In rereading Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, I was struck by how prescient he was regarding Silicon Valley’s development of an unrestrained force that may very well take away our jobs and our future, and leave us with a dust bowl of nothing. In Chapter 5, Steinbeck criticizes unchecked capitalism, calling the symbol of it—i.e., banks—the “monster.” His novel critiques the then machine-like creatures that were made by men who have lost control. In the following quote Steinbeck describes how the banks’ agents come to kick the tenant farmers off what was once their land:
We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.
Note the last line: Men made it, but they can’t control it. The banks were developed by men, but they soon became “something more than men.” Uncontrolled, the financial institutions in America at the time had a large hand in both the Crash of ’29 and its subsequent Great Depression (of which Steinbeck was writing), as well as the more recent economic meltdown of the Great Recession of 2008. What new economic dust bowl will an unchecked AI lead to? I’m not saying that I don’t use banks or, for that matter, AI, but I am saying that unrestricted development could lead to what Steinbeck called “monsters.” Those men who said, “A bank isn’t like a man . . . that’s the monster.”
What sort of AI monsters are being created now?
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