Thinking of AI as a Social Problem

The scale of the AI investment boom in America is just ludicrous. The quest to build chips, data centers, and other infrastructure to enable AI has, in a very real sense, swallowed up the entire investment-oriented portion of the American economy. The hundreds of billions of dollars being spent annually—a figure that has multiplied by 20 times in the past three years—represents fully half of the nation’s annual economic growth figure. The handful of companies most involved drive the majority of the stock market’s gains. AI executives expect to spend $3 trillion more over the next few years. AI companies are now more overvalued than tech companies were at the height of the late-90s tech bubble, despite significant questions about whether this technology will actually, you know, work.

What lures all of this money is the promise of building an AI superintelligence that would effectively make the winner of the race to build it the most powerful business on earth. It is not hard to imagine the potential economic gains that would be associated with an AI smart enough to, say, be the world’s best hedge fund, create popular new drugs for any disease, and so on. Though AI thus far has not proven to be a reliable profit-driver for businesses that use it (rather than build it), the flood of investment in its development will continue for the time being—both because the potential prize is so large, and because the costs already sunk into the industry carry an incredible economic momentum, regardless of whether or not they ultimately prove to be unwise.

For those of us outside of the AI industry and the financial industries investing in AI, there can be a sense that we are simply watching this process unfold. We—by which I mean “95% of Americans, including most elected officials”—do not fully understand the technical aspects of AI; we do not work at the companies in question; and we may just assume that because of this, we can do little but wait and see the outcome of this gargantuan economic and technological gamble that will, one way or another, determine the shape of the US economy for decades to come.

That feeling is not quite right. The AI industry is so large that it has become like a massive star warping money and