> AI as a political project is precisely very authoritarian.
It can also level the playing field.
Every human SHOULD have access to all human knowledge at their fingertips, and a personal assistant to help them navigate through it.
It can also level the playing field.
Every human SHOULD have access to all human knowledge at their fingertips, and a personal assistant to help them navigate through it.
- LLMs give users more knowledge (debatable due to hallucinations and selection bias)
- having more data/knowledge means more power and therefore less authority / power imbalance (that was an argument for the Internet and social media, but it turned out exactly the other way around)
Both of these arguments is dubious, but somewhat reasonable, but requiring both to be true to achieve any form of net positive is a hard sell. That, plus as Al Khatib argues, AI is about taking away autonomy from the people. Beyond the cognitive studies about LLM impacts on our brains, having someone/thing else decide for you is decidedly incompatible with anti-authoritarian politics (autonomy vs heteronomy).
do you agree or disagree with the following:
- Knowledge should not be gatekept.
- At this point in our civilization, a single human cannot learn all of accumulated human knowledge, let alone remember it and master it.
- It's increasingly difficult to make progress in frontier fields without mastering a lot of other fields first ("shoulders of giants") or to even navigate through all the laws and social institutions governing daily life.
- Groups who employ many people to pool their knowledge have an exceedingly broad advantage over a single person.
I agree.
I absolutely think that is not what all this compute power is for.
I do believe that all this statistical inference and generation, alongside the massive data collection apparatus we have built, is designed explicitly to completely lock down the possible actions for any person targeted by the folks who own these systems, and these systems aren't owned by "every human".
Quite the contrary- historically the folks who own those systems are pretty, uh, specific about what they man by "human". Those folks are so capricious about that concept of human they can't believe brown folks are human while their kids suspect the computers might be human.
Oh, and they are using consumers prompts to gather even more data. LLMs are creating even greater asymmetric information situations than we had before.
Also, the common person has no say in how these systems are developed, the big actors do, and these systems are already used to automate decisions. That's a totalitarian potential, not just authoritarian.
So, your banking passwords?