Artificial Intelligence | The catastrophe we want

Sells a technology that he also warns about: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, during a press conference. Photo: Rodrigo Reyes Marin/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa With AI it is like with fascism: people actually know the disastrous consequences that await them, and yet they wouldn't have it any other way. Last weekend, a right-wing extremist party was elected with a large majority in Saxony-Anhalt - against all warnings of a new "'33", the end of democracy and economic ruin. At the same time, the company OpenAI presented the latest model GPT-6 “Astra”. Even the developer company itself warned about the optimized chatbot. OpenAI's Chief Scientist Jakub Pachoki wrote in a blog post that we would soon lose control over artificial intelligence. “I fear that no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid increase in machine intelligence.”

Warnings of an AI apocalypse are making the rounds regularly; not unjustified. The most pressing problem will probably be that artificial intelligence can criminally overcome any security architecture. This happened recently in the so-called Hugging Face incident, in which a collective of organized bots jointly took control of the company Hugging Face and even OpenAI itself. Potentially, the lesson goes, this could happen with any infrastructure.

Ironically, such dystopian scenarios act not as a deterrent, but rather as an advertisement: Look how powerful this technology is! Without such megalomaniac superlatives, all this nonsense wouldn't work. Because ultimately money has to be made with AI, which currently comes exclusively from speculative venture capital and relies on precisely this mystical superiority of the machine. However, OpenAI, for example, estimates the actual benefit for the people who can reverently participate in this unimaginable power for its “Astra” to be very low: “It can take on tedious tasks such as filling out online forms (…) and organizing your calendar. It can conduct online research and create summaries in your email or word processor.«

In a similar way, fascism also lives from projection. The more threatening and unstoppable the rise of the right, the more perfidious and manipulative their strategies are presented, the more powerful the whole thing appears. Just as the stagnating economy leads to speculation on a growth-generating leap in development, people in times of powerlessness place their bets on strength and power. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether it actually benefits them. The promise lies in violently overcoming the entrenched status quo, as the AfD's "It begins here" suggests as background noise in Saxony-Anhalt. At the same time, this is where the downfall lies: in order to maintain the suggestion of power for as long as possible, the announced catastrophe must actually be brought about.

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