Monopoly Round-Up: Stop Telling Me AI is Sentient When You're Just Robbing Me

Lots of monopoly-related news, as usual. Last week, Trump antitrust chief Gail Slater was fired in a major shake-up among enforcers, the Texas Attorney General brought an antitrust case against fire truck makers, and Pam Bondi told Congress that the Epstein Files are a distraction from the stock market. Plus a lot more.

But before getting to the full news round-up, I want to focus on something odd I saw over the past week. A bunch of different elites started making more aggressive claims that artificial intelligence is now some sort of super-intelligent singularity. It’s weird, and I would normally discount these arguments as not worth paying attention to, except that they seem to be capturing the minds of major financiers and even lefty Senators like Bernie Sanders. And I think there’s something problematic going on here.

Why Are They Saying We’ve Invented God?

Let’s start with the arguments. There are a number of them, and they go into a few categories.

First, certain executives are saying, with caveats, that they are creating super-intelligent and almost God-like forces. The main proponent of this line of argument is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who claimed in a podcast this week “we are nearing the exponential” and are about to become “a country of geniuses in a data center.” In his opinion, AI will bring in trillions of dollars by 2029, and the economy will be growing at between 10-20% a year. If you extrapolate his view of energy usage, by 2032 global data center electricity demand would be greater than the world's entire electricity production.

To manage this new force with God-like abilities, Amodei is calling for regulation around “AI safety.” His firm has hired an ethicist to write a “Constitution” for its product, and it attempting to teach it right from wrong.

As if to show the importance of Amodei’s concern about the power of his Godlike modeling, the Wall Street Journal just wrote a story about how Anthropic’s tools were used in the invasion of Venezuela. There are no details about how AI was used. And without any context, it’s impossible to make any conclusions about anything. But it sure seems fancy and terribly important.

Now, Amodei doesn’t want his all-powerful tools used in warfare or in domestic surveillance, and he and the Pentagon are in a major tiff over whether they can be used. This deep moral quandary is ...