Paradise by the Dashboard Model

In November 2022, any residual feeling that Silicon Valley represented a clear-cut boon for humanity vanished like a fart in the wind. In an act of breathtaking arrogance, OpenAI released GPT-3.5, a free preview of its chatbot ChatGPT. Confronted with a technology that could synthesise humanlike text in response to prompts from actual humans, journalists and commentators rushed into print to weigh its likely implications, often using the chatbot itself to generate the first few paragraphs of their articles (which is a bit like a caveman ostentatiously sporting a bronze medallion towards the end of the Stone Age). Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman began to petition the US government to regulate the emerging tech, upon pain of some unspecified catastrophe, quite possibly the prospect of competition from start-ups with too few hoops to jump through. By the time Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer came out in July 2023, the affinities between the theoretical physicist and the tech bros’ favourite tech bro were all too apparent to anyone who’d been paying attention, though no one (save for the fawning members of an AI Senate committee in Washington) was buying Altman’s global-citizen shtick. [More here.]