Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

thefrailestthing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 82 posts

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#71

Post by keepmesmall »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #67
narrator wrote: post #8

Kind of reminds me about how they say the highest level of automation of self-driving cars will be no steering wheel. Who decided that that was higher on the scale and a good thing? The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god. These scales by which progress toward the future is measured are a key ingredient of social engineering. One task that Free Software…

The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god. I know you're using hyperbole here, and many people will disagree with what I'm going to write next, but that's exactly what I think the long term goal of technology should be. Not just individuals but all of our systems as well.

It sounds like you'd rather live under the influence of an imperfect God than to believe in a perfect God?

I'm struggling with this myself so I'm just echoing.

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#72

Post by avmich »

ozmbie wrote: post #63
mikestew wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god. Umm, no, the "progress" is machines that I don't have to micro-manage anymore. Imagine an oven in your house that you had to constantly adjust to keep it at the desired temperature. No, that would be stupid, we've solved that problem decades ago. Now imagine a car that you had to control by hand with the necessary…

"Hey, oven, make your interior 425F so I can bake a pizza” Oven: “Sorry mike. I can only go to 400F unless you upgrade your ovenware plan to $2.99 a month. Or use an ovenware family brand pizza! For every 3 ovenware brand pizzas you cook, you get a chance to win a free pie! Oh by the way on your trip to Dusty Springs tomorrow stop by Chad’s Bakery for their famous pies.”

So logically after that a lobotomy of oven follows, with destruction of electronics and putting basic functions under direct control?

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#73

Post by ryanwaggoner »

core-questions wrote: post #60
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point until you dragged Google into it. They're no different than the tobacco companies of 60 years ago who were getting doctors to say smoking was good for you. Or the makers of junk food and Steam in your examples who would really prefer that you not toss their stuff, but you do anyway. No one is forcing you to use Google, and it's not that difficult to limit your exposure to whatever shenanigans they're engag…

> No one is forcing you to use Google, Unless your organization uses Google Apps, or standardizes company cell phones on Android, or uses Google Cloud for hosting things...

This is a bizarre redefining of being “forced”.

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#74

Post by AndrewKemendo »

keepmesmall wrote: post #71
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god. I know you're using hyperbole here, and many people will disagree with what I'm going to write next, but that's exactly what I think the long term goal of technology should be. Not just individuals but all of our systems as well.

It sounds like you'd rather live under the influence of an imperfect God than to believe in a perfect God? I'm struggling with this myself so I'm just echoing.

Not sure I follow, but it sounds right.

I guess if we're throwing around the term God it kind of loses it's juice.

God in this sense would be "thing that can do things nobody understands." In that sense, yes. Artificial General Intelligence (or maybe even Narrow AI) which can do things that humans can't understand for our benefit would look like "God" to most people.

Nobody can point to a reasonable causal chain of action for previously described "Gods." In the situation I'm advocating for, we would be able to do that - though likely still to a lesser degree than full interpretability.

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#75

Post by hakfoo »

narrator wrote: post #8

Kind of reminds me about how they say the highest level of automation of self-driving cars will be no steering wheel. Who decided that that was higher on the scale and a good thing? The "progress" defined here is complete control over all actions of individuals in society by an AI god. These scales by which progress toward the future is measured are a key ingredient of social engineering. One task that Free Software…

I think it's far less about control and more about bulletproofing the technology.

If the self-driver becomes better than the best human drivers, there's limited gains in real safety if a 15-year-old with his learner's permit/drunkard/suicidal/homicidal/distracted person can still grab the wheel and steer it into a wall manually.

We may find that there are some opportunities that only become feasible if we remove the human factor. I could see a road network with much higher speeds for advanced self-driving vehicles, especially if you rely on the vehicles being able to communicate directly with each other and signaling mechanisms to keep traffic more orderly than a typical freeway.

There may also be some interesting business angles in it-- I fully expect that the feature after "we removed the steering wheel" is "we put a lie-flat bed, workstation or minibar where it lived."

