Davos’s wild fantasies are a dystopia that won’t happen

Silicon Valley celebrity’s vision that AI will make many of today’s jobs irrelevant will go down well with the business and policy elites

Arock star Silicon Valley chief executive has a message for the worrywarts who touch down in Davos today, for the start of the 2023 World Economic Forum. “I think we’re really just going to have to think about how we share wealth in a very different way than we have in the past,” Sam Altman declared. “The fundamental forces of capitalism and what makes that work I think are done.”

The 37-year-old vegetarian is probably at the height of his fame. He’s the chief executive of Openai, a venture founded seven years ago to promote artificial intelligence, with the backing of Californian tech luminaries including Elon Musk. Last week, Microsoft was on the verge of cutting a deal with Openai, according to reports: an investment worth $10bn (£8bn), in return for 75pc of its profits.

If it recoups, Microsoft would own 49pc of the company.

The reason for the excitement is Openai’s CHAT-GPT, a chatbot that is one of the latest examples of what are called “generative AI” services. Think of them as the ultimate pastichecreators, which work like the jobbing painters of fake masterpieces you can still find trading in Chinese marketplaces, who can knock out a “Van Gogh” or “Rembrandt” for you for a few dollars. CHAT-GPT can produce remarkably plausible text or even computer code from a prompt of a few words.

Chat-gpt’s fakery is already beginning to cause problems in classrooms: teachers need to know what has been prepared by the pupil and what has been generated by a robot. Understandably, New York’s education department has banned CHAT-GPT from homework assignments.

But Altman thinks big. In a post in 2021, he proposed an “American Equity Fund”, capitalised by “taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5pc of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund, and by taxing 2.5pc of the value of all privately held land, payable in dollars”.

Even VI Lenin might blush at such an audacious wealth grab. Altman’s embrace of neo-communism may seem odd, until we recall Openai’s mission. It’s about promoting grandiose visions of the future. Altman’s pitch is that AGI, or “artificial general intelligence”, will make so many of today’s jobs irrelevant, and generate so much wealth, it will pay for the dole for everyone.

Naturally, this goes down well at Davos, where the business and policy elites come to be scared out of their wits with terrifying visions of the future.

Yuval Noah Harari, the forum’s favourite public intellectual, bestselling author, has often evoked a future of mass unemployment, concluding that “we just don’t need the vast majority of the population” once that fabled AI arrives.

WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s greatest creation is to convince us that we’re on the brink of a “fourth industrial revolution”, a phrase he helped popularise among the Linkedin classes. Simply namedropping the term confers a dubious cachet on the user, rather like today’s cryptocurrency buffs who draw laser eyes on to their portrait avatars, it’s a way of telling the rest of us that “we can see the future, and you can’t”.

It’s a pity that Schwab’s networking club has become the focus of so many wild conspiracy theories, for if you had to create a surreal comedy movie to discredit the modern progressive Left, it would look very much like the WEF: not only for its tedious wokery, but it’s absurdly tone-deaf pleas to surrender our personal property and eat insects. Needy and desperate for attention, it deserves to be mocked, not feared.

Back on planet Earth, we have rather more urgent labour problems. In Western economies, the tax base is shrinking rapidly, more people are leaving the workforce, while mandatory health and welfare costs rise. So the vast majority of the population still is very much needed. No doubt some will settle for a life of sloth, revolving around soft drugs and video games – but a life without purpose or advancement is repugnant to many more.

A much greater problem for the dystopian futurists in Davos is that rather like a Royal Mail parcel, their future shows no sign of ever arriving. Over the past decade, many promises have been made about the fourth industrial revolution, but any such revolution would require AI to dramatically improve industrial robotics and white-collar productivity, and there’s zero evidence of either. Not one radiologist has been made redundant.

Tellingly, Openai disbanded its own robotics team in 2021 after a much-derided attempt to create a Rubik’s Cube-solving robot. And CHAT-GPT is creating more drudge work for white-collar workers to do, removing its spam, rather than making them superfluous.

Ominously, Openai may never succeed in repaying Microsoft’s investment. Shortly before Christmas, Amazon announced it was taking an axe to staff working on its Alexa products, which were losing $10bn a year.

Amazon popularised the home voice assistant and many people have one. To me, Alexa and CHAT-GPT are remarkably similar services: useful, but very difficult to monetise. Chatbots may well be the Alexa of the next decade – a remarkable trick, but where no one makes a penny.

‘Chatbots may well be the next Alexa – where no one makes a penny’