Divide-and-conquer dynamics in AI-driven disempowerment
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
"Current AI models are already automating away the livelihoods of some artists, actors, and writers."
OpenAI's charter says:
"OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity."
So they are going to develop software that can outperform humans, for less money... Of course people are going to lose their jobs. That's your disempowerment. They're making good on that part. Now we're waiting for the second act where they're going to show us how it magically benefits all of humanity, including the newly unemployed horde.
Without these things the rest of the world, even large corporations, will not be able to compete.
Job loss is temporary, the gains from cheaper/better/faster production are permanent.
We do have a historical examples for horses, though, which was reached somewhere between around 1900 and 1920.
If we need jobs, we will create them, do not worry about that, see David Graebers work on the topic.
Now, though, we aim society towards 5% of people who want to work not having some opportunity to do so, while doing some paperwork magic to exlude an order of magnitude of other non-workers from that measure. Meanwhile, we recognize widespread depression and anxiety that makes sense in a society where most people have no clear, constructive community obligations to give them direction and we struggle to reconcile liberal ideas of universal life, liberty, and happiness with the intuitive collectivist expectation that everybody should be chipping in (even when they have no opportunity to do so).
One can argue it's all been worth it, or that it's surely the road to some future utopia, but "completely wrong" is maybe not the right word choice for the opposing view.
A scenario where people in creative jobs are essentially dispossessed with tax-avoiding megacorporations being the only profiteers is not the only possible option.
We as society could also decide that e.g. there have to be free occupational retraining options for those affected (as happened in other instances of technological revolutions), and AI models, or their underlying data, have to be open source of some new kind and so on.
Consumers decide whether something is too "special" to automate. If you want hand-drawn art, you're welcome to pay extra for it - just like you can get handmade pottery or clothing today.
People make the argument every day that I will die one day. They've been completely wrong so far, this proving that the argument is wrong.
There is a speed at which people can train for new jobs X, and a speed at which new jobs displace old jobs Y. If Y is twice X then your talent pool is half what it could be.
If Y shrinks to only days and X plateaus then the human body becomes just robotic hands that the computer tells what to do. Unthinking meat, incapable of making a decision, never aware of the implications of the decisions that are made on its behalf.
The ratio of the population chanting "Butlerian Jihad now" is currently small. How can I capitalize on a belief that this number grows fast?
Automation has made it possible for cars, cellphones, manufactured goods, air conditioning, running water, etc to be available to everyone.
> Automation has made it possible for;
> cars
We are choking to death on fumes and micro-plastics. CO2 is destroying the planet. The roads are grid-locked. We should be walking more.
> cellphones
We're in a massive global mental health crisis as attention spans plummet and depression soars. Cellphones have ruined family life and turned work in to a 24/7 activity.
> manufactured goods
Our overflowing landfills are spewing methane into the atmosphere from 7 decades of pointless plastic rubbish we make and throw away two weeks later. Nothing we can make lasts.
> air conditioning
Open the window.
> running water
Just No! The Byzantines and Romans had running water. Automation has nothing to do with it.
> Everyone has upgraded.
We work longer hours for less of a stake in society than at any time in history.
You know - I love technology, We really could have done something with it. But we let convenience, greed and vanity be our guides. Just maybe a good start would be to quit with this hopeless mythology and hubris, to actually think critically about the tradeoffs we've made and see just how much harm we're doing to ourselves.
Edit: For context I'm referring to "cheaper/better/faster production" having a negative impact of the quality of housing, which disproportionately impacts renters, who don't have the ability to improve their rented dwelling. Regulation is the only thing that will improve the housing situation for those born too late to buy in the current market.
How succinctly can it be said;
It means shutting the fuck up and doing exactly what you're told to do by a machine. No arguments. The machine is right by definition, and has calculated precisely what is "for your own good" using scientific data.
And don't bother arguing. You're only making it worse for yourself. :)
EDIT: Here's a wonderful passage by Alexis De Tocqueville, from "Democracy in America"
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and
mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that
authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it
seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood:
it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided
they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such
a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole
agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for
their security, foresees and supplies their necessities,
facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns,
directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and
subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them
all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
But we have indeed said "not this fast" to research.
The Amish, on the other hand, have successfully staved off most new technology since the 1600s. They also do not account for all of humanity.
It seems that saying no to a disruptive technology requires the naysayers to split off into a whole new society.
It didn't fail because the tactic didn't work economically, it failed because they were imprisoned and executed for destroying the sewing machines.
In much the same way - when workers go on strike today, it's a tactic, not a protest against the concept of work. Sometimes it works, sometimes that gets you put in prison too.
The luddites' modern equivalent would probably be the French anti-Uber protestors. They were, interestingly, actually described as being anti-smartphone by business journals. This is obviously false, but it's an interesting historical rhyme. I wonder if in 50 years time children will be taught about the "French iPhone protestors".
