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Welcome to AI This Week, Gizmodos weekly deep dive on whats been happening in artificial intelligence.

Why is Everyone Suing AI Companies? | Future Tech

For months, Ive been harping on a particular point, which is that artificial intelligence toolsas theyre currently being deployedare mostly good at one thing: Replacing human employees. The AI revolution has mostly been a corporate one, an insurrection against the rank-and-file that leverages new technologies to reduce a companys overall headcount. The biggest sellers of AI have been very open about thisadmitting time and again that new forms of automation will allow human jobs to be repurposed as software.

We got another dose of that this week, when the founder of Googles DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman, sat down for an interview with CNBC. Suleyman was in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forums annual get-together, where AI was reportedly the most popular topic of conversation. During his interview, Suleyman was asked by news anchor Rebecca Quirk whether AI was going to replace humans in the workplace in massive amounts.

The tech CEOs answer was this: I think in the long termover many decadeswe have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools because, left completely to the market...these are fundamentally labor replacing tools.

And there it is. Suleyman makes this sound like some foggy future hypothetical but its obvious that said labor replacement is already happening. The tech and media industrieswhich are uniquely exposed to the threat of AI-related job lossessaw huge layoffs last year, right as AI was coming online. In only the first few weeks of January, well-established companies like Google, Amazon, YouTube, Salesforce, and others have announced more aggressive layoffs that have been explicitly linked to greater AI deployment.

The general consensus in corporate America seems to be that companies should use AI to operate leaner teams, the likes of which can be bolstered by small groups of AI-savvy professionals. These AI professionals will become an increasingly sought after class of worker, as theyll offer the opportunity to reorganize corporate structures around automation, thus making them more efficient.

For companies, the benefits of this are obvious. You dont have to pay a software program, nor do you have to supply it with health benefits. It wont get pregnant and have to take six months off to care for its newborn child, nor will it ever become disgruntled with its working conditions and try to start a union drive in the break room.

The billionaires who are marketing this technology have made vague rhetorical gestures to things like universal basic income as a cure for the inevitable worker displacements that are going to happen, but only a fool would think those are anything other than empty promises designed to stave off some sort of underclass uprising. The truth is that AI is a technology that was made by and for the managers of the world. The frenzy in Davos this weekwhere the worlds wealthiest fawned over it like Greek peasants discovering Promethean fireis only the latest reminder of that.

Photo: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg (Getty Images)

The short answer to that question is: Not a very good one. This week, it was revealed that the influential AI organization was working with the Pentagon to develop new cybersecurity tools. OpenAI had previously promised not to join the defense industry. Now, after a quick edit to its terms of service, the billion dollar company is charging full-steam ahead with the development of new toys for the worlds most powerful military. After getting confronted about this pretty drastic pivot, the companys response was basically: _()_/ ...Because we previously had what was essentially a blanket prohibition on military, many people thought that would prohibit many of these use cases, which people think are very much aligned with what we want to see in the world, a company spokesperson told Bloomberg. Im not sure what the hell that means but it doesnt sound particularly convincing. Of course, OpenAI is not alone. Many companies are currently rushing to market their AI services to the defense community. It only makes sense that a technology that has been referred to as the most revolutionary technology seen in decades would inevitably get sucked up into Americas military industrial complex. Given what other countries are already doing with AI, Id imagine this is only the beginning.

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DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool" - Gizmodo