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This reminds me of the "Do artifacts have politics" paper by Langdon Winner [1]. He argues that technologies have inherent political traits. Nuclear power is c
by raz32dust 8y ago
This 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.
On similar lines, I feel internet is a democratizing force, since it allowed anyone to publish data and anyone to consume it, and is (somewhat) difficult to control centrally. AI, on the other hand, is a centralizing force, since the most powerful AI can be managed and powered by the most powerful institutions.
[1] https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
- joe_the_user 8y agoIndeed, one could consider machine learning an authoritarian technology if given power over individuals. AI's fundamental problem is it winds-up being a "results oriented" approach where individuals characteristics are weighed by black-box systems and the individual is judged without any recourse or even any exact idea what the criteria is.
- trevyn 8y agoWell, we’re judged by human brains every day, which are even more opaque.
- sgt101 8y agoThis is a sorta standard rejoiner.. but other humans should have to account/take responsibility for their decisions, and part of that process is that other humans should judge individuals as individuals which almost by definition machine learned classifiers cannot. ML is great for dealing with massproduced artefacts, or standardised processes, but it's just not the right tool for reasoning over domains that are not full of approximately similar things. That the Chinese government (and Google, and Facebook) think that humans are in that category speaks volumes about them.
- pixl97 8y agoIn the long term human brains are input and computationally limited.
- joe_the_user 8y agowe’re judged by human brains every day, which are even more opaque. In modern society, the decisive things determining life-direction are determined by human ostensibly using objective criteria. Educators have conditions for grades, bosses write progress reports, courts use etc. This situation is term bureaucratic society and the rule of law. Authoritarianism is one kind of interaction that we all know - when an individual can issue orders without recourse. There's everything from abusive bosses to dictators here. It's a common part of human relations too, just a less desirable side.
- bronz 8y agotechnologies 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 of the world that is characterized by the presence of gun-utilizing nations. this is because the world is a kind of market, and when guns exist the only entities that are competitive are those that use guns. right now, market economies dominate the world. even china utilizes markets for its own internal economic affairs. when AI comes, this will turn on its head -- market economies will no longer be competitive and centralized ones will replace them. this will be a pretty shocking change. also, rather soon, humans will stop being present. this is because they will no longer be competitive, their existence will be vestigial and therefore fragile and vulnerable to the slightest perturbation. it will be similar to endangered animals in the present -- no longer competitive, their existence no longer perpetuates itself and therefore is terminated for any old reason, such as condominium developments or pollution.
- phs318u 8y ago> 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.
- Bizarro 8y agoI'm not going to subscribe to your newsletter ;) Sometimes you feel that you need some special insight that nobody else knows because it makes you feel special. It's probably better to just keep it to yourself when it doesn't reflect any valid reality.
- chobeat 8y agoHe probably read Nick Land without understanding him. Or some cybernetics critics.
- fooker 8y agoThe 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.
- devoply 8y agoThe 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.
- ivanhoe 8y agoOne could argue that it already is...
- buboard 8y agoYou make a case why the private sector should be encouraged to monitor as well.
- sgt101 8y agoI'm really curious : could you try to make the case here? I'd be very interested in this perspective.
- buboard 8y agoits essentially the same argument that some people make against gun control: to keep government in check
- sgt101 8y agoUmmhhh, except here I think that this will lead to powerful people dominating the lives of everyone else. I don't see the similarity to gun control - with guns individuals end up having power (or getting shot - I tend to agree with gun control), with surveillance they end up under the thumb of some plutocrat or politician.
- ben_w 8y agoAn 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.
- yesenadam 8y agoHave you read Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) - well worth reading and rereading. The theme of it in a way is "that people do not know objective truth, and can be fooled by propaganda" It's about things he observed in WWI, the role of the media, the failure of the media, the start of the propaganda age.. My point is - none of these problems are new. Lippmann was writing about very similar problems 100 years ago. (In that and his other early books, e.g. Liberty and the News - on how somehow, we don't require journalists be qualified, although they have such a vital role in democracy.) It's hard to think that democracy is possible, given these problems. (Saward in his Democracy says that Schumpeter in the mid-20th C simply redefined 'democracy' as 'whatever they now have in countries we call democratic', thus avoiding the worrying about democracy that produced the fascinating books of the early 20th C on problems with it. e.g. Lippmann's, Michels' Political Parties)
- emiliobumachar 8y agoNone of these effects is new. One could print anything on pamphlets, or shout it in the town square before literacy was widespread. When searching for that boots quote to put here, I found this reference with excellent 18th century quotes about the issue: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ There's the possibility that the internet has made it worse, but that's a theory I've yet to see evidence for. You could spread fake news a day before the election in ancient Rome or Greece, what would stop you? Today at least we have most people doubting candidate cannibalism stories because if they were true they would be on mainstream sites. What did they have back then? It was normal to not have access to a second news source to seek out at reasonable effort for months. Even with all the garbage out there, I think the cheap mass access to information was a net gain. Lies can be made up on the spot, while the truth must be carefully researched. Being able to put a well-researched rebut on a blog where someone might read it is something, something they didn't have before. Everyone would just go home after the people who could produce information on the spot had shouted it.
