San Francisco: As Apple launched the Vision Pro, at its Worldwide Developers Conference at its Cupertino headquarters in California last week, and the geeky Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was in India meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and unfolding the possibilities offered by ChatGPT (Chatbot Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) — Augmented Reality, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — it seemed to offer a virtual panacea to almost all our problems. Meanwhile, the world’s largest software enterprise firm, Sales Force, headquartered in the tallest building in San Francisco (SF) — a minute away from where we were staying — advertised its corporate culture as based on Ohana, a Hawaiian term for an extended family that works collaboratively, takes care of each other and has fun together.
And yet, it is a moment of profound irony. For SF — at the heart of the AI revolution — offers a grim reminder of the limits of technology, the devastating impact of partisan politics and the grave anomie that seems inherent in advanced capitalism. A city where the greatest concentration of wealth and problem-solving minds meets grim hopelessness on the streets. A habitat where drug addicts, petty criminals and the homeless are part of a floundering urban landscape surely cannot be much of an advertisement for the power of the new technological revolution that we are witnessing.
Many on the margins of SF’s streets would probably echo the diabolic Harvard educated, Berkeley academic-turned “eco terrorist”, Theodore J Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, who died last week in prison, when he warned in his Luddite manifesto of the alienating effects of technology and the way men and women would lose agency over the most primeval of issues. This crisis in SF, let us be sure, is not one engineered by Luddites, but caused perhaps by its own success: A revolution, after all, is often devoured by those who are initiated into enjoying the fruits and do not recognise that strong ethical foundations must be the first principles that guide any flight of imagination. And those unwilling to see how petty politics, above all, can defy the most compelling algorithmic solutions and that, beyond a point, even the rich and famous will not be able to remain safely sequestered in their cocooned homes in Paolo Alto or the Pacific heights.
The strange case of Silicon Valley’s most audacious con-woman, the Stanford-trained chemical engineer, Elizabeth Holmes, and her partner-in-crime, the Indian-origin Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, adds ammunition to those who view the Valley as lacking a conscience. Holmes, who began an 11-year prison sentence on May 30, and who was once named by Forbes “as the wealthiest self-made female billionaire”, wanted to ostensibly democratise healthcare through her bio-tech company Theranos, which claimed to be able to diagnose multiple diseases from a drop of blood taken through just one prick in the finger. The claim turned out to be a huge fraud, causing severe distress to those who were innocent victims of the company’s claims.
This, however, cannot and should not take away from the giant leaps in innovation, strides only capable in the American ecosphere. The great polymath, Umberto Eco, once described the American landscape as one where the distinction between game and illusion is blurred and where the journey into hyperreality is like entering into what Germans described as a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities.
In many ways, California — with Disneyland and Hollywood — has reflected most intensely this terrain of the American fantasy. In recent decades, it is the Bay Area with Stanford, Silicon Valley and San Francisco, that are the abiding contemporary symbols of the seemingly unending limits of the American imagination: A search for perfection beyond perfection, where Baudrillard’s simulacrum or representation of reality is more important than reality itself. It was the convergence of uninhibited freedom and the lifestyle of SF; the domain knowledge and academic rigour of Stanford and the University of California system; and the genius of fresh brilliant minds in the start-ups of Silicon Valley that created the “magic garden” of innovation and endless possibilities in the Bay Area.
But the jury is still out on the future of new innovations and their impact on our common future. As Apple launched Vision Pro, welcoming you into the world of spatial computing with a headset, more like ski goggles, which use eye-tracking, hand gestures, and voice for input to seamlessly blend digital content with physical space, to enhance the reality of the world you normally experience with computer generated content, the informed response has been mixed. One review in Wired, the Valley’s most credible technological monthly, described it as an alarming misfire. Another review was gentler: “Apple’s Vision Pro headset has the potential to eventually mainstream AR in a way that other face computers haven’t, simply because it’s Apple… the experience can be remarkable and surreal, for sure; but it requires a suspension of disbelief and a sacrifice of autonomy.”
But within the harsh and sometimes no-holds-barred and often claustrophobic world of start-ups and the Silicon Valley, it is Sam Altman who has breezed in like a fresh supply of oxygen. As he explains the world of AGI, of which ChatGPT is only a first-generation platform, and the endless possibilities offered by an algorithm that can truly learn and gets better in its predictability with scale, his message is peppered with words that seem surprisingly old fashioned: Maximum benefit for humanity, equity, and advocacy for regulation to control the potential downsides.
The common sense is that the crisis in SF is a function of “woke” politics, including a law that decriminalised petty thefts, a reduction of the police force and more lenient parole rules. That is scratching the surface. SF is a mirror to the entire Bay Area and a challenge to its affluence and intelligence. The real judgment on the successes of innovators will be determined by the way they respond to SF’s downslide into sadness.
The writer is Professor at JNU and the University of Melbourne and former Visiting Scholar at Stanford University
