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AI Is an Ideology, Not a Technology

185 points by Geekette 6y ago

cryptica 6y ago
It's a self-serving ideology dreamed up by a group of elite psychopaths who think of themselves as value creators... When in fact they never created a single ounce of value in their entire lives; they only know how to trick and coerce others and capture the value which others have produced (thereby concentrating that value into their own pockets at the expense of everyone else).
- gjvc 6y ago
  are you speaking equally about academic researchers and those in industry?
  - cryptica 6y ago
    I generally don't think of researchers as psychopaths though I'm sure a small number are. On the whole, I would think that they are more motivated by a thirst for knowledge and wanting to make something cool and gain social approval from other smart people. I'm more referring to the people at the top who make the decisions about the direction of AI innovation and use AI as an excuse for receiving tons of funding from the government (or from industry) that they don't deserve and could be better allocated to more productive things which will actually help people instead of trying to control people. Controlling people does not help them. AI tech related to productive industries like farming, construction, etc... That's great. But clearly that's not the kind of AI which Facebook is working on (there may be general overlap, but the goal is wrong).
    - coddle-hark 6y ago
      None of this has anything to do with AI. It’s just a barely tangential critique of... society? Capitalism? Either way it has nothing to do with the OP.
    - scottlocklin 6y ago
      Man you didn't spend much time in academia. The number of psychopaths I encountered in academia quite easily exceeded those in Business, and I've been in business a lot longer. Maybe I was just unlucky/lucky; don't know. Anyway, "AI" is an actual subject, but as used in the marketing and press releases, and at this point on HN, is a sort of grandiose malapropism meaning "statistics and machine learning." The ideology spelled out by the author is ill presented, but fairly real. 1) "AI" as presented is a continuation of the program of the technocratic managerial "elite." The social class of people who more or less started in the time of Herbert Hoover, and while having some mild successes (the creation of the highway system, public health initiatives, WW-2 production), have mostly discredited themselves for decades (aka the shitty roads, a nation of fat diabetics, deindustrialization because muh free market reasons). Similar social classes also failed spectacularly in the Soviet Union. 2) Data collection is mostly useless. In intelligence work, in marketing, political work: most of it is completely useless, and collecting it and acting on it is a sort of cargo cult for technocratic managerial nerds, economists and other such human refuse. Oh, it pays off sometimes: it doesn't matter though; collecting it and performing actions based on it becomes is its own reward. There's an entire social class of "muh science" nerds who think it a sort of moral imperative to collect and act on data even if it is obviously useless. The very concept that their KPIs and databases might be filled with the sheerest gorp .... or that you might not be able to achieve marketing uplift no matter what you do... doesn't compute for some people. But it's real. I encounter bullshit like this every day. 3) "AI" as labor replacement is a wish, rather than a fact. They really mean your job will be replaced by an Alien or Immigrant, not a computer. As the article points out; the human proctored stuff on the web is the valuable stuff. They didn't point out that "AI" produces a ton of web (and email) spam content as well: and it's almost entirely shit. Something like a search engine is somewhat a somewhat valuable linear algebra way of organizing data in an automated fashion, which ding-dongs continue to conflate with "AI." Human proctored data is almost infinitely more valuable. I don't like Wikipedia, but if I had to pick between it and existing search engines; I'll take Wikipedia all day.
- rusticpenn 6y ago
  We are already using techniques fro AI (CI/ML) in several problems. I am not sure why you assume that no value was created.
- The_rationalist 6y ago
  Wtf machine learning has enabled humanity to solve real world problems that brought a LOT of value.
  - jhoechtl 6y ago
    Example given?
    - Tarq0n 6y ago
      Machine translation is the most obvious one.
      - jhoechtl 6y ago
        Does this use AI? I mean it may use ANI = Artifical Narrow Inteligence. But frankly, that is basically Bayesian networks and a lot of big iron.
        scottlocklin 6y ago
        I think a lot of it is ANN based now, but it worked pretty well when it was just KNN. Calling KNN "AI" is pretty cope; it's just a database query. Of course, the large ANN networks are also more or less just a database query refactored as a function transformer, but nobody likes to talk about that.
        simsla 6y ago
        Most of this is a discussion about semantics, which is silly. In 99% of industry, AI is used as a synonym for Machine Learning. The remaining 1% refers to Artificial General Intelligence, which is a long term vision for what might be achieved using, again, Machine Learning.
