here is an idea: instead of sacrificing AI maybe we should sacrifice organized governments.
The AI Threat to Open Societies
11–20 of 157 posts
Re: The AI Threat to Open Societies
#12This reminds me of the "Do artifacts have politics" paper by Langdon Winner [1]. He argues that technologies have inherent political traits. Nuclear power is considered to be supportive of autocratic political systems since nuclear power plants need centralized planning and networks to be effective. Solar power is considered democratic since anyone can harness it. It's an interesting paper and definitely worth a read…
technologies having inherent political traits is a consequence of a much deeper and more important aspect of technology -- that it has inherent traits of human economics. if you take a set of technological realities that might be imposed on some society, it leads to that society eventually reaching exactly one stable state. a very simple example is the technology of guns. this technology leads inevitably to a state o…
> market economies will no longer be competitive and centralized ones will replace them
Assuming that the AI's have accurate and timely information. I suspect that one of the (many) reasons why modern economies can be dysfunctional is that the information feedback loop is often either inaccurate, incomplete or lagging badly. Solve that problem and you're gold.
Re: The AI Threat to Open Societies
#13This reminds me of the "Do artifacts have politics" paper by Langdon Winner [1]. He argues that technologies have inherent political traits. Nuclear power is considered to be supportive of autocratic political systems since nuclear power plants need centralized planning and networks to be effective. Solar power is considered democratic since anyone can harness it. It's an interesting paper and definitely worth a read…
The internet once required a huge amount of centralized resources and infrastructure to be realized. I don't see why "AI" as we know it now is any different.
The internet allows governments to tightly monitor, as time progresses, all communication... Therefore the internet may be under different governments a tool of immense totalitarian control.
Re: The AI Threat to Open Societies
#14Full video of his speech. His delivery adds to the message:
Re: The AI Threat to Open Societies
#15All large scale human rights violations and crimes in modern history were committed by governments, mostly large and "democratic".
AI is not a threat. Big government is.
Re: The AI Threat to Open Societies
#16AI is only in a supporting role here. It's massive data collection and storage at low cost that's the problem. Machine learning just helps to digest the data. Tech has solved the problem of previous attempts at Big Brother - you just couldn't afford enough watchers to watch everybody all the time. Now, you can. It's even profitable.
And tech will also solve the power problem of autocratic regimes. Right now, a dictator can't control every single individual in the country on their own. They need police that can search your apt at 5am because you made a blog post critical of the government. They need lawyers to convict you, prison guards, etc. In such regimes, the dictator still has to put people into places of power so that the will of the dictator is executed. But people can refuse orders, and they can declare someone else to be president.
Coups are one of the biggest dangers for dictators, and many rebellions are semi-coups where people in power just step aside, letting the rebels do their thing.
Now, enter AI. Now the dictator could give all that power to an AI instead of intermediaries. An entire government run by two entities: the Dictator, with direct control over the AI that runs the remainder. All the bomb-equipped drones, all the self-driving tanks, all the bipedal robots with their machine guns. All the robot prison-guards and the robot judges to put critical people into prison. If this AI would answer only to the head of government, then any kind of upheaval would become unrealistic and impossible.
Re: The AI Threat to Open Societies
#17Any non-paywalled version?
https://www.wired.com/story/mortal-danger-chinas-push-into-a...
Mods, please consider changing the link to this.
[edit] From the speaker himself: https://www.georgesoros.com/2019/01/24/remarks-delivered-at-...
Re: The AI Threat to Open Societies
#18AI is only in a supporting role here. It's massive data collection and storage at low cost that's the problem. Machine learning just helps to digest the data. Tech has solved the problem of previous attempts at Big Brother - you just couldn't afford enough watchers to watch everybody all the time. Now, you can. It's even profitable.
And tech will also solve the power problem of autocratic regimes. Right now, a dictator can't control every single individual in the country on their own. They need police that can search your apt at 5am because you made a blog post critical of the government. They need lawyers to convict you, prison guards, etc. In such regimes, the dictator still has to put people into places of power so that the will of the dictat…
The technology isn't a fundamental change, it's just a more deadly weapon.
Re: The AI Threat to Open Societies
#19This reminds me of the "Do artifacts have politics" paper by Langdon Winner [1]. He argues that technologies have inherent political traits. Nuclear power is considered to be supportive of autocratic political systems since nuclear power plants need centralized planning and networks to be effective. Solar power is considered democratic since anyone can harness it. It's an interesting paper and definitely worth a read…
An interesting perspective, however I do not believe that the Internet is democratising.
I regard democracy (and capitalism) as being an industrial-era approximation of solutions to the institution-alignment-problem (analogous to the AI alignment problem, but for governments and corporations). Both of these have their own failure modes; In the case of democracy, the failure mode is that people do not know objective truth, and can be fooled by propaganda. The Internet allowed cheap mass propaganda for as long as spam has existed, and this has become worse as propoganists learned to use internet friendly memes.
If you take away (or corrupt) the electorate’s knowledge, I do not think it is okay to continue to call it “democracy” even if they all still vote.
Re: The AI Threat to Open Societies
#20AI is only in a supporting role here. It's massive data collection and storage at low cost that's the problem. Machine learning just helps to digest the data. Tech has solved the problem of previous attempts at Big Brother - you just couldn't afford enough watchers to watch everybody all the time. Now, you can. It's even profitable.
Dictators have one mind; Oligarchies have a handful, or scores. AI (as is, not scify) is (I think) a multiplier or leverage for a mind. The open societies differentiation is potentially millions or billions of minds. To realise that differentiation open societies have to create a population that has it's own mind, and develop a substrate that supports individual thinking, and of course manage the interaction and flow of all these minds. This is where the internet started to get interesting, but has now run into sand - most people still lack the tools and opportunities to think for themselves, while this is true they can be dominated.