Ethics, politics, and society in the age of artificial intelligence (2020)
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
"One reason for my own skepticism is the fact that in recent years the AI landscape has come to be progressively more dominated by AI of the newfangled 'deep learning' variety [...] But if it’s really AI-as-cognitive science that you are interested in, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that it may take a bit more than our cool new deep learning hammer to build a humanlike mind.
[...]
If I am right that there are many mysteries about the human mind that currently dominant approaches to AI are ill-equipped to help us solve, then to the extent that such approaches continue to dominate AI into the future, we are very unlikely to be inundated anytime soon with a race of thinking robots—at least not if we mean by “thinking” that peculiar thing that we humans do, done in precisely the way that we humans do it."
What? Everyone in the world is brain damaged enough to all keep repeating this useless idea.
Work is just the shit you do for other people to stay alive. If a robot is doing that thing, I'll do something else. If robots do everything a person can do for zero marginal cost, then the we are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad?
A disheartening realization my sister-in-law pointed out is that we don't perform work, we perform jobs. Even the unemployed and retired have many jobs. Sibling, friend, parent, child, partner, spouse. Our most vital and rewarding jobs don't have a uniform or an RFID badge, but the robots may nevertheless take them too.
You and I might be hesitant to replace friends and family with artificial people but they might not feel the same way. Why risk rejection when compatibility can be programmed?
But on the other hand, elites themselves also have hierarchies. There used to be kings, lower nobility, higher nobility, etc. Those would fight all the time about how much power each of them had. If the top 10% of the human population had a secret meeting to kill the bottom 90%, and used their combined powers to do that, then what used to be the bottom 9% suddenly becomes the bottom 90%. Probably those people get really scared that the same will happen to them at the next meeting of the top 10%ers council.
But this requires initial capital to get going, and that capital (and land) is what gets traded. At some point, when capital is no longer required, then it would become worthless, but by then i think humanity would've reached star trek level of post-scarcity (or killed themselves with a war).
[ ] Trump Putin Musk
[ ] Biden Zelensky AltmanWe already live in post-scarcity thing(don't know if it is utopy or dystopy, but for some people it's former while for some later, for some reason I think dystopy have higher population), but the surplus of production is destroyed/put into landfills(with police security so no one can steal it from trashcan).
there's zero way we are anywhere near a post-scarcity society today.
We still have to drill for oil and gas, mine for iron, and hope the weather is still good enough to grow crops.
People need work to feel that their lives have meaning.
Post-scarcity utopia is exactly that. A fantasy. If people have nothing to do then civilization will collapse.
I don't think that follows at all. People need to accomplish things, yes. Those things don't have to be work in the sense we mean it today.
i think the word "work" is overloaded with two meaning - one being the regular meaning of doing work (for a wage/price). The other one being to exert oneself.
People _do_ find meaning in exerting oneself, but only for a purpose which is not merely sustenance. For example, intrinsically valuable work like artistic pursuits is work, but would still be done in the event of post-scarcity.
The way we designed out current society makes unemployed people some kind of pest, it's not glorified, quite the opposite.
But that's not a god given rule, nothing obliges us to follow that path, especially if (big if) AIs/robots take over most things.
If anything you're flat out wrong, automation moved people from stable and fulfilling jobs (small companies, family companies, life long carriers, &c.) into more and more precarious situations (minijob, student jobs, faceless corporations, hashed carriers, &c.)
Productivity shot through the roof while wages stagnated
PS: I've been unemployed for large chunks of my life and had perfect meaning, I was productive, learned stuff, created stuff, enjoyed nature, got in shape, &c.
You’ll do some other work.
Because you won't have the money to buy anything, perhaps?
Just because things can be produced at zero marginal costs in no way means those things will be free. The people who own the AIs doing the stuff will want to gain wealth for doing so.
There's currently some incentive for governments in poorer countries to put up with IP-friendly laws favored by richer countries. It might be the only way to get their exports into the European market, or get development loans, for example. But if robots can do literally everything then there is no reason that these carrots matter any more. Instead of taking development loans and trying to become the next low-cost-manufacturing location after China, just copy the robots and ignore everyone who says it's theft. If you're a Sri Lankan, Bolivian, or South African politician looking to improve your country and become wildly popular at the same time, "copy the robots" is the fastest way to develop. It's also the fastest way to modernize and expand a poor country's military, if they're afraid of gunboat diplomacy from the richer countries.
Given the societal impact that the "curse of resources" has, future societies might look more like some african country or the russian oligarchy where a small percentage lives in utter luxury while the masses live in extreme poverty.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKPsuBIKuejNJW_M6ArHp...
because you have exactly two use cases under that "utopia": backbreaking labor that robots aren't good at yet, and source of Soylent green.
I feel like it's some kind of Stockholm syndrome, they don't want to realize the shear absolute lack of logic and meaning in their day to day life so they rationalize that fulfilling random task for most of their day/life somehow _is_ the meaning of life.
To me it's signals a complete lack of imagination of what life could be. Opening any book from the 50s/60s/70s about the "future of work" that automation was going to bring would blow their mind. They're too caught up in the rate race to even notice that there is something else
Actually that’s dead wrong, it is the system that is at fault here, rarely or never the human. Otherwise I thought this was a really good read.
In that scenario, a time-sensitive decision will automatically lead to failure in cases where the autopilot is wrong. That’s a trade off I wouldn’t take but they chose it because in the same time-sensitive scenarios pilots are most prone to misunderstanding the situation and making a bad decision on that basis. However, in safety we do not ever blame the pilot for their misunderstanding and bad decision. Instead we look at the systematic forces that left them confused and attempt to improve the system.
If this is all conceptually new, I can highly recommend Dekker, The Field guide to Human Error which is about exactly this though the field has progressed since it was published in 2002.