Briefly, Paul Atreides’s mother, a main character in the story, fabricates a story to position Paul as the rightful supreme leader, ultimately to control the population. Those who come across this myth don’t know any better and don’t realize it’s fabricated, and become true believers. This is similar to how many today don’t know the true history behind “Artificial Intelligence,” or what AI is or isn’t, so they fall for the nice stories crafted by a few very unremarkable, hubris-filled white males who believe only they are the rightful decision-makers for humanity’s future.

Similarly, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, like Paul, knows his story is a fabrication, yet they still get caught up in the created myth — power becomes intoxicating, insatiable, and the line between reality and science fiction blurs. The myth spreads as it's repeated repeatedly to the masses who become true believers. This is essentially what is happening in Silicon Valley today and spreading throughout the world: a self-declared AI aristocracy built on a constructed myth becomes a new AI religion.

“Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.”

The above quote is attributed to Qi Lu. But Sam Altman, the high priest of the new AI religion, said this, “It got me thinking, though — the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point, it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.”

Therefore, when Altman and the rest of the Tech Bro AI aristocracy talk about AGI (artificial general intelligence) it is not based on any scientific evidence or discovery. It is simply a made up term, from a quasi-religious hypomania belief, of a tiny group of determined akward white men engaging in constructive delusion. 

Religion is about power and control, so the new AI religion allows its high priests and acolytes to thrive off the ignorance of its followers. The intellectually lazy! And for Sam Altman and OpenAI, the aristocracy, this is their promised land. AI, too, is fundamentally about power and control for those who have a vision of what they want the world to look like, and with them at the top,  enjoying the wealth of their manifestation. 

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has,” wrote Margaret Mead.

In her recent best-selling book, Empire of AI — Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, journalist and author Karen Hao explains how Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and a few others formed OpenAI with the “singular obsession: to be the first to reach artificial general intelligence, to make it in their own image.” 

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AI-generated videos are going viral after stereotypically depicting Black women. 

OpenAI began under the “altruistic façade” of a “non-profit” by a small group of Silicon Valley elites determined to shape the future of AI and humanity with a very narrow view of the world and what it should be. 

Similar to the Gilded Age period in America, from the late 1870s to the late 1890s, the “robber barons” of that time also believed that, because of their industrial achievements and ambitions about the future, they earned the right to make all the important economic decisions. The rest of society would benefit from their brilliance as those benefits would “trickle down.” And lest we forget, former President Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics in the 1980s was the same idea. 

So today, the Tech Bros — the few — believe that due to their self-declared superiority, they have the divine right to build the future how they see fit, and the benefits will “trickle down”. 

Technologies are not inevitable; however, they progress when groups with capital and power decide it is worth pursuing and investing in. However, these technologies rarely advance and deliver widespread prosperity; instead, they come to benefit a narrow elite and serve their equally narrow agendas. 

As an example, the invention of a new cotton gin in the 1790s transformed the American South’s plantation economy into the world's largest exporter of cotton, significantly boosting the South’s economic growth and prosperity. This generated enormous economic gains for white landowners involved in the cotton industry, with enslaved Black people doing the work. But it never served the interests of the slaves; enslaved Black people were forced to work longer hours to extract maximum profit for rich plantation owners. Further intensifying the economy of slavery and the brutal dehumanization of Black bodies and minds, they didn’t want to give up the economic advantages technology created for them, so they would go as far as fighting a Civil War to keep their slave-plantation based economy. Which they build for themselves, nobody else!

Therefore, the promise of AGI utopia, technology that benefits entire societies as OpenAI says it will, is a lie! History tells us that things, more often than not, don’t materialize that way; usually, they only truly benefit a narrow elite. (Note, even the Second Industrial Revolution that occurred in Britain between 1870 to 1914, ushered in the rise of the new urban working poor concentrated in the city of London.)   

Accordingly, the Silicon Valley AI Revolution is elite and agenda-driven; times and technologies might change, but human nature always stays the same. From the plantation owner elites of the South and even the feudal systems of the Middle Ages, human nature remains the same. Like the new cotton gin, new technology is typically developed to serve the economic interests of the elites. Regular folks, and the most vulnerable, seldom, if ever, truly benefit. 

Colonialism 3.0

Today, it’s not about the theft of sugar, cotton, minerals and precious metals and other material natural resources, but the free extraction of massive water resources to run Google’s huge data centre in Chile, for example, or paying sweatshop wages to workers in Kenya for data inputs that feed these ever growing large language models for OpenAI.

