I found myself nodding in agreement while reading Jason Snell’s piece about OpenAI buying Ive’s tech design startup:
So OpenAI and Apple’s legendary design lead are embarking on a journey to build some new AI-enabled hardware. They’re coy about what it will be—probably not a phone, definitely not a watch, maybe not “something you wear” — but my gut feeling is that it’ll be something we’ve actually seen before. My true prediction is that it’ll be more like the Humane Ai Pin or that AI Pendant but they’re embarrassed to be associated with those products, so they’re going to wait a little longer to let the stink clear.
I’m skeptical about OpenAI in general, because while I think AI is so powerful that aspects of it will legitimately change the world, I also think it has been overhyped more than just about anything I’ve seen in my three decades of writing about technology. Sam Altman strikes me as being a drinker of his own Kool-Aid, but it’s also his job to make everyone in the world think that AI is inevitable and amazing and that his company is the unassailable leader while it’s bleeding cash.
I think it’s important to clarify that OpenAI isn’t bleeding cash; they’re haemorrhaging it. This is all further reinforced by the fact that OpenAI is purchasing Ive’s company for an astronomical $6.5 billion, and all that money is in privately owned stock funded by equity firms, banks, and desperate venture capital companies.
With all that in mind, I find myself wondering what Ive and Altman’s new product could possibly be. Jony Ive insists that good design “elevates humanity,” but because of the current direction of AI in our society, I don’t see how it’s possible any AI-based product could.
I am not anti-AI. I use it frequently, particularly for summarizing in-depth Google research (my most recent example: “what e‑sims should I consider for traveling around France and the Netherlands, and which options have the widest coverage?”). I also use it for rubber ducking, in which I copy and paste error messages from my code into the chatbot and get it to suggest potential solutions. (It never gets it right, but it at least gets me thinking.)
So I am not some sort of anti-AI Luddite or prude. I think AI chat bots have enormous potential for research, data analysis, and even as code assistants. However, it’s not clearly net positive for the world.
On one hand, I see many smart people I know fawning over this technology product that is often merely a very advanced version of Siri. I also see Jony Ive and Sam Altman making googly eyes at each other in a very awkward announcement video. Even Jony Ive, a man who makes product design sound like Aristotelian philosophy, is fawning over Sam Altman.
It’s also become clear that many unhinged CEOs are sending outrageous emails about their expectations for AI. In summary: “AI is coming for your job, so get ten times better at it quickly.” Mostly, it sounds like they expect their employees to do ten times the work for the same pay as before, as a baseline for keeping their job. AI is already being used to exploit the workforce.
For the first time in our collective history, knowledge workers face an extinction-level event, not dissimilar to what happened to blue-collar workers in the face of factory automation and machining. And Sam Altman and Jony Ive think that the best path forward is to continue developing a product they claim will be “for everybody,” when all current signs point to AI mostly being a tool for incredibly wealthy CEOs to extract more value and productivity from an increasingly smaller workforce of disenfranchised employees.
How can an AI product “elevate humanity” when it’s often used now to oppress and exploit the working class? Jony Ive is a very smart man, but his most recent work includes $3,000 jackets and personal branding for the king of England. Ive has a long history of designing luxury products for wealthy people. It is hard to imagine yet another tech product solving (or even avoiding) the problem its base technology has already created.
Unlike certain technocrats, I am unconcerned about a Terminator-like future. I am far more concerned with a future where technology has created an even larger disparity between the rich and the poor. Unless we can all figure out Universal Basic Income, (and conservative governments the world over are uninterested in that notion), I fear that we are creating a society that values the contributions of workers less than ever before, while the cost of living continues to become more unaffordable.
Sam Altman and Jony Ive spend a lot of time in their self-congratulatory video discussing San Francisco. This is what Sam had to say:
“San Francisco has been, like, a mythical place in American history, and maybe in world history in some sense. It is the city I most associate with the leading edge of culture and technology. … The fact that all of those things happen in the Bay Area and not anywhere else on this gigantic planet we live on, I think, is not an accident.”
This is true (even if it ignores much of the rest of the Valley and San Jose in particular), but it’s worth noting that this is all happening in the United States. Right now, the US is a country where “move fast and break things” is quite literally the political policy of the White House. America leads in technology for many reasons, but the Valley’s attitude of “move fast and break things” has become a global problem.
Forgive me, then, for being skeptical that ChatGPT and its competitors will change the world in a net positive way. Forgive me for having a hard time imagining Jony Ive ever again designing anything as revolutionary as the iPhone (which, for all its flaws, globally democratized technology, changed society and global commerce, and has created a ripple effect that will last decades). Forgive me for assuming that all this hype around this partnership is a lot of smoke and mirrors to make OpenAI’s investors feel like there’s still a fish on the line, rather than a hole in the boat.
I am an optimist about humanity, but I am unsure technology is always for humanity’s betterment. I do not see how, to use Sir Jony Ive’s words, AI “elevates humanity.” Right now, it looks to me like the only person who’s been elevated in all this is Sam Altman.