The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
So we have Google, Facebook, and Amazon. (China has Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba, but they need the Great Firewall to compete.) The US is down to four big trillion-dollar banks. (Bank #5, the Bank of New York, is about a third the size of #4.) Telecom is consolidating to AT&T and Comcast.
These companies act like monopolies. They stop competing on price and influence government and culture instead. While organizations, rather than AIs, they optimize for size and shareholder value. That's runaway capitalism.
I hadn't made the 'mirror' connection before and it's a great image, but pretty much the first time I heard Bostrom, Musk et al talk about this I really wondered how absent any issues of political or social tension was that they are fuelling.
Andrew Ng talked about this too. Instead of talking about how technological change is impacting our social, cultural and political life the tech industry lets their machinations lose on the world and everybody else can deal with the fallout.
Furthermore, capitalism has obvious logical limitations that most people who are in love with it seem to ignore. It runs on resource and energy extraction from the earth. All economic operations run on energy and materials. There will come a point where all resources are extracted from the earth, so no new wealth will be generated in that way.
At that point (likely much sooner), capitalism as we use it today will not function what so ever.
What I don't understand is how this gets presented as an argument against AI risk. If the "paperclip maximizers" we construct now out of humans, machines, institutional processes and legal codes already exist, are successful, exhibit runaway growth, are a danger and lack insight in Chiang's sense, isn't that actually evidence in favor of the viability of such entities? If they are already dangerous even with humans in the loop and relying on cumbersome institutional processes, isn't that all the more reason to think about how much more dangerous they can get as they become more autonomous and agile?
I took it that the author wasn't doing that. He was using the "AI Threat" argument and pointing it back at the tech entrepreneur's current creations: their companies.
This argument is not from technologists! The major proponents I'm aware of are Nick Bostrom, a philosopher, and Eliezer Yudkowski. Musk is simply repeating their argument, because he found it convincing. It strikes me as extremely dishonest to psychoanalyze an argument based on the celebrity who repeated it.
The greatest danger to Civilization, in my not-so-humble opinion is tribalism. My country is better. My religion. My political philosophy. My color. My sex. My gender.
And I'll riot and kill if you don't agree.
Capitalism? Socialism? AI? Those won't overcome the stupidity of large populations of humans.
I like to think of ancient China as the counter-example. China built a huge, self-sufficient empire. It had almost everything it needed and a stable trade network for the few things it didn't. It was well-protected by natural borders and had a large army for keeping the peace. It developed enough technology to lend it's people a relatively good standard of living. The end result was that China stagnated and lost the ~2,000 year head start they had over Europeans. China's goal was to provide stability, and it did that very well, at the cost of progress.
The problem is the extreme version that ends in Nuclear War.
We can survive quite a few races - race to the stars. Race to solar. Race to the Super Bowl.
We can only lose the Nuclear Arms race once.
And North Korea ai'nt lookin pretty.
- Global poverty will continue to decrease
- We'll get a variety of options to choose from whenever we want to buy something
- We'll get to choose how to spend our own money
- We'll get quick and diligent service
- If we don't like something, we can choose to stop buying it or working for them?
The horror!!!!!
(Of course, unregulated capitalism is an oxymoron; capitalism involves active government intervention to enforce a very specific model of property rights; it is a particular application of regulation, not it's absence.)
When I think of the word capitalist, I think: "using markets to allocate resources & products". When you use that word, you think of... well I'm not sure, but it's some kind of boogeyman that you think is self-evident.
The author of the post is himself a social-democrat or some sorts, and supports redistribution, but he still recognizes the basics of how well markets work.
We'll also get rampant misspending of scientific research funds, which will go to boner pills and hair replacement techniques, rather than curing malaria or exploring space.
We'll also have the end-game for all capitalist nations be leadership that is completely bought and paid for.
We'll also have workers treated as useless and interchangeable cogs, while public markets sway back and forth, removing jobs, pushing mergers, cutting pay.
We'll also get things like McDonald's and Coca-Cola, two of the largest companies in the world, both of which are literally, 100% dedicated to selling addictive foods that are diabolically unhealthy.
Capitalism ensures people get what they want most. The problem is, people are fucking horrible, and what they all want most is cheeseburgers, soda, angry Facebook rants, fake news, and bigger dicks.
