"If you don't know it, Ecclesiastes is a collection of Old Testament verses in which the eponymous title character discourses on the apparent meaninglessness of pleasure, accomplishment, wealth, politics, and life itself in the face of the infinitude of the universe and the absolute perfection of God. It is the source of many of our most cliched phrases, such as there is a time for everything and there is nothing new under the sun."
"Rapturous memes, both of salvation and perdition, abound in the AI discourse, from last year's creepy billboards around San Francisco declaring Humans are so 2023, the AI 2027 scenario published last Spring by Kokotajlo et. al., to Marc Andreesen's promises of private jets for chump change courtesy of super-intelligent computers. So far, these lurid prophecies haven't panned out, and instead, AI is looking more and more like an inherently unreliable mediocrity machine."
Ecclesiastes frames the apparent meaninglessness of pleasure, accomplishment, wealth, politics, and life under an infinite universe and an absolutely perfect God, repeating motifs like 'there is a time for everything' and 'nothing new under the sun.' Contemporary AI discourse features rapturous memes of salvation and perdition, from doomsday billboards to speculative scenarios and techno-utopian promises, yet many prophecies have not materialized. AI increasingly appears as an unreliable 'mediocrity machine' that requires enormous electricity and scarce resources, worsening ecological strain. Major public-facing, revenue-generating applications center on pornography, mass surveillance, and cheating on homework. Philosophy courses should attempt novel, constructive engagement with the LLM problem instead of collective despondency.
Read at blog.apaonline.org
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