Does the future of the AI Industry "lie in the trash can"?

Does the future of the Artificial Intelligence Industry “lie in the trash can”?

Perversion of plastic

According to Wikipedia, humanity has known about plastic since 1839. Yet, until the mid 1950s, plastic was not as pervasive as it is today. What was the turning point?

According to several articles on the internet, it was 1956. At the packaging industry’s annual conference in NewYork, Lloyd Stouffer, then editor of Modern Packaging Magazine had this to say:

“The package that is used once and thrown away like a tin can or a paper carton represents not a one-shot market for a few thousand units, but an everyday recurring market measured by the billions of units. Your future in packaging…does indeed lie in the trash can”.

Stouffer literally implored the industry to move from durable plastics to single use ones. The result is for everyone to see. The plastic industry took a perfectly useful material that had its legitimate use, and flooded the earth with it, in turn poisoning every single thing it encountered along the way.

OpenAI and the perversion of AI

In 2024, in an interview at Dartmouth Engineering, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati had this to say about AI and job losses:

“Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality”

Parallels with the 1956 moment

Are there parallels to be drawn between this moment and the 1956 “future of packaging lies in the trash can” moment?

1. Not only has Machine Learning existed for decades at this point, it has been deployed in several applications in daily life. Just like plastics had been before 1956.
2. There are specific use cases where Machine Learning and its evolution “AI” make sense. Just like plastics had before 1956.
3. There is now an attempt to flood the world with AI, with scant consideration to the potential devastating long term consequences. Just like what happened with single use plastics in 1956.
4. The industry has dropped all pretense about the product being for the benefit of the users. Mira Murati’s quote has an eerie resemblance to that of Lloyd Stouffer, the underlying sentiment being: “We as an industry do whatever it takes to serve our own interests. We expressly do not care about the consequences”

What’s different this time around?

There are differences though:

1. In 1956 it was far more difficult for an industry to set the narrative compared to 2024.
2. In contrast to the situation in 1956, today the AI industry has a huge overlap with the industry that literally owns the internet.

That second point bears a bit more explanation. Think about the organizations that literally control the internet today. Think about your feeds and what companies hold the keys to the algorithm that dictates what you see. It is most likely that you’ll think of Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

Now think about what are the companies pushing AI. You’ll find that most of the companies from the above list also feature in this one. This means that these companies have the power to shape public opinion and they’re going to use it to fuel the hype around AI.

So it is going to be way way more challenging to separate the wheat from the chaff. But what can we as consumers, or even producers of this technology do about it?

Call to action

My call to action for this post: For every application of AI, ask yourself the following question:

“Does this use case fall under the durable plastic category? Or does it belong to the single use plastic category?”