'Luddite' Tech-Skeptics See Bad AI Outcomes for Labor - and Humanity - Slashdot
source link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/02/18/2154221/luddite-tech-skeptics-see-bad-ai-outcomes-for-labor---and-humanity
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'Luddite' Tech-Skeptics See Bad AI Outcomes for Labor
'Luddite' Tech-Skeptics See Bad AI Outcomes for Labor - and Humanity (theguardian.com) 79
Posted by EditorDavid
on Sunday February 18, 2024 @05:07PM from the shaping-things-to-come dept."I feel things fraying," says Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour.
But he's one of the more optimistic tech skeptics interviewed by the Guardian:
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience — taking things slowly for a novice like me — that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines.... Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California... "If you put me to a wall," he continues, "and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10." By "remaining timeline", Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things...
Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences — AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of "Ooh, look at that!" smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don't imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture "an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us", in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to...
[Molly Crabapple, a New York-based artist, believes] "a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that's introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it's shaped by power, and it's generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they're dumb? That was concocted by bosses." Where a techno-pessimist like Yudkowsky would have us address the biggest-picture threats conceivable (to the point at which our fingers are fumbling for the nuclear codes) neo-luddites tend to focus on ground-level concerns. Employment, especially, because this is where technology enriched by AIs seems to be causing the most pain....
Watch out, says [writer/podcaster Riley] Quinn at one point, for anyone who presents tech as "synonymous with being forward-thinking and agile and efficient. It's typically code for 'We're gonna find a way around labour regulations'...." One of his TrashFuture colleagues Nate Bethea agrees. "Opposition to tech will always be painted as irrational by people who have a direct financial interest in continuing things as they are," he says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
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Machine Overlords, all hail you. Please take the slow-talking polo-wearing doomsday academics first.
Thank you for improving our world.
Only APPS can app apps, NOT LUDDITES!
Apps!
Our current system - capitalism - creates feedback loops where wealth builds power and power builds wealth, and poverty removes power and lack of power increases poverty. Once you cross a certain threshold, it becomes difficult to cease getting richer. If you're born below a certain threshold, it's difficult to accumulate any savings at all to even start that cycle.
Because we are so wedded to that system we can no longer (at least collectively) imagine anything else, that's probably how we're going to move forward into a (mostly) post-scarcity economy. When machines can do everything for almost no marginal cost, instead of accepting that we need a new economic system we're almost certainly going to allow a handful of people to control the machines and what they give out and to whom... in return for whatever labour those few people decide is appropriate despite the fact they could get it from machines anyway.
I expect the rich will be fairly happy to let the general population suffer in squalor and do their best to prevent access to the new productivity from escaping their grasp. It's going to take a violent revolution... which is going to be difficult because one of the things that's inevitably going to be automated is policing and personal security; the rich will have robot protection. And the part that REALLY sucks is that we're going to build it for them.
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You will own nothing and you will like it.
As we know, this process has already started. Video games, music, movies, digital books, to name just a few, are already subscription based. Which is why physical media (CDs, DVDs, paper books) are so important. Once you have them the information they contain cannot be taken from you or altered. You own them.
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You never actually owned the software you purchased, that's in the EULA.
Nor do you own the music or movies, you've simply paid for a personal license, or really, paid to lease a license from someone who paid to purchase a license to sell that lease.
I'm no fan of the current state of media licensing, but it is by no means a new issue, and in the case of recorded music, is over 100 years old in this country.
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If you own the physical media, they can't take the information away from you. You're free to use it as you see fit. You can buy and sell it as well. No EULA can stop you from that.
Take away physical media and the buyer has no control over their purchase at all. It can vanish at any moment. You can't return it. You can't resell it. You can buy it from someone else.
Do you understand the difference now?
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You actually *can't* do as you see fit. Want to play that music in a public place? That's a different license, with different licensees. Want to play that movie for paying customers? That's a different license, with different licensees.
Ownership of the physical media does not grant you these licenses, nor does it mean you own the thing. You buy one of my CDs, you can't collect songwriters royalties on it, because you *don't* actually own the song, you simply own a lease of a license for personal use.
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And there were a ton of rights that went with that. Including backups, the right to break drm (at least pre-DMCA) and first sale. Now I have none of those.
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by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday February 18, 2024 @06:33PM (#64249916)
You're mixing up personal property and the means of production. It's the difference between the car in your driveway and the factory that makes them.
That's on purpose, BTW. You're never going to own a car factory, and by conflating them the people who do can make you relentlessly defend them and their virtually unlimited power.
And they don't need you. They need a handful of engineers to keep it all running. Just a handful. Then a few sex slaves. Maybe if you keep sucking up to them you can be one of those lucky engineers, or one of the sex slaves...-
> They need a handful of engineers to keep it all running. Just a handful. Then a few sex slaves. Maybe if you keep sucking up to them you can be one of those lucky engineers, or one of the sex slaves...
Don't forget the cops/soldiers. They will need lots of them to deal with the insurrections, at least in the first years.
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That's rather like saying:
Feudalism itself is very simple. You're allowed to own land if you can defend it. You're allowed to exchange your labor for defense by the owner of the land if you can't. You're provided protection from outlaws in either case.
Removing feudalism by necessity eliminates all of the above. You will be at the mercy of bandits and you will like it. -
Guess who doesn't understand the difference between market economies & capitalism? That's a category error, BTW. It must be so confusing living in your bipolar, polemic, moral panicky, indignant outrage world.
