Media frenzy around an Anthropic researcher claiming that people in the industry believe rogue AI could wipe out humanity has me searching for analogies in the gambling sector. After all, the guy said AI companies are “gambling with our lives,” alongside another employee’s highly speculative 10% chance of human extinction by 2030.
My skepticism stems from analysis of a purported “rogue” AI incident involving OpenAI that actually represents a predictable outcome. AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI appear to have tremendous incentive to become a government-protected oligopoly before the AI investment bubble pops and/or Chinese rivals catch up—two interrelated scenarios. The U.S. political backlash against data centers, which ravage the environment and undermine community quality of life, has also rattled the industry’s nervous system. If you thought casinos or legal sports betting were unpopular, behold the polling on data centers.
As the tech critic Cory Doctorow summed it up in a recent analysis:
“AI” – chatbots that wake up, “set their own goals,” and “spontaneously” start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn’t have “a 10% chance of ending the human race.” The Hugging Face hack isn’t a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It’s a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn’t accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.
The political theorist Richard Seymour similarly argues that this doom-oriented criticism of the industry has immense economic benefits for a small group of players and tech elites. Seymour wrote:
It seems a strange publicity gambit, to say our product could wipe out humanity. In the lingo of our evolving tech empire, though, this is exactly what is meant by ‘criti-hype’. The term was coined by Lee Vinsel at Virginia Tech, who defined it as ‘criticism that both feeds and feeds on hype’.
The extinction panic also obscures the violence and harm happening now, not in some dystopian future, as the former Google AI researcher Timnit Gebru argues. AI is already deepening the corrosion of human relationships, trampling on privacy rights, enshittifying the internet, and, in the online gambling world, helping companies market their products more effectively and target users based on their tendencies. Several states have considered legislation to rein in the use of AI to prey on users of online gambling platforms.
So, like the now-infamous Hugging Face cybersecurity incident, this predation in online gambling is not — and probably never will be — a crisis of a chatbot or swarm of them going rogue. It is a problem of companies using AI to exploit users more efficiently. In gambling, the fan-out effect of addiction is vast.
Much of the reaction to what happened with OpenAI and Hugging Face is like saying a slot machine went rogue because it bankrupted a person. Yet, the harm was foreseeable, as the system’s behavior stemmed from capabilities and objectives humans deliberately gave it. No human physically hides inside the slot machine or controls it remotely in real time. It was built to sit on the casino floor or exist as software on a phone to generate revenue by keeping people gambling and producing a mathematical advantage for the house.
Gambling reformers have long been on point to oppose and seek to restrict the use of AI by the gambling industry. In the wake of this wave of extinction panic and the exaggerated powers attributed to AI, no one should be blinded by fear that AI can set its own goals, such as bankrupting an online bettor in a way that the online casino, despite all its responsible gambling PR, didn’t think was A-OK.
There is a deeper political and historical argument that humans exploiting humans to extract value is a kind of alien power. Gambling, for instance, has existed for at least 12,000 years and wasn’t, until more recently, a means of exploitation. But this centuries-old problem of how humans can create modern egalitarian societies goes far beyond gambling or AI. Maybe this is too optimistic, but it still seems that people are in control of the future, not capital or its (slot) machines.