Sure, society wants much more than this, but at the individual level, these are the second-to-second motivations, and capitalism's atavistic psychic mining project always ends up down on this dopamine level of reaction in all things.
Humans can be wonderful and do good things. The problem is capitalism is a race to exploit the worst in human nature, effectively heading off those better instincts with porn, fast cars, and lap band surgery.
1. Boner pills or hair replacement is worse or better than curing malaria or exploring space.
2. That the end game for every capitalist is leadership that can be paid for and bought.
3. That treating workers as useless and interchangeable cogs provide more profit than treating them fairly (assuming profit is the goal).
4. That abuse of McDonalds and Coca Cola being worse than abuse of literally anything else (Water in big enough quantities will kill you too).
5. That people are 'fucking horrible' and their second-to-second motivation is horrible.
You sound like every extreme socialist I envision. It sounds like you want a totalitarian government (made of humans) that dictate what exactly what people can do, eat and what not. It absolutely frightens me that you can condemm the entirety of the human race and also have the ability to vote.
I'll take the "people can spend money on what they want" dystopia before I take yours. Because the capitalism dystopia to presented can be fixed by people changing their minds and changing their spending habits. Your dystopia can't change without deaths.
In terms of people spending money on what they want, people spend lots of money on opioids and it ruins their lives, or kills them. Should doctors and pharmaceutical companies not be bound by any regulatory body? Should people just be allowed to OD on fentanil because they want to spend their money on it?
People who use drugs are not harming anyone with force or fraud. And if drugs were decriminalized, they'd be far cheaper, and drug addicts wouldn't have to turn to crime to pay for their drugs. The drug war is a massive failure and a huge civil rights violation.
I would also hope that, when drugs are decriminalized, the drug addict would choose a safer opiate, like simple morphine or heroin. Yes, they are very addictive, and they can cause overdoses, but if people could buy their drugs in a legal market they could actually get good dosage information and it wouldn't be cut with shit like fentanil.
- Global poverty will continue to decrease
- We'll get a variety of options to choose from whenever we want to buy something
May I also point out that beating poverty and making more consumerist products available, are not two goals with equal value? Same goes for the rest of the list in your comment.
As always it's hard to take anything from buzzfeed serious when they are so obviously biased in everything they post. What ever thing can 'runaway' is a threat to civilization, from pollution to propaganda in the news.
Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieves its goals because that’s the attitude they adopted.
Kind of reminds one of Ex Machina. If amoral profit maximizers design AI, it's very possibly gonna be an amoral profit maximizer.
It still irrationally bothers me after 30 years of shitty MS products and Gates literally preventing technological progress so he could make money, he's one of the good guys. It's like if you donate enough to the church you can earn penance. The new versions of Gates don't seem much different.
Same thing as Andrew Carnegie: After the violent putting down of steel worker strikes, Carnegie was seen as the devil himself. He was so upset that this would be his legacy, Carnegie went about doing charitable work to change his image. You probably have a library he built within 50 miles of you, no matter where you live in the US.
Gates is doing the same thing. He does not want his legacy to be that of a businessman, but rather, that of a philanthropist.
[0] http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-hist...
Gates was born too early for immortality to be achievable. Could it be that he has come face to face with his mortality, and having enough money to get anything he wants in the word that is for sale, he is effectively buying a positive legacy to be remembered by, as that is the closest thing to immortality that is currently on the market?
The argument from those concerned about AI is richer than that. Any AI, and indeed, any Intelligence in general can be viewed as maximizing its results along a certain gradiant, no matter how complicated that gradient may be. If an AI determines that improving itself would help it achieve its goals, and there isn't some sort of natural limit to intelligence that would stop it, the first one to develop will improve itself until it is exceedingly good at maximizing that metric, whatever it may be. Even if someone quite altruistic comes along and programs this first AI to "maximize the happiness of humans", and gets even a slight bit sloppy with their gradient, they may create an AI that optimizes the universe for human happiness by converting the entire universe into human pleasure centers being stimulated at the maximum possible rate, and nothing else that you might be concerned about, such as your forebrain or visual center or anything else that you may think makes you human, but the highly altruistic and very well-meaning AI programmer neglected to specify in their definition of human.
Here's another way of looking at the AI concerns: Let us stipulate a magical force in the universe that constrains AIs to be "fairly benevolent". Can you, right now, mathematically specify what a human is, and mathematically specify the best thing for humanity, in such a way that you are willing to 100% commit yourself and all humans to those definitions, rigidly, and for all time? And are you comfortable with the fact that it probably won't be you deciding?
