I have mixed feeling about the stuff that’s currently being marketed as “Artificial Intelligence”. To begin with, I believe calling it that was a deliberate choice to mislead people about the nature, power, and “coolness” of the technology. I do think it’s cool technology, and the main reason it worries me is that as with everything else in a capitalist society, it’s being used to further the interests of pathologically greedy capitalists, rather than the interests of humanity as a whole. We already have a vast number of marvelous labor-saving devices that really do work. Worker productivity has gone through the roof in recent decades, but rather than having higher paychecks and/or shorter hours, the benefits have gone to create a class of multibillionaires, while things have gotten harder for everyday people in a number of ways. As corporations use this “AI” to replace workers, keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s possible to have a world in which labor-saving devices actually save us from doing so much labor.
1. That people will believe it to be far more capable than it currently is and as a result make a series of decisions that are incredibly stupid and dangerous in their own right.
…that’s about all I got.
Well, there’s this documentary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
and this one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Seed
.
The biggest danger right now is it’s being used for marketing. That’s why we’ve all heard about it. There’s nothing super newsworthy about it but they’ve had a lot of free marketing so far and they’re getting more for claiming the government must keep this vast power in check. I’m impressed by those statements for exactly one reason: I don’t quite know how they keep a straight face while saying such ridiculous things. Next they’ll be telling everyone that handheld remote controls like the kind you get for a tv are going to take over the world because you can just click a button and some remote device changes what it’s doing.
Well, more than the marketing, there’s bosses trying to use AI as a way to lay people off or cut wages, same as they’ve done with every other technological development.
If AI was actually intelligent — that is to say, not just bluffing its way through natural language by putting one word after another to create the surface impression of making sense, but actually doing some maths with the numbers it turned up — it might try plotting a graph of happiness level versus amount of money, and reach the conclusion that the expected reduction in just one billionaire’s happiness caused by taking a few billion pounds away from them would be outweighed many times over by the improvement that could be expected in a few million people’s happiness if they were each given a thousand pounds …..