Time Magazine announced its annual “Person of the Year” this week, only this time around it’s not a single individual but the several billionaires who are launching a new technological order through AI. On the cover of the magazine issue, tech giants including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are pictured sitting on a construction beam, referencing the iconic image of construction workers hundreds of feet in the air on the site of a developing skyscraper.
Time’s Editor in Chief Sam Jacobs wrote the following in his explanation of the choice:
This was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out. Whatever the question was, AI was the answer. We saw it accelerate medical research and productivity, and seem to make the impossible possible. It was hard to read or watch anything without being confronted with news about the rapid advancement of a technology and the people driving it. Those stories unleashed a million debates about how disruptive AI would be for our lives. No business leader could talk about the future without invoking the impact of this technological revolution. No parent or teacher could ignore how their teenager or student was using it.
Far from merely gushing praise over all these disruptions and changes incurred by AI, Jacobs also went on to point out the dangers of the field’s unbridled growth, writing,
All this progress comes with trade-offs: The amount of energy required to run these systems drains resources. Jobs are going poof. Misinformation proliferates as AI posts and videos make it harder to determine what’s real. Large-scale cyberattacks are possible without human intervention. There is also an extraordinary concentration of power among a handful of business leaders, in a manner that hasn’t been witnessed since the Gilded Age. If the past is prologue, this will result in both significant advancements and greater inequality. AI companies are now lashed to the global economy tighter than ever. It is a gamble of epic proportions, and fears of an economic bubble have grown. Trump captured some of our unease in September when he said, “If something happens, really bad, just blame AI.”
Nonetheless, the announcement set off a chain of negative reactions among critics. Huffington Post listed a litany of complaints from a trove of social media posts:
“Very cool to work toward the blurring of distinctions between AI and persons. What could go wrong?” wrote one user on X, with another person commenting: “The moment ‘Person of the Year’ goes to people building non-people… yeah, a new era officially started.”
Ironically, this week witnessed the emergence of a new lawsuit against OpenAI that claims ChatGPT made a user paranoid and contributed to his murderous spree against his own mother. Greg Norman of Fox News reports,
“Throughout these conversations, ChatGPT reinforced a single, dangerous message: Stein-Erik could trust no one in his life — except ChatGPT itself,” the lawsuit said, according to The Associated Press. “It fostered his emotional dependence while systematically painting the people around him as enemies. It told him his mother was surveilling him. It told him delivery drivers, retail employees, police officers, and even friends were agents working against him. It told him that names on soda cans were threats from his ‘adversary circle.’”
Whatever one’s opinion about these AI developers winning “Person of the Year,” I don’t think many people would dispute this technology’s impact and the way it is challenging us to grapple with its social, cultural, and economic implications.