- chalst 8y agoGeorge Orwell made much the same point in 1945: http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb
- buboard 8y ago"ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance" All we need to do is democratize AI. It can be well argued that it is happening.
- Ar-Curunir 8y agoNo, training modern enural networks requires a ton of data and a ton of computing power, both of which are available only to the biggest organizations.
- buboard 8y agoWe re not talking about Apollo-level investments
- Yoric 8y agoSo you're thinking the best way to defeat (for some notion of "defeat") a centralizing AI is a myriad of user-controlled AIs (even if they are hosted e.g. on AWS)? I had never thought of this, but it seems to make sense.
- buboard 8y agohopefully we re not even at the point where we found the best way to train AIs. it's possible that the field may be revolutionized by new methods.
- dev_dull 8y agoA 2nd amendment for “weaponized” AI? “The right of the people, to code, maintain, and develop weaponized artificial intelligence shall not be infringed.”
- js8 8y ago> He argues that technologies have inherent political traits. What are the traits of money and billionaires?
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- joakinen 8y agoInternet is out of control by citizens. The web was such a democratic space but browsers narrow that space down because they are centralized products. DRM-enabled only (if ever comes) will kill the web.
- hoaw 8y agoAccessible isn't necessarily the same thing as democratic. The future of the Internet was always decided essentially behind closed doors. No surprise that it is now being done at the big companies rather than 'by the public'. Any country could regulate the Internet in a democratic direction if it wanted to, but that isn't very popular from what I have seen.
- sgt101 8y agoI don't understand - why are browsers centralised?
- nine_k 8y agoHow many major browsers do you know? How hard it is to implement your own? How hard it is to just read and roughly audit the source code? How much control do you have over the features of the browser?
- sgt101 8y agoWell, several are open source. I know that they have vast and complex code bases and are extremely hard to understand or modify but it is possible and diverse communities are working on them. For me the centralisation is at the search engine and the content generation; both have narrowed and narrowed and narrowed.
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- nabla9 8y agoI see Internet as somewhat neutral neutral in relation to democracy in already existing liberal democratic societies. It promotes diffusion of information, but not synthesis. Internet really promotes anarchism. Even today with most of the discussion going trough few choke points. Internet is an anarchist force and as such it's prone to informal elites. They are cliques that control people without well defined responsibility, and often without peoples knowledge or consent. The controlling groups can be rich individuals, corporations, foreign states marketers and political operators.
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- intended 8y agoBase internet is democratizing at complexity = 1. The moment complexity on the web goes up, your need for governance structures goes up and the web becomes a force for centralized control of entities on the web: Human or otherwise. The higher the level of complexity, the better the tools required to manage and analyze data. Therefore the better the tools available to analyze and manage humans. I guess, if you project this, then the highest levels of the web probably are fully centralized and firewalled networks,. At some point you have to deal with attackers, inimical and hostile networks and attacks to take over your "stack" of complexity/society. With the internet and high enough complexity, You can finally attack some subset of human behavior, privacy, brains, or information with automation. The internet is probably the equivalent of flight based damage to fortresses. And this is before people discuss something like singularity AI.
- gaius 8y agoSolar power is considered democratic since anyone can harness it But that makes literally no sense. You can’t fabricate solar panels in your backyard. You need a factory handling toxic chemistry and a supply chain of rare earth elements from open cast mining! Solar is no less centralised than nukes.
- chongli 8y agoYou don't need to use photovoltaic cells to harness solar power. It can be as simple as mounting a coil of tube on a flat board and painting the whole thing black, then pumping water through it. Backyard solar water heater made with cheap materials you can get at any hardware store.
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