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #65
core-questions wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key thing to keep in mind here is incentives and motivation. You have a motivation toward self improvement, you make a change to your environment, monitor it, and see what happens. You want to increase your physical fitness, awareness, education, life position, finances, etc. and you make corresponding changes where you and yours are the primary beneficiaries. Google has a motivation to deliver value to their sha…

No, it doesn't have to be, but I have very little faith in Google to make any choices that even border on altruistic when it's far more profitable to exploit us. I think there's a case to be made here that Google's motivations can mirror those of the users and that it's in Google's best long term interest for that to be the case. It seems obvious to me that a company that can be aligned with their customer's desires…

> Rather, my point is that there is no law of economics that guarantees users and corporations must be in conflict or that corporations will always do better financially by exploiting users to the users' detriment (or that a competitor that does that will beat one that doesn't).

But isn't there?

I think the core point of Meditations on Moloch[0] was that there kind of is, that in the limit, competitive environments will always sacrifice every value other than the one over which they're competing, and that an "AI god" would probably be the only thing that's strong enough to break these chains.

--

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#77

Post by TeMPOraL »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #73
core-questions wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is forcing you to use Google, Unless your organization uses Google Apps, or standardizes company cell phones on Android, or uses Google Cloud for hosting things...

This is a bizarre redefining of being “forced”.

It's not bizarre. The "do this or else lose your job (and therefore go into poverty, making yourself and everyone you know miesrable, and possibly die of illness or starvation)" is probably the most common method of forcing people to do things against their will and conscience in the western world.

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#78

Post by TeMPOraL »

skybrian wrote: post #61
nafey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you hire a maid for a day from a service, and you find out that they have been keeping tabs on your dietary habits and daily routine and reporting it back to their employer? That's closer to what Google is doing.

The speaker is just the user interface. You've effectively hired a large corporation to work in your house. Alexa doesn't work for Amazon, Alexa is Amazon. Google at least makes this explicit with "Ok, Google".

That's not how it works internally, and everyone knows it.

You've hired a tiny, tiny string of server activations, through which your voice gets interpreted and turned into query to be run, with some amount of side effects that may affect your device directly. Just because some people cannot see through the abstraction of a company name, doesn't mean we should let it be the accepted view.

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#79

Post by TeMPOraL »

matt_kantor wrote: post #32
api wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quantitative difference in spreading velocity and general bandwidth is so large it becomes qualitative and looks a lot like a phase change. We burned stuff long before modern steam turbines and internal combustion engines...

The same sort of thing could have been said (and was) when the telephone and printing press were invented, to pick just two examples.

And (possibly replacing telephone with telegraph and radio) those events pretty much turned the civilization upside down. They were transformative. So was the Internet.

Now we have another qualitative step - never before people were actually connected 24/7, with constant Internet activations coming to our pocket.

Re: The World Will Be Our Skinner Box

#80

Post by ryanwaggoner »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bizarre redefining of being “forced”.

It's not bizarre. The "do this or else lose your job (and therefore go into poverty, making yourself and everyone you know miesrable, and possibly die of illness or starvation)" is probably the most common method of forcing people to do things against their will and conscience in the western world.

Yeah, the outcome for quitting or being fired is usually crushing poverty followed by starvation or dying in the gutter from an untreated illness. That’s why everyone still works the same first job that they got in high school.

I want to see employees have more negotiating power, but you’re being ridiculous. Yes, there’s a whole segment of employees who are exploited by their employers because they are financially vulnerable and may not be able to easily get another job. I’ve worked some of those jobs. They’re mostly not the types of jobs where there’s a lot of concern because their boss makes them use Google Apps.

And going down this road, there’s a huge variety of things you can say your boss “forces” you to do, where it becomes meaningless.

My boss “forces” me to use this brand of office furniture. My boss “forces” me to be here during business hours. My boss “forces” me to do work, for crying out loud! The inhumanity!

You seem to think that if anyone has any ability to cause you inconvenience or even harm if you don’t do their bidding, they’re forced you.

Post reply on HN