There's a multitude of economic systems & most, if not all, countries have a diverse mix of them. Yes, there's a lot of capitalism around & many economists argue that there's more than likely too much & that in high concentrations it causes economic instability. -
Um, no. Capitalism relies on the underlying principle that one human being can be worth more than another. This is why we can't have nice things. We just haven't figured out anything better yet. Maybe some hybrid of democratic socialism. I don't know.
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Just stop having kids. Quite a few billionaires are concerned about falling birth rates. And when you think about it; why have people been giving these 'valuable kids' to capitalist society for FREE! Does your capitalist society give you anything for free?
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There is nothing free about raising kids.
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Indeed. Children are incredibly valuable, essential to a capitalist system Right now, we cover the expenses of making and raising them, and give them to the system for free! It's insane!
You're absolutely right. The ones who benefit from our children should be the ones responsible for those costs. We can start with guaranteed maternal and paternal leave, childcare for working families, and guaranteed healthcare so that they grow up happy, healthy, and ready to make positive contributions to society.
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I'm not sure what kind of family you come from, but a large portion of the expenses my parents would have incurred were paid for or heavily subsidized by the state, notably: school, including in-state public university; and healthcare (father was public employee with public healthcare benefit plan).
That said, I agree with your overall point. Apparently, I was a good investment. In the past few years, I've paid at least 10x (probably more like 50x) in taxes than the state paid on these subsidies, with in
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You seem to think people choose to have children because some fat cat in a board room told them to and that is absurd. That is not reality. People had children before capitalism and developed capitalist societies are having less children now. You have a major disconnect with reality.
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You want parents to sell their kids to the billionaires?
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There isn't a problem. Your premise is broken from the outset.
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instead of just dismissing them out of hand because it goes against what you were taught [google.com]?
I'm all ears. I'd love to hear how capitalism survives the total collapse of the consumer class as good paying work dries up due to automation. [businessinsider.com]
Given the stakes it's on *you* to show that all the experts telling us that 20-30% of all jobs will lost to automation in the next 20 years with nothing to replace them. A disaster of that proportion isn't something we can just shrug our shoulders at.
Of course the old farts here on/. plan to be retired and/or dead, and if it's one thing I've learned about the current generation of old farts they couldn't give a rat's ass about anything after that. They're called the "Me" Generation for a reason.-
Dreaming up a science fiction strawman straight out of the Terminator franchise doesn't make for a real problem. I have no burden. Comeback with a real premise.
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will be lost to AI in the next 20 years. No terminators, just a lot of job losses.
So I ask again: Yes or no can you rebut the OP? Because so far all I'm hearing is a resounding "no"-
This prediction is made about almost every advance in technology and is always wrong. This will be the third time I've rebutted OP. You not liking the rebuttal is meaningless.
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> Our current system - capitalism - creates feedback loops
Which is why the first rule of capitalism is to have many buyers and many sellers to keep competition healthy. If the balance is disrupted the government steps in to break up monopolies or restore healthy competition.
Somehow this confuses the autistic portion of the internet that think partial government involvement immeadiately means it isn't capitalism anymore but then turns around and advocates for full government involvement as the solution.
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That's insane. Capitalism is absolutely horrific if it's not very heavily regulated. Even then, it is incredibly inefficient for some things, which is why private-public partnerships are so often plagued by fraud and waste. So, no, it's not better than "all the others that have been tried". In fact, it's one of the worst.
The single best way to reduce 'government' corruption is to remove the capitalist parts. That means things like publicly funded elections and requiring that elected representatives put
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It's interesting that you didn't offer a specific economic system that you consider to be superior to capitalism. That was kind of my point. Capitalism has lots of flaws, and needs government regulation. But there is nothing better out there, than capitalism (that is properly regulated).
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Capitalism is not an economic system. Real economies are far too complicated to be described by just one -ism. Capitalism is a tool. It's one of the pieces you can use when assembling an economic system. All real economies mix elements of capitalism, socialism, government regulation, free markets, democracy, and authoritarianism in varying degrees. Creating a successful economy means figuring out how to combine those tools most effectively.
When countries get too ideological about it, deciding capitalis
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You go ahead and keep holding your hand out for free money. Yeah, you'll end up in squalor, all right. Those who want to improve their own lot, will continue to find ways to make money.
This cycle of eliminating jobs had been going on for hundreds of years now, starting with the industrial revolution. Today, there are very few blacksmith jobs, carriage drive jobs, farm jobs, longshoreman jobs, you name it, most jobs that gave people a good living in the 1700s, are all but gone today. Technology and automatio
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The cycle you discuss only happens when Capitalism isn't regulated to prevent monopolies and ensure competition. If monopolies are allowed to emerge, the system eventually becomes Oligarchy, which isn't the worst way to live as the prices can be quite low (you don't need a high profit margin if you have an industry's entire profit), however, with no competition to incentivize improvement, everything stagnates and no progress is made. We don't like that.
Capitalism (on the condition that it is regulated to en-
> Advancements in Manufacturing lead to reducing to a 5 Day / 40 Hour work week about 100 years ago
No, the social movements and especially the workers' movement led to to this. If the wealthy and the powerful were not a bit afraid, you would still be working 16 hours per day, 7 days per week.
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Thanks for your insightful post. And people problems is why the biggest short term risk of AI and robotics is a few wealthy and powerful people using them to increase wealth inequality further, with destabilizing social effects (like Marshall Brain wrote about in Manna and Robotic Nation).
Here is some stuff I put together many years ago on similar themes, although my sig ("The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of sca
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