By TechCrunch | Created at 2025-03-03 21:54:38 | Updated at 2025-03-04 08:37:43
11 hours ago
Two sharply different visions of AI were platformed on stage at the Mobile World Congress trade show on Monday.
The true believer’s case for the technology’s potential — to merge with and transform human life for the better — was offered up by futurist and singularity priest Ray Kurzweil, who also has a research role at Google.
Beaming in via videoconference in a white shirt paired with vividly painted braces, Kurzweil suggested AI will supercharge humanity — bringing, if not quite immortality, a major extension in humanity’s longevity and capabilities as a result of AI-fuelled advances in areas like healthcare.
AI is, he suggested, already powering huge gains for those paying attention — and is going to transform “everything all at once”, raining benefits down on humanity across countless other domains, such as unlocking the plentiful power of solar energy.
Thanks to “AI-optimised designs” and new components, renewable energy technology is on track to “dominate within a decade”, he predicted.
The AI-adjacent doomsaying arrived in person, and with plainer speech: author, academic and tech investor Scott Galloway used his on-stage fireside chat to warn that rage-fuelling algorithms are destroying an entire generation of (mostly) young men.
Left to run by their negligent owners, the algorithms figured out “that the ultimate branding tool is rage”, he argued — painting a picture of ad-funded, AI-fuelled platforms profiting from a polarised nation where neighbors in the U.S. are increasingly not talking to each other.
“We’ve never been stronger… and yet we hate each other,” he said, crediting AI-driven information-sorting with amping up isolation and anti-social attitudes, especially among young men, as well as contributing to a national loneliness crisis.
Going further, Galloway railed against a billionaire class of tech CEOs for failing to call out democratic abuses by the current U.S. government — where X owner Elon Musk is presiding over a Department of Government Efficiency that’s busy slashing federal programs while the Trump administration quietly pushes tax cuts that he said will exclusively benefit the wealthiest in society, including himself.
“This domino of cowardice among super wealthy — it’s just so disappointing and un-American,” railed Galloway, tossing in several unvarnished insults (“f*** you!”) directed at tech CEOs including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook for bending the knee to Trump rather than speaking up in defence of the democratic system that enabled them to build their own tech empires.
Natasha is a senior reporter for TechCrunch, joining September 2012, based in Europe. She joined TC after a stint reviewing smartphones for CNET UK and, prior to that, more than five years covering business technology for silicon.com (now folded into TechRepublic), where she focused on mobile and wireless, telecoms & networking, and IT skills issues. She has also freelanced for organisations including The Guardian and the BBC. Natasha holds a First Class degree in English from Cambridge University, and an MA in journalism from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
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