For context, I'm not necessarily a big believer in this argument, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth at least thinking about, and characterizing correctly.
"Preventing technological progress" -- so because of M$ shenanigangs perhaps rich kids got their toys a year or two later? (Big perhaps.) Still think the world as a whole was better off with Bill Gates in it.
You have to be rich to give the same moral weight to providing tech toys and providing medicines.
TIL protocols and operating system technologies that could make life better for millions is just some rich kid's toy.
If you can display how "better operating systems" and "make life better for millions" fits together I may change my mind.
Basically anything that is not providing for basic human needs are "rich peoples toys" in my book (in the context of evaluating Gates' moral standards). Operating systems are just not in the same playing field as peace, food, health.
There are some hundred million people living in utter despair. If you mildly inconvenience others in order to help these, you are taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
The entire world runs on computers. Better and faster operating systems means a better computer.
>There are some hundred million people living in utter despair. If you mildly inconvenience others in order to help these, you are taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
Is... Is this supposed to be you not understand communism, or Robin Hood? There's a good chance you're better off than I am, should I send you my Paypal?
A faster operating system means a faster computer: True.
World would be better with faster computers, to the degree that you can compare the negatives Gates has done with the positive: Ridiculous. During paste decades speed as increased orders of magnitudes while Gates is to blame for...how much? Javascript has done far more to remove performance than MS ever did.
Such as websites run on ad clicks? Buzzfeed itself is the problem, and things like it. Not tech, not capitalism.
Many people who critisize microsoft are doing it from a chair that was designed on a Windows machine, and likely assembled in a factory with machines running windows embeded. It's a good product for what it's good at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Software, RealNetworks, Linux, and others.[15] Judgment was split in two parts. On April 3, 2000, he issued his conclusions of law, according to which Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Microsoft immediately appealed the decision.[16]
Second, you can accuse him of preventing technological progress, but he was responsible more than probably any other person for bringing personal computing to the masses. I think he said his goal was a personal computer on every desktop and he pretty much achieved his goal.
Finally, the Gates foundation's work on malaria and maternal mortality has and will do more good for more people than many thousands of the "disrupt the world for good" startups ever will.
How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats)
I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read "How To Become A Hacker", it influenced me a lot. I would say it was the most influential article I've ever read in my life.
I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person, who likes to find non-standard solutions to problems, who thinks out of box, who don't blindly follow authority, who likes decentralisation as opposed to centralisation. "A hacker" is a person who almost by definition right-libertarian.
Latter I found this article of Eric Raymond:
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/libgates.html
Years later, I found articles of Paul Graham. It was amazing to read him. And he also turned out to be on free-market side:
http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
I like his quote:
> This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians.
Now, what I've see is disappointing, I don't like this and it shouldn't be like this at least on Hacker News. We have more than enough people in the world who wants more government, more authority, more religion.
FWIW I am a right leaning libertarian type, but I think I understand why a lot of hackers/intellectuals lean left. Feel free to correct me.
I don't disagree with you in some of these points, but I do disagree (as someone who thinks that the author of this article makes some good points) about being a "die hard socialist". Wanting universal healthcare, funded education, infrastructure spending, and corporate oversight does not make me a socialist. Or if we've moved so far to the right that it does make me a socialist, so be it. I'm not moving.
This is an unfortunate misunderstanding of the term "capitalism". While many people who call themselves capitalists would like everyone else to think it means a free market, the capitalists themselves don't mean that. They mean simply that they acquire control of more capital, by hook or by crook. If they can most easily acquire control of more capital in a free market, they will support a free market. But historically, most capitalists have acquired more capital by buying monopoly privileges from the government, usually because they have failed in the free market and so turn to plan B: outlaw your competition.
What seems to be new about companies like Google and Facebook is that instead of buying monopoly privileges from the government, they are acquiring them, and hence control of more capital, by exploiting bugs in the human cognitive system to get people to take actions that satisfy short term needs but have potentially disastrous long term consequences. In one sense this is still a free market, since people voluntarily choose to use Google and Facebook. But in another sense it erodes a free market, by eroding trust. Unfortunately, I don't see the buzzfeed article engaging with this aspect at all.
