> The direction that AI takes is not written into the technology itself. It depends on our choices, on the institutions that host and underpin that choosing, and on our ability to manage innovation responsibly to serve the common good.

This is such a key point -- the problem is that the $T that are being poured into AI are doing so for one purpose alone: ROI

The choice has already been made, and it's the wrong one.

This is the same position of Yuval Noah Harari in his recent Economist interview: The ones in power (Musk etc.) try to frame the bad AI future as inevitable, instead of shouldering responsibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNZhxTtOL-I

The whole interview is well worth your time.

It's the correct choice according to the fundamental principles of capitalism, as set down by Milton Friedman.[1] and Lewis Powell.[2] Friedman set down the theory:

In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no “social” values, no “social” responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form. ...

(But) the doctrine of “social responsibility” taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book “Capitalism and Freedom,” I have called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and have said that in such a society, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Then Powell (the Powell who became a Supreme Court Justice) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce set out to change the rules of the game. The 1971 "Powell memo" was written when the values of the 1960s had permeated society. The objective of the memo was to turn that around. It's a battle plan to use corporate power to change government. When it was written, few companies had lobbyists. Now, corporate lobbying is huge, and effective.

The extent to which this well-funded project worked doesn't have to be described today. What's worth realizing is that it wasn't always that way.

The U.S. Government of the Lyndon Johnson era ("Great Society", "War on Poverty") was organized to deal with something like the impact of AI on employment. The current government is not. It is permeated with people who think it the government shouldn't do anything about it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

[2] https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

I agree with your summary. Greed has won out over everything else.

Its certainly the wrong choice if by all indications the R is apparently missing in your ROI.

Yeah. And the quality of AI will only get worse from here unless we can commoditize open weight models.

If Google and Anthropic and such are able to own access, they will enshittify it horribly. Because they are powerless to do anything but, in the name of profit.

I'd say that the outcome mostly depends on whether something resembling AGI is achieved since that would more or less inevitably end up leading to something resembling ASI ('super-intelligence') which in turn makes it questionable whether the resulting entity can be counted upon to 'serve the common good' - whatever that may be. The quest for ROI has at most a temporary influence on the direction if this path is followed unless it actually keeps AGI (and thus ASI) from being achieved.