Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World – Parmy Olson

I for one, am sick of all the AI talk. I am also wondering how much more of this shit we will have to undergo until the technology tapers off and we get left alone to sort out what jobs we can do and what will be outsourced to our computer betters. My cynisism around all this might color my review negatively.

I read this book on the strength of Parmy Olson as an author. I read her book on Anonymous a long time ago, and I loved it. I also read a book by Gabriella Coleman at the same time (also about anonymous) and it was pretty awful. Olson came out the clear winner in a competition she didn’t know she was having. Her journalism chops really come out in that, and she comes across like a very astute and talented researcher.

She still is, or at least comes across that way in this book. What is this about? The AI race, who the key players are in the race for our real life McGuffin, Artificial Intelligence. If you are paying attention to the intersection of politics and technology, you already know a lot of these names.

Have you been wondering why any of this shit might matter? Have you been wondering how much more of your attention fuckers like Altman, Musk, and the rest of the charlatan brigade actually deserve? Here’s a quote that might put it into a bit of perspective:

We have no historical reference point for what happens when companies get this big. The market cap numbers that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are currently achieving have never been seen before. And while they bring greater wealth to the shareholders of those companies, including pension funds, they have also centralized power in such a way that the privacy, identity, public discourse, and increasingly the job prospects of billions of people are beholden to a handful of large firms, run by a handful of unfathomably wealthy people.