Orthodox Jews generally stay away from the internet.
History really does rhyme.
So the "no" can be "not yet", and I believe it can materially affect outcomes.
I think we very often say "not yet". It's one of the main things policy does, even if it disguises itself as "no, never"
We're in an age of rising fascism, authoritarianism and inequality.
With regard to "AI", it's a technology that disproportionately favours established power and threatens democracy.
If "AI" really was a leveller, if it threatened to split monopolies, reign in government, redistribute wealth and build social capital then I think you'd hear a good deal more enthusiasm for it.
Right now even the dumbest people can see which way that wind is blowing.
Other comments mentioned CFCs, cloning, chemical weapons, DDT. To that, let's add: Trans fats, Soylent, hydrogenated vegetable oils (butter's still going strong), bisphenol A in food and drink containers, veganism, rare earth metal extraction (and pollution, on US soil). Electric cars (at both the start and the end of the twentieth century!), zip fuel, most types of advanced fission reactor design and probably a couple non-nuclear renewable power plant types as well (up until recently).
The question's kinda paradoxically framed. If everybody just outright rejected the technology from the start, then it didn't get the chance to be all that "disruptive", even if it could have been. That makes it hard to think of good specific examples, but technically feasible and socially disruptive technologies get dropped for lack of interest all the time. If we blindly developed and proliferated every technology, without regard for its consequences and for whether people even want it or if it helps people while keeping harm to a minimum… Obviously that strategy would entail a.. casualty list.
In fact, maybe you could even say the default reponse to disruptive new technologies is "no". It took a lot of true believers and investors/wealth inequality to get ML to the point it's at now. And even then, it's most likely still heavily subsidized (I.E. operating at a loss, economically unviable so far), and the vast majority of "humanity" doesn't really understand, doesn't care about, or actively doesn't want it.
The fact that a relatively tiny portion of society is able to force it onto everybody despite that is a property of currently existing power structures, not an intrinsic feature of humans or of all potentially socially disruptive technologies.
Progress is a vector.
Progress to where? We require direction as well as magnitude.
We keep making lots of progress, against ourselves.
> Why would we want that?
Like, "AI" can make visually complex patterns of moving pixels now? Great! I like making my own patterns of pixels though. I like seeing other patterns of pixels because they're made by other people; art is just a communication medium. And I don't like being unable to trust anything I see, because the cost of fabricating fake videos is effectively zero, and the mass proliferation of doing so dilutes the pool of meaning, experience, and information with empty spam lacking substance.
Congrats! You solved a very challenging technical problem. Now, why is this a good thing exactly? How does this align with what most people actually want to get out of life?
However, AI at present is just a tool and how you use it is what determines the outcomes. There are several things to consider:
First, do you have guaranteed access to and control over your tools? If not, then becoming reliant on those tools places you in a position of helpless dependency.
Second, do the tools really result in more productivity per hour of effort? If so, they are good and useful tools.
The issue of how those productivity gains are distributed throughout society, or not, is a separate question. Here we again have modern agriculture to look to - the tractor, the seed drill, the combine harvester, the cotton gin and hemp decorticator, etc. all meant that a few people with these tools could be as productive as several hundred field laborers. In some cases, the field laborers could then have the freedom to get an education (many were children), and produce other items, like printing presses and medical knowledge - and in other cases, they were forced off the land and into slums (see colonial export agriculture systems).
Here's an illustrative question: can AI more efficiently and productively distribute capital to promising enterprises than human beings can? Since the AI doesn't need to buy superyachts as an AI status symbol (I hope not anyway), this would be much more efficient than billionaire-run investment capitalism would be, correct? Think of how much money could be saved if all corporate boards could be automated away with AI.
China might be running something curiously like this at present, what with their state-backed investment fund model:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-launch-new-40-bln-s...
The real magic is that, you will believe you chose that, and that you want it. You'll look back at digitally revised history - available not as "documents" to search, but as 'answers' from the system to your questions - and recoil at the horror of the primitive pre-AI world.
I think so, yes. Thinking about Fahrenheit 451, and the memory hole of Nineteen Eighty Four it always seemed implausible for any regime to completely expunge the past. That said, one our commenters (fong? who I presume is Chinese) was telling me how, between the end of the Qing dynasty and Mao, 5000 years of cultural history was more or less erased. What I see with AI is a much stronger possibility for radical revisionists and deniers to use "guardrails and "safety" to airbrush out all the distasteful bits of history.
Sure, but why would the billionaires who own the warehouse full of GPUs permit that to happen? There's a ton of better ways capital could be distributed, and the barriers to implementing them seem to be primarily extant rich people, not the lack of super-awesome ai venture capitalists.