        The_rationalist 6y ago
        The state of the art is using transformers I believe, which are a special kind of ANN
        6y ago
st1x7 6y ago
The argumentation here is poor. - there is no explanation of what the "AI philosophy" or "AI way of thinking" is according to the authors - according to the authors this undefined philosophy has caused economical and social damage - the authors propose "focusing on the human" as an alternative but the two aren't mutually exclusive at all It's just a cheap formula - keep the target vague, blame the vague target for real problems without proving causation, propose an alternative that's good on its own but doesn't contradict any real form of the vaguely defined target. I haven't read a lot of Wired but this just comes accross as poorly thought out at best. Or worse, it's just manipulative.
- sheeshkebab 6y ago
  > the authors propose "focusing on the human" as an alternative but the two aren't mutually exclusive at all the holy grail of AI, it's ultimate goal, is AGI, which is quite opposite of human focus.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - arethuza 6y ago
    "the holy grail of AI, it's ultimate goal, is AGI" I don't think it is an explicit goal for many people - most people seem to be focusing on using 'AI' techniques to solve narrowly defined practical problems that were difficult or impossible with other techniques. Edit: AGI was perhaps more of an explicit goal during the phase of "good old fashioned" symbolic AI the peaked in the 1980s and early 1990s.
  - ganzuul 6y ago
    Full AGI has little economic use aside from a brief resurgence of slavery. Its real value lies in creating an alien, terrestrial, intelligence to which we can compare and learn about ourselves. Philosophically AGI is ancient and has always been about humans.
- qsort 6y ago
  There's a famous paper by Dijkstra where he claims that using anthropomorphic terms for computers is a sign of immaturity of the discipline. I used to think that was a bit extreme, but the more people keep talking about fucking AI, the more I'm convinced he was actually right. Machine learning is linear algebra, nothing more nothing less. Making a model, using it wrong, and then complaining that "the model failed" is a unique kind of stupidity that's becoming more and more popular with "hoi polloi" due to garbage articles like this.
sadness2 6y ago
This article is an Idealogue, not Journalism.
- classified 6y ago
  It's not obvious on the page itself but the URL classifies this article as "opinion". Do your opinions equal journalism?
futureofaiisnot 6y ago
Still waiting for ai to predict or at least help with a solution for covid. Jokes aside, ai has done a great job for chatbots, deep fakes, profiling customers and analysing stats about data. Beyond that its mostly sensationalism.
- dynamite-ready 6y ago
  Controversial... How about Oncology? It appears to be making a big difference there. Plus there was AlphaGo, which was thought to be impossible, up until the very moment it actually worked, right?
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    Not yet it isn't. Nobody trusts it enough to not require a trained oncologist to look at the samples. Not to mention the machines or software are unavailable for end user doctors. It's in research.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >How about Oncology? It appears to be making a big difference there It doesn't really. I'm not aware of any oncology work that has yet been replacement by a machine, a few hype articles aside every year or so. >Plus there was AlphaGo, which was thought to be impossible, up until the very moment it actually worked, right? Also no. After the AI winter people were more conservative about when computers would be able to compete in Go, and people generally thought it was five more years away or so. But nobody believed playing go was impossible or even out of reach, why would anyone have thought that
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  You missed voice recognition, machine translation and copyright violation detection. (Where it creates problems for content creators.) And some automated blood morphology analysis and MRI/CT/scintigraphy/X-ray analysis, but that's in research so far.
- visarga 6y ago
  There are plenty of indirect applications of AI in COVID but the core problem is not learning, it's searching and testing solutions. So a simulator would serve better. Learning comes after you already have the training data and want a model to solve similar cases.
