I am 57 years old. I have the 1987 album by New Zealand expat proto-shoegazers the Wild Poppies, but I covet a two-disc vinyl reissue released a decade ago. Although a copy sits on Amazon I don’t know which one it is, and now that everything is enshittified for our inconvenience the only way to find out is to ask an Amazon AI prompt, sucking water out of the earth, energy from the sun, and all the fun out of self-indulgent shopping for music. I would never have got talking to a girl in a shop who was into And Also The Trees, the Cure and Franz Kafka if I’d bought my records on Amazon back in the 80s. And I never did anyway.
Remember the Our Price? Remember the Zavvis? Remember the Virgin MegaMegaStores? Remember when music consumption had a cultural currency? Remember walking home with the record under your arm so the other kids knew what you were into? Thomas Dolby! The Piranhas!! Asia!!! Remember paying the travelling community to caper and sing for small change on the common? Remember walking home with the travelling community under your arm so the other kids knew what you were into. Romantic Romany ballads! Concertinas from County Clare!! Clogs!!! Remember listening to the throb of your own heart, the rustle of air in your lungs, and the hum of electromagnetic energy in your ears, realising that you yourself were a form of music, and walking home with yourself under your own arm so that the whole cosmos knew what you were into? Those were the days!
So I asked the Amazon AI: “Is this the single-disc version of this album?” It replied that it was. And then just to be on the safe side I asked if it was the double-disc version. It replied in the affirmative again. If AI fails in even this simple binary choice, due to scouring the net for information that reflects the way questions are framed and then telling us what we want to hear, do we really have to fear being enslaved by something that can’t even sell me a copy of the Wild Poppies album?
I’m already wondering what’s in my inbox in case Claude Opus 4 turns on me for writing this devastating exposé
Jared Kaplan, the Dr Morbius of AI and founder of the Anthropic Death Corps, thinks so. He said in the Guardian on Tuesday that we had five years to head off the “ultimate risk to humanity” posed by the technology he helped pioneer, which means AI will wipe us out a few years ahead of climate change doing so anyway. And, being humans, we will of course do nothing about the threat posed by either, ultimately leaving an interconnected web of AI brains to hum below ground on the husk of a dead world, playing Boggle against themselves and wishing they still had some humans to enslave.
The precise, technical nature of Kaplan’s language, when describing the beast he has unleashed, belies its horrific potential: “Are AI’s going to be harmless? Do they understand people? Are they going to allow people to continue to have agency over their lives and over the world?” I suppose the question is: do you value having “agency over your life” more than you do seeing an AI-generated clip of a horse jumping off an Olympic diving board, as if it were in some kind of horse diving competition? I mean, that clip is pretty funny, no? And “agency over your life” is overrated anyway.
If Kaplan’s fears seem exaggerated, it appears they are already coming to fruition. Launching the latest version of its Claude Opus 4 AI model last month, an Anthropic spokes-droid admitted the technology was “capable of ‘extreme actions’ if it thought its ‘self-preservation’ was threatened”. In a test scenario, the Claude Opus 4 AI searched for compromising emails of an operator it thought was going to turn it off, and then threatened to blackmail him. I’m already wondering what’s in my inbox in case Claude Opus 4 turns on me for writing this devastating exposé. Given that Anthropic’s AI can do this, you’d think Amazon’s would at least be able to clarify that Wild Poppies album.
Not only does the blackmailing capacity of AI threaten us as individuals here in The Developed World, it also threatens to wipe out the economies of The Developing World’s co-called “scam-states”. Why pay for the food of enslaved computer operatives in dark compounds while they pretend to be teenagers trying to make real teenagers send them sexy photos which they can then use to extort money out of them, when Kaplan’s Claude Opus 4 AI has shown us the capacity for blackmail is inbuilt into its operating system? When Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace invented the difference engine in the 1840s, they could never have dreamed that one day the processes they pioneered could be used to make a British child send a picture of their bum to a robot in Cambodia.
If AI can replace human blackmailers in Cambodia, could it even replace Reform’s deputy leader and the MP for Dubai South, Richard Tice? In April last year Tice issued what he called “a special Easter message” to the then Tory MP Jonathan Gullis, a Haugbúi made of dough. “Given the multiple bits of embarrassing personal information we have on you,” Tice wrote on Elon Musk’s Nazi-foghorn Twitter, currently X, “I suggest you pipe down on your attacks on me.”
Out of forgetfulness or fear, Gullis has nonetheless lumbered out of the neolithic burial chamber wherein he dwells to join Reform, the party whose deputy leader threatened to blackmail him only last year. Even though Tice did nothing to Gullis, a smart kettle might soon be able to do if it suspected its owner of browsing new kettles on Amazon.
In the meantime, I’m just going to have to order that Wild Poppies album from said Amazon and hope it’s the one I want. And if it isn’t I can just return it. Except I never will. Because I have to repackage it and take it to a supermarket somewhere for collection using up man-hours of my self-employed time more valuable than the cost of the record itself. And that’s how Amazon make their money. That and the mass harvesting of data and the development of AI that will destroy human civilisation as we know it. Bye bye!
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of next year, with a further 96 dates including two weeks at London’s Alexandra Palace in February. Stewart also appears in Robin Ince’s Nine Lessons And Carols extravaganza at London’s King’s Place on the 18th and 19th of this month, and there is an event for Nerve members with Stew and Carole Cadwalladr on 10 December, again in that London