Think About It 104: TED CHIANG

 

I suggest that we think about Artificial Intelligence as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company.  Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and Artificial Intelligence systems are used for many reasons, too.  But the similarities between McKinsey — a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100 — and Artificial Intelligence are also clear.  Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds.  In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to 'turbocharge' sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic.  Just as Artificial Intelligence promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

      A former McKinsey employee has described the company as 'capital’s willing executioners': if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you.  That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide.  Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice.  Even in its current rudimentary form, Artificial Intelligence has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what 'the algorithm' says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

 

'Will AI Become the New McKinsey?' [Annals of Artificial Intelligence, 4 May 2023]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to listen to a December 2024 interview with North American science fiction writer TED CHIANG:

 

 

 

https://thepublicsradio.org/npr/writer-ted-chiang-on-ai-and-grappling-with-big-ideas/

 

 

 

 

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