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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

But, what good is technology for the sake of technology if it’s detrimental to people’s well-being? Technology to conquer ills, yes. Technology which alienates people, no.

It’s kind of like the goths vs the romans or the inuit vs europeans. Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth?

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I'm more concerned about these two aspects of it from the reporting:

> Experts said the rules were vague and contained loopholes.

> The use of AI in the military is exempt, as are systems used by authorities in order to safeguard public security.

Sounds like it's keyed to build stagnation in public tools, but state-actor tools can go right on ahead becoming more sophisticated (and harder to understand or predict).

There are almost always these exemptions for military/law enforcement use cases in EU Directives and Regulations, because while the constituent countries in the EU have miltary and law enforcement co-operation, they would veto new legislation that impacts their independence in those areas.

That’s a different question. Even if you think certain technologies are overall negative, you may be forced to adopt them in order to remain competitive with other nation states. Nuclear weapons are probably the classic example here. AI seems similar to me.

Nuclear weapons are a huge net positive for humanity. Have we had another big industrial war since WWII? No. Why not? Because the combatants understand that nowadays total war means total annihilation. Now we resolve our disputes in other ways. Nuclear weapons gave us an age of peace.

There’s a survivorship bias here. If nuclear weapons did totally annihilate society we could not have this conversation.

Their point is that anyone who can develop a nuclear weapon also is aware of this. It might be a survivorship bias, but it is also self-fulfilling.

The biggest threat, as I can see it, is a truly irrational actor. Luckily they're hard enough to build that this prerequisite has so far filtered out anyone truly irrational.

> Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth?

Why is self worth put in antithesis with progress? Was past progress a cause of loss of self worth?

Progress brings good: vaccines, decreased infant mortality, etc. But we also get to live in cities, disconnected from some realities, like food and self sufficiency. In civilization you are counting on other people doing things for you. Farming, housing, transportation, care, education, etc. Yes it’s fancy and advanced and most of us will choose modern life, but not everyone has gone that route (goths in roman times, inuit in present times). Some people see value in being connected to nature, not necessarily in some artificial romantic way, but more visceral ways and forgoing modern progressive life.

How do you know that these technologies are detrimental to people's well-being?

Some activists claim that things like facial recognition, ad targeting, and personalized risk scoring are detrimental, but are these activists correct? I don't think so! All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world.

Every single time humanity has gained new abilities --- from the Acheulean stone ax to the modern deep neural network --- humans in general have benefited and prospered, because any increase in our ability to understand and manipulate the world is a boon.

There is no such thing as a net-negative technology.

> All these technologies give us new capabilities and allow us to more precisely understand and shape the world.

Allow who to shape the world, exactly? Because it's not me, and it's probably not you. Technology gives power to those who control it, and control over face-recognition tech, personalized risk-scoring and ad tech is in the best cases behind several layers of bureaucratic abstraction. Our world is being shaped by megacorporations and governments, not those whose lives these technologies have the potential of having the most negative impact on.

Our lives are being shaped by powerful organizations so we should shun progress because it helps them too! Let's all burn our phones and dismantle the internet, it's the root of all evil, I tell you.

After we destroy AI we should make sure nobody does any data analysis by hand or other means. Just to be sure. Because there are people who would justify the exact same decisions even without AI. They just use data to do what they want. So let's destroy data too, and math so nobody can do anything biased or wrong.

> There is no such thing as a net-negative technology

Explain to me the benefits of a gatling gun, other than being a more effective tool for killing humans. Is all of humanity really better off for all those that have been killed by this invention?

That's a lot of deaths that start out as a massive negative balance against. Tell me the overall improvement to society that the gatling gun brought us that was "worth" those deaths.

Armies are smaller because drafting ten million half-trained teenagers to carry rifles is no longer the best way to win a war.

Lethality of weaponry has a significant impact on how battles are fought, where increasing lethality generally means fewer participants and, counterintuitively, fewer deaths: https://acoup.blog/2021/02/26/fireside-friday-february-26-20... is a decent discussion.

There's obviously some lag (the bloodiness of WWI) but overall yes, in a weird way, the Gatling gun and other weapons like it are part of why you're a lot less likely to die as a draftee today than in the Napoleonic era.

WWII was even bloodier then WWI.

The obvious difference between current draftee and Napoleon one is that Napoleon set up to conquer other coutries. The peace time draftee is going to have lower mortality.

Napoleon was literally the aggressor.

WWII's civilian/military casualty ratio was way higher than WWI's (~2:1 vs. very very roughly 1:1 or lower), which would affect how the lethality hypothesis affects casualties. When more of the dead are civilians and civilians predominantly die from famine and disease, higher overall death counts in a more-global conflict don't necessarily mean that conflict killed more soldiers per-capita, though some nations definitely suffered higher per-capita military losses due to factors beyond increasing weapon lethality - mostly thinking of Russia there. For instance, furiously crunches Wikipedia numbers in the UK it looks like WWI had a higher proportion of military deaths to population (~2% vs. ~.8%) even though it also suffered significantly more civilian deaths in II, though not enough to outweigh the decrease in military losses as a function of total population.

There might be an argument that increasing weapon lethality can decrease the number of battlefield combatant deaths but also could increase the likelihood of mass civilian atrocity. That said, high-lethality weapons definitely aren't necessary for mass civilian atrocities either.

And sure, I intended a wartime/wartime comparison regarding draftees: even if we go back to WWII as the last real great-power hot war, a French Napoleonic draftee (looking at France as Britain apparently didn't actually conscript in the Napoleonic wars) is significantly more likely to die in battle than a French WWII (or even WWI!) draftee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties#cit...

The mere threat of its awesome killing power made an adversary think twice. In one of the most bizarre episodes Ms. Keller recounts, on July 17, 1863, during the draft riots, the New York Times (which supported conscription) mounted three Gatling guns on the roof of its headquarters, with the editor in chief at the trigger, and successfully cowed an angry mob without firing a single shot.

> There is no such thing as a net-negative technology.

OK, but no one is actually arguing that. The problem starts when the technology gets abused. We need safeguards against abuse of AI in much the same way as we need it for nuclear weapons and energy and, more recently, social media (eg GDPR protections).

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