Of course coercion doesn't have to be at gunpoint. That doesn't mean "coercion" is not a reasonably well-defined term. Similarly, giving someone false information to induce them to buy something you're selling isn't a free market, it's fraud.
That said, I agree that the definition of "voluntary" has to be made with care. I said basically the same thing in the second paragraph of the post you responded to.
I also like your point about acquiring a monopoly by exploiting bugs in the cognitive system. I think in that sense it's a monopoly on attention and time, which results in both an economic and information monopoly. The information monopoly is especially scary to me. At least Standard Oil didn't also control what news the country read.
It most certainly is not. The US health care system is basically a hodgepodge of somewhat free markets and draconian government regulation, which combines the worst features of both. It is nothing like what an actual free market in health care would produce.
To name just one important difference: in the US health care system, people purchasing health care services have no idea what they actually cost (because most of the cost is borne by their health insurance), and therefore have no idea whether those services are worth their cost. Yes, if you need a lifesaving operation you basically don't care what it costs; but most health care is not lifesaving operations but routine services like annual physical exams, immunizations, visits for simple ailments like a cold or flu, etc. Since people using these services don't see their actual cost, they don't know if they're getting proper value received for the cost. That means the most important mechanism of a free market, the ability of consumers to choose the best value for their money, can't work.
Not with the correct definition of that term. You can't have a free market if the customers don't know the cost of what they're getting.
> Every healthcare system that is better than ours has way less free market and way more government control.
Which systems are these that are "better"? Many have lower costs, but that's not the same as "better" since many outcomes and metrics (such as wait times for services) are also worse.
No. Capitalism is good. However, runaway winner-take-all capitalism will destroy our planet and lead us back to feudalism. The great success of the United States has been its' ability to restrain unfettered capitalism with social responsibility, while not hampering the progress of the former. That contract has begun to break down, and it is causing the horrors we now see.
You _cannot_ build a society on individualism. We have shared needs that only scale with our shared contribution. We also have _plenty_. We have the resources to ensure the health and well-being of every human being on the planet.
We need capitalism to innovate and respond with agility to market forces (when THERE'S ACTUALLY A FREE AND TRANSPARENT MARKET), but we need socialism to check their power, as a corporation is wont to become singular, which, as you've stated, a singular, centralized power is no good either.
And the only way to scale that shared contribution without leading to all the problems with centralization that you refer to is to do it based on interactions between individuals--i.e., individualism. So you _have_ to build a society on individualism: nothing else works.
> We have the resources to ensure the health and well-being of every human being on the planet.
Who is this "we"? There is no single "we" that has all the resources. Nor should there be; that would be centralized power.
Right now, the box we find ourselves in is a capitalist society where capitalist ideology is completely pervasive. The most powerful and dangerous authorities are corporations and excessively rich individuals. The best hopes for decentralization lie in genuinely decentralized solutions that give power back to workers, like worker cooperatives, democratic labor unions, and political protest.
What we reject is the idea that capitalism has any of the right answers here. To the left, capitalism is the primary agent of centralization of wealth and power and authority. I don't expect you to agree, but I hope you better understand where we are coming from.
> The best hopes for decentralization lie in genuinely decentralized solutions that give power back to workers, like worker cooperatives, democratic labor unions, and political protest.
All of these "solutions" have been tried. They all failed at your stated goal; instead they ended up leading to enough centralized power to kill tens of millions of people.
The only way to decentralize is to empower individual people. As soon as you form a group, any group, based on any interaction except mutual affection or trade, you are centralizing, whether you realize it or not. That's the hard lesson the 20th century taught us; unfortunately many people have not learned it.
Big companies come and go. They may have power, but it's temporary, and there's nothing violent when they start losing their footing.
I'd rather have Amazon delivery my groceries than live in Venezuela.
As the parent comment says,
> The best hopes for decentralization lie in genuinely decentralized solutions that give power back to workers, like worker cooperatives, democratic labor unions, and political protest.
These are bottom-up solutions that can work just as easily in a democratic state.
This is an either-or logical fallacy, acting like the only two options are either pure capitalism or pure socialism.
Many countries in the world manage to have some basics like socialized healthcare and education, yet they manage to not be hell-holes. Germany managed to enforce anti-trust legislation in their country to such an extent that Walmart left the country, yet "tens of millions of people" haven't been killed in the process.