danielEM 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence Machine Learning algorithms and Artificial Neural Networks are still mostly adequate terms for what's going on in the industry thus abusing of term "AI" (artificial intelligence) makes it just a marketing BS.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  > Machine Learning algorithms and Artificial Neural Networks are still mostly adequate terms for what's going on in the industry thus abusing of term "AI" (artificial intelligence) makes it just a marketing BS. It's true that the terms ML and ANN predate the current hype but they were introduced/kept in use for the same reason: talking in mathematical terms does not excite research grant decision makers or business customers. Neural is a buzzword, it's easy to interpret for laypeople. If you talk about Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Support Vector Regression, Projection Pursuit, Principal Component Analysis, Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces, Reverse-Mode Automatic Differentiation etc etc, then people yawn. Why do we call linear programming "programming"? It has nothing to do with machine instructions. The answer: the name was made up for the hype and for securing research grants, when math funding was dry, but CS research was popular. Why call "dynamic programming" like that? What's dynamic about it? Because the inventor wanted a name nobody can object to and sounds buzzy enough. People try to name things in sexy ways to gain an edge.
wrinkl3 6y ago
This is one of those weird articles where the author's intent becomes clearer the moment you replace "AI" with "capitalism". Anthropomorphizing technology goes well beyond AI and has been a thing pretty much ever since we've had gizmos. When we talk about a car or a fridge or a calculator that we own, we don't talk about the 300+ people that were complicit in its design and production, so I'm not sure how this has got anything to do with AI specifically. When you buy groceries from your supermarket, are you thankful to every single person it took to get them there? It's also strange how the article references GPT-3, and in the same breath talks about how there's a need to provide "actively engaged" and "high-quality" training data, even tho GPT-3 was a success specifically because it relied on neither.
- visarga 6y ago
  GPT-3 training data was 'actively engaged', it just wasn't supervised (labelled by hand).
  - wrinkl3 6y ago
    I have no clue what "actively engaged" data actually means, since the author doesn't provide any links to the studies asserting its superiority. GPT-3 was trained on 45TB of text, little of which was written with AI training in mind.
- randcraw 6y ago
  I think “actively engaged” here means “curated”, where a human had to provide labels or guidance. Obviously the rise of big data and deep models that can induce probabilities is the source of pretty much all advancement in AI since heavy reliance on curation and logic were abandoned. As such, AI really is as much a technology now as it has ever been. It seems that the central revelation in the field since the demise of symbolic AI (aka GOFAI) has been that so much useful pattern matching can be achieved by 1) the inducing of sufficient probability from large data to enable high levels of (narrow) intelligent behavior and 2) doing it using so little human curation. Perhaps the author is suggesting that recent advances in AI are not really based in intelligence or cognition, and thus is only a trivially small subset of the greater endeavor of building machines that can think. If so, then the misnomer she objects to isn't “AI”, it's “intelligence”.
visarga 6y ago
> this gets little attention from investors who believe “AI is the future,” encouraging further automation. This has contributed to the hollowing out of the economy Automation == "hollowing out of the economy" does not follow. Companies can use automation to grow their output while keeping their workforce intact by taking on new projects that were not previously possible. If automation were that dangerous, then being a software developer should be the worst job because it automates itself away. But no, in reality we do more and still need even more devs. On the other hand, not automating is wasteful and a future time bomb. This anti-automation rhetoric is like children hating school while their parents force them to attend - preferring short term ease that comes with a much bigger long term penalty (temporal discounting at work).
- stallmanite 6y ago
  Your argument doesn’t follow. How would being a software developer be the worst job because they “automate their own work away” when in fact they’d have a job until they automated everyone’s work away? It’s likely a given developer would reach retirement before that happens. Meanwhile tons of other people are out of a job.
  - codekansas 6y ago
    I think the point is that software automation tools (automatic testing, nice IDEs) generally don't lead to companies hiring fewer devs, it leads to companies being able to do more with the same number of devs and consequently hiring more. Same thing in construction or any globally competitive industry
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    Point being that software developers automate away their own manual tasks (and even entire jobs) faster than they automate anything else.
- sjwright 6y ago
  Automation certainly doesn’t hollow out the “economy” but it certainly can contribute to wealth inequality by reducing the number of employed humans required to generate value. At the extreme it could permanently upend the concept of full employment in the economy.
