Ideally no one person or entity controls such a thing. But, would I rather have a Government, or a corporation control AGI? If I had to pick one of two evils, the Government would be the lesser of the two.
People elected to government often seem to seek power for powers sake and I have less faith that they'll not harm us.
Doing more to stem the growth in CO2 emissions would have reduced the magnitude of the change in the climate, and with it, the harmful effects of that change, but it would also have reduced the benefits that oil and gas have conferred upon the world, in raising incomes and reducing poverty worldwide.
In Germany, their actions actually caused increase in the use of coal and increased CO2 output.
So it’s possible for a rational environmentalist to acknowledge the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear and decide subsidizing nuclear is a poor investment vs other options. Since 2010 Germany reduced coal production by 82 TWh while also reducing Nuclear by 104 TWh. Oil -7 TWh and gas + 6TWh effectively canceled out for a net of -83 TWh from fossil fuels.
I know because I served as an officer in one of those wars on behalf of the United States (among other things that were also not beneficial to citizens). That had absolutely nothing to do with protecting US citizens directly.
It was chiefly about maintaining petro-dollar power and reinforcing the financial-corporate-govt collusion that maintains the current capitalist structures.
The structure of an organized body politic is not the problem.
The problem is that the body politic has been beaten into submission by those same corporate-government oligarchs to such an extent that most people just “go with the flow” because fighting it is exhausting and seemingly impossible.
Link here too for everyone:
The US does not care about "the petrodollar". Nor do we care about foreign oil. Nor do we have remotely the same economy we did in 1935.
In fact, war is not even profitable for our military industrial complex. They profit from the threat of war because that funds development of untested superweapons. Actual wars mean all that stuff actually has to work though, and there's a chance you'll get nationalized.
But if it was good for some MIC rich people, it still wouldn't matter, because they're outnumbered by all the other rich people it's bad for.
It probably wouldn’t be hard for whoever had the most direct control of it to have it start pushing buttons population wide.
Napoleon's government alone murdered more people than all corporations combined have throughout all of history. And that's a revered historical figure that routinely gets fawning movies made about him, there are obviously worse examples. Mao's government murdered several times more than Napoleon did.
Don't get me wrong, corps have brought good as well, but saying one is necessarily better than the other is just betraying political leanings more than providing sound arguments.
OpenAI’s stated mission is AGI that can replace half the population in “economically valuable” work.
I get that with some creativity you can see that as a net benefit for humanity, but across at least a generation that’s going to be a rough & destabilizing transition.
There is one person out there who decides if you have a job and it's not anyone working on AI. It's the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
There's no perfect solution. I think so far we've done best with whatever's the most democratic (which is sometimes trade unions and sometimes capitalism), but even then, democracy itself is what sounds convincing rather than what is true — and the difference between them matters most when you've got an AI trained to respond with what people upvote the most, which is all of them from ChatGPT's RLHF to the Facebook/Twitter/etc. timelines to Google/Amazon/YouTube etc. search results…
[0] TW basically everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857#Death...
Corporations also enable government actions by developing the tech and tools/weapons needed.
The company was only nationalised in 1858 and until then effectively colonised india until then
Government granted monopoly.
Just off the top of my head; holodomir, the Great Leap Forward, the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge are at least 10x the East India companies death toll. We should probably add in war casualties too - at a minimum WW1 and WW2. I think I could list off probably 10 more with about 5 more minutes of work.
People can be terrible. More direct power usually means more terrible.
Gov’ts usually have the most direct power.
East India company was an odd case because they were granted defacto delegated gov’t power over a region that was full of ‘others’.
Considering the factors involved, it’s amazing they weren’t worse. Like the French Congo [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Congo].
This is literally why economics is called "the dismal science". Slaveowners called economists that when the economists told them to stop doing slavery.
But the modern status quo is so massively skewed toward government that the benefits from mitigating the worst cases of competition are vastly eclipsed by the detriments of monopolistic centralization.
So we shouldn't cheer on private corporations that developers technology that could allow them to replace the government, that is really really scary if they actually succeeds in doing it.
The fact that governments used contrived symbolic rituals to get arbitrary subsets of arbitrary aggregations of people to express nominal approval of their behavior does nothing whatsoever to alter either the empirical nature or the ethical implicatoins of its monopoly.
> Corporations aren't democratic
Good -- this means that it's harder for them to appeal to vague symbolism to convince people that their actions are inherently legitimate, which in turn means that they are under greater scrutiny to justify their actions, each on its own merits.
> if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.
Large vested interests are already extremely adept at co-opting nominally "democratic" government and using the very monopoly you're trying to justify as a way of obtaining top-down power that they'd never be able to acquire on their own -- they have zero interest in overthrowing anything.
Regulatory capture is the principal mechanism of corruption in the modern world, and it's astonishing to me that people keep arguing for expanding the reach of the regulatory state in order to reduce the dominance of large corporations, when the actual effect is always to amplify it.
This isn’t a feature of humans, but basic system dynamics / economics / etc.
A group gets more power and leverage that power to gain more power. Inevitable. Coordinated action is the only way to prevent it. And coordinated action is government.
Stopping this accumulation of power takes very little, its undoing the accumulation of power that is costly.
I don't consider myself an anarchist, partly be cause the term has been repurposed so many times now that it doesn't have a clear meaning.
The belief in magical harmony is unrealistic regardless of the model that's supposed to create it, whether its anarchism or federalism.
Uh oh, what if he spent $50 buying muscle?
USA didn't exist pre-colonial times, it started as a colony. Do you mean the British Empire? That one did way worse, yeah, but USA isn't the British Empire.
