I told chatGPT to replace reference to AI with references to computers. The arguments seem just as valid (and wrong). Here is a snippet.
"Of course, computers do present a threat of violence, but as Randall points out, it’s not from the computers themselves, but rather from the people that employ them. The US military is testing out computer-controlled drones, which aren’t going to be self-aware but will scale up human errors (or human malice) until innocent people are killed. Computer tools are already being used to set bail and parole conditions – it can put you in jail or keep you there. Police are using computers for facial recognition and “predictive policing”. Of course, all of these models end up discriminating against minorities, depriving them of liberty and often getting them killed.
Computers are defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of computers are going to make the world worse. The computer revolution is here, and I don’t really like it."
The rest of the article.
There is a computer bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by computers. But it will probably be crappier, not better.
Contrary to the doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to computers. Contemporary advances in computing aren’t really getting us any closer to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and as Randall Monroe pointed out back in 2018:
A panel from the webcomic “xkcd” showing a timeline from now into the distant future, dividing the timeline into the periods between “computers become advanced enough to control unstoppable swarms of robots” and “computers become self-aware and rebel against human control”. The period from self-awareness to the indefinite future is labelled “the part lots of people seem to worry about”; Randall is instead worried about the part between these two epochs.
What will happen to computers is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. Language models are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and computers will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains.
The biggest lasting changes from computers will be more like the following:
- A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work
- The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles
- More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams
- SEO hacking content farms dominating search results
- Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market
- Computer-generated content overwhelming social media
- Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising
Computer companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the data monster.
You will never trust another product review. You will never speak to a human being at your ISP again. Vapid, pithy media will fill the digital world around you. Technology built for engagement farms – those computer-edited videos with the grating machine voice you’ve seen on your feeds lately – will be white-labeled and used to push products and ideologies at a massive scale with a minimum cost from social media accounts which are populated with computer content, cultivate an audience, and sold in bulk and in good standing with the Algorithm.
All of these things are already happening and will continue to get worse. The future of media is a soulless, vapid regurgitation of all media that came before the computer epoch, and the fate of all new creative media is to be subsumed into the roiling pile of math.
This will be incredibly profitable for the computer barons, and to secure their investment they are deploying an immense, expensive, world-wide propaganda campaign. To the public, the present-day and potential future capabilities of the technology are played up in breathless promises of ridiculous possibility. In closed-room meetings, much more realistic promises are made of cutting payroll budgets in half.
The propaganda also leans into the mystical sci-fi computer canon, the threat of smart computers with world-ending power, the forbidden allure of a new Manhattan project and all of its consequences, the long-prophesied singularity. The technology is nowhere near this level, a fact well-known by experts and the barons themselves, but the illusion is maintained in the interests of lobbying lawmakers to help the barons erect a moat around their new industry.
Of course, computers do present a threat of violence, but as Randall points out, it’s not from the computers themselves, but rather from the people that employ them. The US military is testing out computer-controlled drones, which aren’t going to be self-aware but will scale up human errors (or human malice) until innocent people are killed. Computer tools are already being used to set bail and parole conditions – it can put you in jail or keep you there. Police are using computers for facial recognition and “predictive policing”. Of course, all of these models end up discriminating against minorities, depriving them of liberty and often getting them killed.
Computers are defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of computers are going to make the world worse. The computer revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.