Any ideology taken to a violent extreme is bad. That includes both communism and capitalism. Market failures are real, and the increase in socialist tendencies in the US is because most people recognize that those market failures need to be corrected.
There's not just the one polar spectrum of political ideology that's demonstrated by modern politicians and its far extremes.
You can hold both Libertarian and Socialist value axioms at the same time, they aren't mutually exclusive.
I agree, HN discussions should be more than just saying "I don't like this and it shouldn't be like that", don't you think?
> I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person, who likes to find non-standard solutions to problems, who thinks out of box, who don't blindly follow authority, who likes decentralisation as opposed to centralisation. "A hacker" is a person who almost by definition right-libertarian.
That's a huge jump you made there, from someone "who doesn't blindly follow authority" to a "right-libertarian". Your whole "argument" hinges on your perception and interpretation of what "hacker" means.
They've grown up. They've come to understand that the biggest problems humanity faces all come down to them not being able to coordinate shit. They've learned that governments, bad as they are, are the natural and one of the few working mechanisms to coordinate at scale. And in particular, they've realized the folly of libertarians who ignore the fact that free markets have stupidly obvious and dangerous failure modes that come from insufficient or invalid coordination.
They've also been observant. They've noticed how private industry took over and utterly corrupted computing. They've noticed that it's private companies who create apparatus of the totalitarian dystopia they feared. They've seen how the market abused people, and they themselves have been disappointed by the market, which left them behind and continued to create shitty computing toys for the masses instead of useful tools to build the future with.
They comprehended topology, discovering that decentralization can be more robust, but is usually also less efficient - and sometimes a situation calls for more efficiency.
But hey, there's plenty of decentralization-loving, government-hating anarchist "hackers" out there. They're busy trying to cook us all on this planet by worsening climate change with cryptocurrencies.
Fun fact, there is an RFC stating that the Internet is a cooperative anarchy: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1726.txt
For an introduction into IETF-style anarchy see: https://www.wired.com/1995/10/ietf/
On W3C: https://cyber.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/reg...
Murray Rothbard even said in his books that the word "libertarian" was used by "libertarian socialist" first. It is only recently that capitalist and extremely individualist views became popular among hackers. Hackers were always anarchist, but only recently anarchy started to mean extreme liberalism, essential point of which is absolute private property, including copyright.
For more on anarchist view on "libertarian" views, read Anarchist FAQ. Ironically, you can install it with "apt-get install anarchism" on any Debian-based distro.
It must be all those years of reducing marginal costs of production to tiny fractions of their previous values and then seeing absolutely no benefit from it going to our friends and family.
Not that I'm a socialist. I used to be right-libertarian. Now I'm more of an anarchist, but pragmatic about it. I simply don't believe that the problems caused by concentrated power can be adequately solved by believing in concentrated power. I also don't believe that anything I say or do can have any noticeable impact on global politics. That frees me to do the best I can do in my local arena, without the rest of the world somehow being my problem to solve.
As I see it, the onus is on the wealthy to distribute the fruits of the economy that they have taken, far in excess of what they can use themselves. If they don't, the rest of us will eventually murder them. Maybe not you or me, but someone. We can suggest fixes like UBI, debate their merits, and provide detailed, foolproof plans that might avert that bloody and grisly demise, but the cycle repeats until someone that has the power elects to diffuse it permanently. Otherwise, the challenger just claims the one ring and becomes the new tyrant. From my perspective, either some key elements of socialism happen, or I may have to join a torches-and-pitchforks mob, storm the castle, and maybe kill someone. Maybe the survivors get what they want immediately, or maybe they have to wait for the pigs to start walking around on two legs, and then try again.
I don't really want to kill rich people, but I'm sure there are a few of them out there that could be vastly improved by a good murderin', and I could probably live with the guilt of it, so long as they're enough of an asshat. I can rationalize a whole lot against someone who thinks people earning $7.50/hr shouldn't have access to affordable health care. Or even houses or food.
Strange characterization of an author pointing out a form of authoritarianism.
Well? So what? And you very obviously speak from a libertarian point of view- but that doesn't mean that your comment must automatically be dismissed as worthless by those who have different political affiliations.
What's important is what someone is saying, not who is saying it, or how similar it is to something someone else has said. I'm pretty sure we should not have to point this out, anymore.
Buzzfeed "news" is the last place I look for an objective article.
[0] - http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/the-wrap/article/BuzzFee...