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This week on The Brief, the vibe and theme for our stories cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of technology and innovation. Google and Gucci spearhead luxury smart glasses, Zuckerberg plans to clone himself to run Meta, and Chrome’s skills follow you around the web.
Forgive me, but I’m going to focus here on the ugly…specifically talking about Molotov cocktails. Growing up as a cinephile, this rudimentary weapon seemed like something only conceptualized for the silver screen, but last week, one was hurled at Sam Altman’s house, along with a slew of other violence-related stories about the public backlash against AI.
If you’re reading this, you likely already know my stance on violence like this: deplorable, dangerous, and completely unhelpful in achieving anything. But I’ve been thinking since about that specific weapon and its parallel to Big Tech and AI since I read that story. A Molotov cocktail is comprised of three mostly innocuous ingredients that are useful in our world…gasoline for fuel and energy! A bottle for drinking! Fabric for clothing! Individually, they all have utility. But together, they’re deadly.
Then I started thinking about Big Tech. Powerful frontier large language models, a deregulatory environment, and capitalism maxxing. If weighted individually, these three promote human empowerment, business growth, and have helped make America one of the most powerful countries in the world, respectively. But if you put all three together, what happens? Well, millions of people a week discuss suicidal ideation with ChatGPT, 80% of GenZ believe AI partners can replace human companionship, and a misguided individual hurls a weapon at a CEO in hopes to “stop the existential threat of AI.”
Big Tech companies are operating like Molotov cocktails every day, and then rushing in with fire extinguishers when they catch things on fire. They offer us tools that can elevate our productivity and our lifestyles, but enabled as they are with no guardrails to speak of, they are becoming dangerously destructive.