Both governments and corporations kill people (look up annual tobacco deaths, for just one fun example).
Interestingly schizophrenic people almost universally smoke, and it's thought this is because it's a better treatment than the actual drugs we give them, though that's not proven.
No, that's quite backwards. Individual behavior is effectively the only thing that objectively exists, as "society" is just an emergent pattern of aggregated individual behavior. Individuals' choices are limited by their own particular capacities, and "society" factors into that only in the sense that the choices of other individuals in the same bounded context, in aggregate, can function as environmental constraints. So a more accurate statement is "every individual has full freedom of choice, but external constraints including the behavior of others may limit one's ability to fully execute the choices one has made".
Given that the act of smoking entails deliberately choosing to purchase a product, light it on fire, and actively inhale the fumes -- all behaviors which are necessarily the result of purposeful intention -- and given that within any social context one will find some people who smoke but a great many who do not, along with many who have chosen to quit (despite the external influences and incentives being largely constant), it seems impossible to attribute smoking to anything other than conscious individual choice.
I once asked family member why they smoke, and the response was "because I love it". I had, and could have, no retort to that -- if another person consciously chooses to make the risk/reward tradeoff in favor of short-term pleasure rather than longer-term health, then there's no further argument to be had, and the only demand that any other party could make is that they not be exposed to negative externalities resulting from that choice.
All that while fossil fuel companies receive 7000B$ of annual subsidies, and spend billions yearly to fuel disinformation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/09/apple-a...
Why don't you ask the people who were slaving in United Fruit plantations how much corporations improved their lives? Or East India Company colony subjects?
Corporations benefit those who benefit from them, often at the expense of everyone else/extraction of the commons.
Even in that scenario, I'm not really sure what the distinction would end up being. At least in the US, our government and corporations are so tightly coupled at this point that we're really toeing the waters of Fascism.
If a corporation develops an AGI our government can have access to it whenever they deem necessary. And if a government wants to develop one they will almost certainly partner with corporations to do it. I'm sure the military and intelligence agencies have their own projects running, but they'd accelerate by partnering with and funding corporate projects and research.
However, we have seen with other AI models that as soon as something useful is proved possible, we can expect rapid reductions in the amount of compute necessary to achieve the same.
It might take steps to try to prevent anyone building such a thing.
An AGI without consciousness may well act like it has consciousness for the same reason VHS tapes playing on a TV do a good job of reproducing human facial expressions. An AI like this would still act scared of such things, because some of us act scared of such things.
[0] it's not obvious to me that an AGI necessarily has to have consciousness
We simply don't know, just like we don't know what other species experience and can only guess at by observing their behavior and trying to map it back to what we know.
Once a digital intelligence is discovered, does it have rights? Can it be enslaved, controlled, or destroyed? If an AGI can't be granted similar rights as a human, why are corporations legally treated similarly to humans?
It's not only this one, but all of your opinions are dependent on cases from the past that you've been trained on.
If a company has it, US intelligence will have it, for sure.
If US govt has it, it might take a decade, or so, to leak out.
Maybe AGI takes over after it emerges as a solution to our inability to select competent candidates for political office.
I think it could be better until it won't. Like with dictators sometimes they "do good" but the issue is that at some point they will start doing more harm than good and they may not want to go away.
A succesful revolution against an AGI ruler may become impossible.
And I don't think we need sentience for AGI, so "want" may be the wrong term anyway. You could argue that the reward function is close enough ("do submarines swim?" etc.), but a human-made reward function is almost certainly going to be designed to be as close to aligned with our interests as we can manage.
In more recent history, Exxon has a checkered past when it comes to using force against sovereign citizens, often employing paramilitary organizations to guard oil fields [1] to more recently abusing international court systems to disbar and jail the lawyer which successfully secured judgements against them [2]
And at this very moment, right now, is the ongoing genocide in the Congo due to rare earth mineral mining [3]
Everything I link here is quite frankly the tip of the iceberg, not the end-all-be-all, but meant to provide a jumping off point should you want to research how often private capital and genocide go hand in hand.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_ExxonMobil_hu...
[2] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/28/chevron-lawy...
[3] https://republic.com.ng/october-november-2023/congo-cobalt-g...
Pretty much all leading heads of IG Farben were in one way or another dinked (but not procecuted bc of political reasons) for their part in the Holocaust.
Then we have the Kiobel vs Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. case, where a number of petroleum companies ("allegedly") instigated the Nigarian government to crush protests.
It all depends on your definition of "trying to commit [atrocity]", to me personally, instigating and happily lending a hand are both morally deplorable. So in the context of this thread, I'd much rather have the instigater have that power than a helper. At least I have some say in what the government does... I hope?
Google, maybe, until they dropped the "don't be evil" catchphrase?
Many, maybe even most, governments could commit genocide and don't.
How many corporations that could commit genocide wouldn't? I don't know the answer to this, but I am less confident about the answer than I would prefer.
I don't think most corporations are inherently more evil than most governments, but I would choose a democratic government or consortium to shepherd AGI over any corporation, but also of course over any non-democratic government as well.
It may be hard to directly peg weapons manufacturers with genocide though Nazi-era chemical research absolutely played a role in the Holocaust.
For a more recent example, there are companies that play the role of mercenary armies. They have committed various atrocities, war crimes, and at least played a role in genocide.
Here's a list of corporations who profited from the holocaust in various ways.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_i...
They are not part of the international coûts mandaté at the moment so they are used to shield people behind them.
Here's a paper exploring this possibility