The assortment of festivals and conferences in Austin, known collectively as South by Southwest, or SXSW, has become a cultural weathervane, spotlighting the latest trends in music, film and consumer tech. This year it pointed toward a stormy season.
It was hardly surprising that a video about the vast potential for artificial intelligence technology was aired at film screenings at SXSW. What organizers didn’t expect was the response.
“At first, just a few people booed,” the cultural critic Ted Gioia wrote. “But then more and more—and louder and louder. The more the experts on screen praised the benefits of artificial intelligence, the more hostile the crowd got.”
Audiences booed when the experts described AI as a “culture,” when they were advised to accept “disruption” as inevitable, and when Peter Deng, who manages ChatGPT, commented that AI “fundamentally makes us more human.”
On reflection, the SXSW organizers might have avoided presenting a pro-AI video before two film premiers, where the audience was sure to include veterans of last year’s writer’s and actor’s strike, in which, for the first time, AI was a major issue. But over the past weekend, the disgruntled hipsters of SXSW were joined by the Sage of Omaha.
The goody bags at SXSW are probably a lot cooler, but the really serious money still heads to Nebraska each year for the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the hedge fund built over a lifetime by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, who died in December.
Last year, Buffett voiced his concerns that AI, like nuclear weapons in an earlier era, was a “genie let out of the bottle” with the power to cause great harm if misused. This year, the influential investor amplified his concerns, warning that online scams — powered by AI — are going to be “the growth industry of all time.”
These are broadly based indications of an inflection point in the rapid development of AI. The economy is still barreling forward on the promise of AI, and we’ve only just begun to see the first consumer products transformed by this new technology. Buffett isn’t going to let his misgivings about AI get in the way of making a buck off it.
But the happy talk has subsided. There’s a growing realization of just how sweeping the changes wrought by AI are going to be and how fast they are arriving. Last week, in a demonstration of military technology that was both impressive and sobering, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall flew in an F-16 fighter jet controlled by AI. A year ago such technology would have been science fiction. Last week Kendall said it would be a security risk not to have it. “At this point, we have to have it,” he said.
That comment could describe the way leaders in many fields are coming to terms with AI. What we may be seeing now, after a year of gee-whiz about AI, is the early development of the first authentic, AI-generated political issues.
Legislation related to AI has been introduced in at least half the states, most of it establishing guidelines for businesses using AI or providing incentives for AI development. The Biden White House has released a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” which addresses privacy issues and algorithmic discrimination, as well as guaranteeing the right to speak to an actual human when dealing with an automated system.
The rumblings from Austin and Omaha suggest these preparatory measures are the easy part. Inevitably, a technology that promises to reshape the economy in fundamental ways is going to have huge political impacts as well. We just don’t know what all these are yet.
“I do think, as someone who doesn’t understand a damn thing about it, it has enormous potential for good and enormous potential for harm — and I just don’t know how that plays out,” Buffett said over the weekend.