The demand for land and water to power LLM energy needs is staggering to facilitate these supercomputers 24/7.  

We must also acknowledge the theft of artists’ and writers’ work — OpenAI blatantly ignores copyright laws and fair compensation,  along with the countless individuals sharing their experiences and data online that ChatGPT leverages to train these models on. We are, therefore, witnessing colonialism 3.0, under the new American AI empire, becoming the main exploiter and harmer of the planet, people and humanity.

Busting Myth

With all the hype surrounding AI, it might seem like a recent breakthrough in technology; however, the origins of what we call “AI” date back to 1950–1956, the period when Alan Turing published “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” which introduced a test for machine intelligence called The Imitation Game. You might have seen the movie. 

In 1955, John McCarthy held a workshop at Dartmouth on “artificial intelligence,” marking the first use of the term. And in 1956, he coined the term to attract more attention and funding to his existing research. He explicitly stated years later, “I invented the term artificial intelligence to get money for a summer study.” Effectively, marketing and capital raising needs are behind the name AI, similarly to what is being done today with OpenAI and AGI. 

So we still lack a definitive scientific consensus on what ‘artificial intelligence’ is, relative to authentic human general intelligence. Both AI and AGI remain undefined.

Consequently, when people refer to AI today, they are typically talking about a broad category of things they don’t fully understand. However, the term is catchy and seems reasonable enough, a suitable label for technologies that mimic various human behaviours or tasks, and if enough people use it over and over again, the uninformed and wilfully ignorant masses begin to adopt it, like a new religion.  

Nevertheless, these systems operate very differently from how humans think, reason, and behave. Terms like machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks are also invented labels to support nice theories, but are void of any scientific bedrock to stand on, so a group of guys create a belief and call it whatever suits their agenda. This is the long and short of AGI.   

So when AI advocates mention AGI, it is mostly a rebranding of AI. This is what major AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are doing: marketing and rebranding, because they all effectively produce the same thing, just different shades of pale grey.

Math Over Myths

Recently, Goldman Sachs published a 32-page report, June 25, 2024, GEN AI: TOO MUCH SPEND, TOO LITTLE BENEFIT? In summary, it is clear that tech giants and beyond are set to spend over $ 1 trillion on AI capital expenditures in the coming years, with little to show for it so far. 

Jim Covello, Head of Global Equity Research at Goldman Sachs, is highly skeptical, saying, “AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do.” Arguing that “the technology isn’t designed to solve the complex problems that would justify the costs, which may not decline as many expect.” 

Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT and 2024 Nobel Laureate, adds, “Given the focus and architecture of generative AI technology today… truly transformative changes won’t happen quickly and few — if any — will likely occur within the next 10 years.” Acemoglu goes on to say that AI might automate only 5% of tasks and add just 1% to global GDP over the next decade. 

He says that AI’s potential is less clear than the Internet’s was, for example, and that human judgment trumps algorithms; he further challenges business leaders to innovate to enhance worker skills and productivity with AI, rather than seeing it as a one-dimensional cost-cutter or replacer of workers. 

AI performs tasks we humans perform and recounts already established knowledge, he says. But reality is much more complex; it involves interactions and lots of other things based on tacit knowledge, or matching your contextual understanding of a problem with the specific tasks at hand. Most decisions require judgment, social interaction, and social intelligence, all of which are beyond the capabilities of AI.

“Many AI-based products use neural networks to infer patterns and rules from large volumes of data. But what many politicians do not understand is that simply adding a neural network to a problem does not automatically create a solution,” said the World Economic Forum (WEF), adding that “AI has huge potential — but it won’t solve all our problems, and not every problem is best addressed by applying machine intelligence.”

How long investors and people alike remain caught up in the myth and hype is anyone’s guess, but some bubbles just take longer to burst. But in the end, reality and gravity always prevail. 

For those who read history, one thing has been proven over time: that our progress and prosperity depend on how we think and the choices we make about the technology we use. 

Our choices matter! But if we allow others to be the arbiters of our lives, sacrificing our free will and individualism, we put our humanity at risk. 

Technology has been a key driver of human progress and prosperity, which cannot be denied, but it can work against us when we allow all the major decisions to remain in the hands of a few hubris-filled men . Nevertheless, we do have agency, if we claim it with our minds, and don’t let nice stories, myths, and new religions run our lives.