists etc who are critical. This being of course Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, oh boy that was a joy to read, gagging the whole way, which takes this public concern THAT HE CREATED and packages it as the dangerous and deranged anti-progress woke mind virused inferiors, and an existential threat to technology progress: 

“We believe that advancing technology is one of the most virtuous things that we can do. We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology… 

We have enemies. Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas. Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.”

Hating all of this, 6,000 words of top to bottom lies. 

Now, Marc Andreessen is behind OpenAI in a very deep way, both as the funding venture capitalist but also in the prior sale of Github to Microsoft, which gave Microsoft the massive, massive amount of code done by the industry so they could turn it into their coding AI, CoPilot, which was the first AI offering launching even before OpenAI, about a month prior. So this is the man who is responsible for creating not only the artificial intelligence but the huge amounts of FUD about artificial intelligence, now turning around and pretending that all of this was someone else’s idea, the “enemy”. 

Now the tech industry itself — its programmers, product managers, executives, everyone — is being told by the king himself, that holy shit, we have wolves at the gate, they want to STOP US FROM INNOVATING, they want to TAKE AWAY OUR LITTLE TOYS, they are THREATENING OUR LIVELIHOODS,  AND ALL THAT WE STAND FOR AS SHAPE ROTATORS AND BUILDERS, no, AS BROTHERS, they are coming to TAKE OUR COMPUTERS and HALT THE PROGRESS OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION and bring about THE STAGNATION OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT and blah fucking blah and oh yeah, THESE FUCKING COMMIES.

This is very dangerous because it is, as we speak, radicalizing people inside the industry against, what boils down to—  users, and particularly the left and liberals, regardless of any other names used as a proxy; and radicalizing people inside the industry towards the fascist character of the venture capitalists; this is truly the manufacturing of an enemy by the same people who manufactured the hysteria about AI in the first place. Manufacturing of enemies, particularly communists, and a focus on mindless outward expansion, both being core tenants of fascism. 

This creation of a counter-counter-movement is ALSO being used to again, go after the White House and other governments for favorable regulations; used to stir up the pressure for favorable regulation and for favorable positioning and jostling in the echelons of law and order. And energizing tech’s base to advocate for these things and to get involved on a much more political and public level than ever before in pushing forward the “accelerationist” agenda of “as much money as possible to make the death machine go brrrrrrr.” This speaks to the ongoing radicalization of the programming and tech worker base and structure and to venture capitalist’s ongoing efforts to push it more and more to the right. 

Hilariously, VC is presenting to the industry, a fake enemy as overblown and overhyped and manufactured, as it is to the public itself on the other side of that wall. The “opposition” that venture capital is using to whip up their puppies into a frenzy, is literally like 6 bloggers with 3 podcasts and a grant, and some academic losers with no power sitting in non-profits, and a few petitions saying we should slow down AI development if it’s so big of a fucking threat, again, reasonable shit. Like there is not meaningful resistance to venture capital. They may FEAR it but it does not in fact exist in any materially significant way. That sucks but that is where we are. The general public just eats whatever shit venture capital shovels to them as usual and is far from launching any kind of uprising to stop venture capital. But of course we have me, tiny but mighty, perhaps the real cause for concern lmfao, or at least we can flatter ourselves considering the lack of any other threat. Rawr. 

This is a really great case study in how venture capital uses FUD (fear, uncertainty, dismay), media manipulation, manufacturing of fake social conflict, manufacturing of enemies, inserting false dichotomies (like “techno-optimists” vs “doomers”, a purposefully useless and immaterial divide), media circuses, world tours, and influence over captive and clueless constituents both inside and outside of the industry. These are some pretty slick people I gotta tell you. 

When do we stop letting pathological liars and opportunists dictate the terms of the discourse on these technologies, which by the way, were created by stealing alllllll of our shit, and now OpenAI is promising tech people that if anyone gets sued for copyright infringement for building products on top of OpenAI, OpenAI will defend them in court. Holy shit. Another gain to them in the AI FUD and gaslighting is that we aren’t even talking about the real shit. 

Weird. 

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