At this point, it should be clear that AI is a choose-your-own-adventure book where every option ends in disaster. Exploding carbon emissions and ecological collapse? Other outcomes include some or all of: the bubble bursting and an ensuing financial crisis; mass unemployment via automation; the end of democracy and the rise of authoritarian surveillance states; raving cults who believe the pattern-matching algorithm is a consciousness; terrorists who create devastating bioweapons; nation states that deploy autonomous weapons systems that act on non-human timeframes; nation states or terrorists that hack all the myriad systems we depend on; or an AI that, conscious or not, pursues directives that are at odds with human wellbeing.
Imagining that people such as Elon Musk, the OpenAI boss, Sam Altman, Palantir’s Peter Thiel and the Trump administration tech adviser Marc Andreessen will lead us to a utopian future of flourishing environmentalism, social harmony and endless leisure requires hallucination and sycophancy so great that that choose-your-own-adventure scenario could only have been written by ChatGPT. There is a growing, if wildly delayed, realisation that we are heading for calamity, with accompanying calls to slow down, regulate or even put all of this on pause while we wrap our minds around it. These calls are coming not only from activists, but from a collection of politicians, experts and big-tech insiders too ecumenical to dismiss, from Bernie Sanders to Bill Gates, who wrote recently that “if someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it”.
He is merely the latest insider to acknowledge the reality that AI company Anthropic did earlier this summer, when it called for a “brake pedal”. Industry self-restraint will not work. A pause, if there is to be one, must be imposed from the outside.
Despite this, an international agreement is sadly unlikely. AI is analogous to nuclear weaponry, and follows the same logic: each individual actor is incentivised to run this foolish race, with the sole justification that it does not want to be at the mercy of whoever wins. The best chance of inducing a slowdown, it seems, would be for a single actor to control a choke-point, and have an incentive to close it.
Curiously, the EU holds such a card – and even has an incentive to play it, should it dare. The Dutch tech company ASML is Europe’s most valuable company, thanks to its production of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. These underlie the most advanced chip-making in the world, and as such are one of few possible choke-points on the entire AI industry.
ASML has mastered the technology and intricate supply chain to make the $400m per unit machines needed to etch patterns on to silicon, where light is focused to a 13.5 nanometre wavelength (about 1/10,000th of the width of a human hair). Without its machines, there are no chips; without the chips, there are no more datacentres. That means everything from Taiwanese chip-maker TSMC’s $265bn investment in future fabrication facilities (known as “fabs”), to the $7tn-worth of datacentres that the industry is expected to build globally (though primarily in the US) by 2030.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
