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> I'd say that there is whole another kingdom of AIs that are apex predators. Armies. States, more explicitly. The insight that human organizations can be see
by wwweston 9y ago
> I'd say that there is whole another kingdom of AIs that are apex predators. Armies.
States, more explicitly.
The insight that human organizations can be seen as superorganisms (and perhaps superintelligences) is right, and applies to states, businesses, municipalities, churches, etc.
But the whole point of the insight isn't to be generally suspicious of these semi-alien systems that are generally more powerful than individual humans. It's to think more carefully about how to program and limit them, just like with AIs.
One of the nice thing about at least one of the two state AIs in that cold war you were talking about is that people did/do think about this and we've ended up with a system fairly-well designed to operate with broad user input. It's possible it could use some improvement but it's probably better than a broad segment of constituent humans is prepared to take advantage of.
Business AIs are generally pretty good at taking advantage of that, though. In fact, there's a credible argument they're exploiting features of the system to heavily influence the first tier.
- hyperion2010 9y agoThomas Hobbes Leviathan is the definitive work on this [0]. Modern nation states are living gods. For better or for worse, they are largely unconscious in their actions and relatively slow to move. When a state level actor achieves agency on timescales similar to individual humans, I think all we can do is hope that whatever process brought it into being has endowed it with a love of all living beings and a propensity to let the living expire at their natural time. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(book)
- scotty79 9y ago> States, more explicitly. Not quite. States are just facades for armies. When state fails to collect taxes for the army it is simply replaced. I'm not so sure that peace between top AIs comes from user input. IIWW made armies realise they can't win a fight and they suffer trying. Thanks to that expeirience cold war was won by waiting opponent out. Humans in all of this were just cogs not the users.