Great quote: "There are industry observers talking about the need for AIs to have a sense of ethics, and some have proposed that we ensure that any superintelli

Great quote: "There are industry observers talking about the need for AIs to have a sense of ethics, and some have proposed that we ensure that any superintelligent AIs we create be “friendly,” meaning that their goals are aligned with human goals. I find these suggestions ironic given that we as a society have failed to teach corporations a sense of ethics, that we did nothing to ensure that Facebook’s and Amazon’s goals were aligned with the public good. But I shouldn’t be surprised; the question of how to create friendly AI is simply more fun to think about than the problem of industry regulation, just as imagining what you’d do during the zombie apocalypse is more fun than thinking about how to mitigate global warming." The narrative that the danger is corporations might accidentally let AIs gain power is appealing but indeed ought to be challenged. The paperclip/strawberry monomania fear masks the way things how things are shaping up now. AI is far from being to able intelligently plan over a time horizon - maintaining a real world process all the way to even a smallish goal requires real world corner-case handling that the best AIs haven't got (self-driving cars have five years away for 10-15 years, etc). But AIs as "intelligent" filters are here now. These allow "better" decision making along with unaccountable decision making, both of which indeed fit well with the agenda of the modern corporation. And that's the thing - the modern corporation is already short sighted, the process of ignoring the potential for climate happened well before automated decision making appeared. But the modern corporation is still more far seeing than a deep learning network and still theoretically and legally accountable to society. However, indeed, deep learning networks that only maximize those qualities that these corporation want maximize and ignore other considerations suit the indeed short-term preferences of the institutions.