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Kind of reminds me about how they say the highest level of automation of self-driving cars will be no steering wheel. Who decided that that was higher on the scale and a good thing? The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god.

These scales by which progress toward the future is measured are a key ingredient of social engineering. One task that Free Software Foundation type organizations could take upon themselves is to define a road map for future progress of technology that recognizes freedom and human dignity.

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The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god.

Umm, no, the "progress" is machines that I don't have to micro-manage anymore. Imagine an oven in your house that you had to constantly adjust to keep it at the desired temperature. No, that would be stupid, we've solved that problem decades ago. Now imagine a car that you had to control by hand with the necessary micro adjustments needed to keep it between the lines. No, that would be...well, it will be stupid, and a solved problem, one of these days.

"Hey, oven, make your interior 425F so I can bake a pizza."

"Hey, car, drive me to Dusty Strings in Fremont. Oh, why am I talking to you? You see it on my calendar, and you've been warmed up and ready waiting for me."

I don't know what dystopian future you're imagining, but I don't see the AI gods whisking me off to places I don't want to go. I see machines that finally, FINALLY, do what I want without me having to speak baby talk to them.

How'd you decide where you did or did not want to go?

"Hey, oven, make your interior 425F so I can bake a pizza”

Oven: “Sorry mike. I can only go to 400F unless you upgrade your ovenware plan to $2.99 a month. Or use an ovenware family brand pizza! For every 3 ovenware brand pizzas you cook, you get a chance to win a free pie! Oh by the way on your trip to Dusty Springs tomorrow stop by Chad’s Bakery for their famous pies.”

So logically after that a lobotomy of oven follows, with destruction of electronics and putting basic functions under direct control?

  "Hey, oven, make your interior 425F so I can bake a pizza."

What could possibly go wrong?

Assuming that you didn't leave a dish in there the night before.

And that your child didn't hide a favorite toy in there... or a sibling.

> Kind of reminds me about how they say the highest level of automation of self-driving cars will be no steering wheel. Who decided that that was higher on the scale and a good thing?

Everyone who's ever sat in traffic. It's a miserable experience and it is indeed a fundamentally better thing to be able to use that time in a more productive or entertaining fashion. Few people care if the steering wheel is entirely absent, so long as it's not needed and it's not in the way.

> The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god.

Who is defining progress that way? Everyone I know who wants a self-driving car wants it to go where they tell it to.

> Everyone who's ever sat in traffic. It's a miserable experience and it is indeed a fundamentally better thing to be able to use that time in a more productive or entertaining fashion. Few people care if the steering wheel is entirely absent, so long as it's not needed and it's not in the way.

I'm sure many car enthusiasts care whether the steering wheel is entirely absent. Some people enjoy driving, albeit usually in times/places without much traffic. If someone who found driving therapeutic instead spends their commute time staring at a social media feed on their phone because that's their default action when they aren't sure what to do, would that be fundamentally better for them?

> Who is defining progress that way? Everyone I know who wants a self-driving car wants it to go where they tell it to.

Of course everyone wants self-driving cars to go where they tell it, but that is different from having control over where the car goes. What if the AI that controls the self-driving car takes 99% of people to their destination, but rounds up a few political dissidents and whisks them away to an unknown location. Most everyone would get what they want, but none of the passengers are able to control where the AI takes them. Like Stallman says, "Either the users control the program or the program controls the users."

> I'm sure many car enthusiasts care whether the steering wheel is entirely absent....

Perhaps I was ambiguous. You're reading my intent backwards. Few people specifically want the steering wheel to be gone. They generally just want to not care about it.

> If someone who found driving therapeutic instead spends their commute time staring at a social media feed on their phone because that's their default action when they aren't sure what to do, would that be fundamentally better for them?

The car enthusiasts I know still don't like sitting in traffic. It's not the fun sort of driving.

> Of course everyone wants self-driving cars to go where they tell it, but that is different from having control over where the car goes. What if the AI that controls the self-driving car takes 99% of people to their destination, but rounds up a few political dissidents and whisks them away to an unknown location. Most everyone would get what they want, but none of the passengers are able to control where the AI takes them. Like Stallman says, "Either the users control the program or the program controls the users."

I don't know what to say in response to this. This feels over the top absurd to me. If your government is this fundamentally evil and amoral, I don't think driving your own car is going to protect you. There are already lots of ways to get rid of political dissidents.

You got trapped in the car driving mode of thinking. Commuting and traffic is a necessary burden to most people. Most see automation as a way to reduce that burden by letting them spend the cognitive resources necessary for driving on something else.

The core problem is not the car, or who is driving it, but the fact that people need to spend a not insignificant amount of time traveling to and from the location or their employment.

> Who is defining progress that way?

It seems to be defined as convenience by any means necessary.

I think it's far less about control and more about bulletproofing the technology.

If the self-driver becomes better than the best human drivers, there's limited gains in real safety if a 15-year-old with his learner's permit/drunkard/suicidal/homicidal/distracted person can still grab the wheel and steer it into a wall manually.

We may find that there are some opportunities that only become feasible if we remove the human factor. I could see a road network with much higher speeds for advanced self-driving vehicles, especially if you rely on the vehicles being able to communicate directly with each other and signaling mechanisms to keep traffic more orderly than a typical freeway.

There may also be some interesting business angles in it-- I fully expect that the feature after "we removed the steering wheel" is "we put a lie-flat bed, workstation or minibar where it lived."

The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god.

I know you're using hyperbole here, and many people will disagree with what I'm going to write next, but that's exactly what I think the long term goal of technology should be. Not just individuals but all of our systems as well.

It sounds like you'd rather live under the influence of an imperfect God than to believe in a perfect God?

I'm struggling with this myself so I'm just echoing.

Not sure I follow, but it sounds right.

I guess if we're throwing around the term God it kind of loses it's juice.

God in this sense would be "thing that can do things nobody understands." In that sense, yes. Artificial General Intelligence (or maybe even Narrow AI) which can do things that humans can't understand for our benefit would look like "God" to most people.

Nobody can point to a reasonable causal chain of action for previously described "Gods." In the situation I'm advocating for, we would be able to do that - though likely still to a lesser degree than full interpretability.

As a side note: myself and the public fully retain the rights to Google's self-driving cars, as my work has created it through answering captchas. We observe our rights through force, if necessary. This is where we're heading.

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