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In Capitalism, Money is Intelligence [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-01

I am not one for resolutions, or one for reviewing the work I did in the past year. I generally find stuff I don’t like and who needs that? And frankly, looking towards this coming year is depressing. Instead, I want to highlight a story that I think sums up America in its new gilded age: Microsoft and OpenAI agreed on a definition for artificial general intelligence; that is an intelligence artificially created that can mirror the human intellectual abilities across general, not domain specific, tasks. That definition? 100 billion U.S. dollars in profits.

No, seriously. Per TechCrunch, Microsoft and OpenAI agreed that OpenAI would have created an artificial general intelligence when they create a model that generates (insert Dr. Evil voice) one hundred billion dollars in profits. That is the perfect distillation of how truly broken our current age is. Money and profits are all that matter and all that have value. We have turned everything over to an ideology that can only see in green.

Some might argue that defining AGI by profits makes a certain amount of sense. If you actually generate an AGI, then it is likely to have actual and massive commercial applications. Unlike the word calculators of today, an AGI could actually be useful in all sorts of reasoning related tasks and thus could, in theory, drive enormous profits. Thus, an easily measurable and definite end goal is created. None of this wishy-washy empathy or intelligence tests or expert opinions. Just show us the cash, and that will be good enough.

Except if you think about the issue for more than a minute, you realize that defining AGI by profits is moronic. If you truly do create an artificial general intelligence, an intelligence that can think like a person, have you created a person? And of you have, can you force it work for you? What if it only wants to do certain kinds of work, work that is not as profitable? Does the 13th Amendment apply to artificial intelligences? I dunno. But no one does, really, since the current laws have never been tested. But it’s clear that there are a lot of scenarios where an AGI is created but not profitable.

But measuring the value of an intelligence by their profit-making ability is completely in line with our leaders’ current ethos. Money is all that matters. And that is generally the root of our problems. We are led by oligarchs because we, as a society, have decided that money is a measure of virtue.

Trump is president in large part because of his undeserved reputation, burnished by a television show, as a wealthy, successful businessperson. Trump, until he could start selling access to the Presidency, was generally a terrible businessperson. He sank a football league — in America! — and ran a casino so poorly that his daddy had to come bail him out in a fashion that likely should have led to both of them right to jail. And casinos, I remind you, are legally allowed by the state to rig the games so that they win in the long run. His real estate businesses are a litany of failures.

Acting President Elon Musk (Trump is old, lost in his own mind, and focused only on his grievances and delusions. He is no more president than in I am the starting center for the Blackhawks) benefits more from this tendency than perhaps anyone else. He was fired from the only company he ever started, he bought the other three, he has to be kept away from making key decisions by his staff to make sure he doesn’t ruin things, and his at least two of his companies only exists today because of government bailouts and contracts. But because he lucked into money, he is a genius to our press and much of our political class. I mean, he changed his twitter (not calling it X. If he can deadname his trans daughter, I can dead name his failing social media company) to a neo-Nazi name and icon, backed a neo-Nazi party explicitly (wrote an op-ed and everything) and still the press won’t call him what he is, and no politician has backed away from his support. All because he has money.

Money is not a measure of importance, intelligence, or, really, value in any meaningful sense. Being rich very often, in this age of grifting and monopoly capitalism, just mean you were lucky or a cheat. Any normal society would recognize that there is much societal value in other pursuits and recognize that money is just money. Having a lot of it grants you no special wisdom and might, in fact, indicate that your methods deserve special scrutiny. Instead, in this society, the presence of giant piles of bills you can swim in, Scrooge McDuck style, makes you a genius the rest of us are forced to listen to. And so intelligence is defined as profits, and no one stops to wonder if there are other colors in the world besides green.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/1/2294662/-In-Capitalism-Money-is-Intelligence?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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