OliverJones 6y ago
For a long time, "AI" meant "unsolved hard problem" to hackers like us. Speech synthesis and recognition was AI. Text recognition was AI. Some compiler optimization was AI. Search was AI. Now, those things are, well, those things. They work. Things are a little different now. The feasibility of neural networks trained up on vast data sets means we have non-human systems with hunches. That is, we have AIs capable of delivering results without explanations. Take a look at Neal Stephenson's recent "Fall" for a social network that uses AI to generate "news" stories where the training metric is engagement. The consequence is the construction of an alternate social universe, and the kind of dystopia only Stephenson can dream up. https://www.worldcat.org/title/fall-or-dodge-in-hell/oclc/1148063262 https://www.worldcat.org/title/fall-or-dodge-in-hell/oclc/11... Human hunches are often accompanied by a sense of ethics. The agricultural savant who sexes hatchling baby chickens knows the success of the farm depends on a low error rate. The judge sentencing a culprit knows the consequence of making mistakes. I wonder how hard it would be to add a sense of ethics to neural network results? Maybe it's just a matter of managing the error rates. But this article suggests otherwise.
pritovido 6y ago
The article is confusing. There are private intelligence agencies like google and facebook that make money from extracting all the information they can of individuals in the society. There is a huge interest on their part on ending privacy restrictions, of course. There is lots of money too, and people in charge in governments that are interested in using private security agencies like public security agencies because the private sector is usually way more efficient than the public one. That also applies to spies. This is prone for abuses, and society should react to protect themselves. You can easily create a "dictatorship in practice" from a democracy with it. Now, AI is just the technology that makes global surveillance possible, machines are cheap and easy to control. The alternative humans are expensive and prone to whistle blowers denouncing your abuses. But AI is not an ideology, it is just a technique set, and you can use it for very good things, like counting blood cells, driving cars or watch your house while you are away. It is a good thing that exist, only that it must be controlled by the users and not be the controller itself.
robertlagrant 6y ago
> At its core, "artificial intelligence" is a perilous belief that fails to recognize the agency of humans. This article fails at the very first sentence.
- mc32 6y ago
  Maybe not necessarily, if long term the end result is fewer people making a living and instead relying on a centralized system that props them up economically or otherwise “provides” for them. In that scenario agency is removed from people. Historical or modern slaves also lack some aspects of agency. In that sense you can see that to allow AI you have to be okay with people having less agency. To fib that it’s easier when you can ignore their natural agency.
Traubenfuchs 6y ago
AI is a buzzword. A fresh label slapped on old technology that became much more usable in the last years and allows us to tell apart cats and dogs with 98.6% accuracy.
awkward 6y ago
This is a full reversion of where we were at the start of the century. Back then, the AI paradox was in full effect - if no reliable implementation had been found, it was AI. If you could just A* your way through a maze, it wasn't intelligent routefinding anymore, it was just a simple algorithm. The change is mostly in terms of money. The promise of AI has become a draw for investment rather than a repellant. Additionally, there is an interest in turning the mountains of surveillance data that exist now from a situationally useful tool to a tradable commodity.
nathias 6y ago
Broadly understood this thesis could be properly developed, AI approaches are based on aggregated data not the particular user, and will in a conflict of interests always go against the particular user. There is a lot of ideology present in the way platforms operate, but mostly its to embellish that they are profit driven.
yannis7 6y ago
well, no matter if you agree or disagree with JL, I think it's great WIRED can still occasionally publish great articles like that
stereolambda 6y ago
The hostility here to this article is interesting. To me, a reasonable interpretation is that it criticizes the way we understand/conceptualize some areas of modern technology. Indeed, if for some legal or practical reason research labs wouldn't have access to the data generated by the public (i.e. humans), many breakthroughs wouldn't happen. This is the other side to emphasizing the progress in algorithms (which is of course hard to deny). You can't fully extricate technology from the societies where it exists, and things like naming, branding, institutions, and of course ideologies. There is a tendency to treat some areas of technology like some kinds of ancient gods or idols that have their own "needs" and "mandates" to force on their environment no matter what. I happen to like[1] some their political proposals, like forcing the barter "data for services" to some fully disclosed monetary form. Also, coming up with some method of using these technologies that is compatible with individual freedom is a big concern. Even from purely practical standpoint, people trying and doing what they want has obvious value compared to everything having to be accepted by some (always to some extent self-interested and narrow-minded) authority. Shifting the language to talking about how we can enable and shape "AIs" as humans and societies seems reasonable: emphasizes that we have natural agency in all this. [1] Liking doesn't necessarily mean supporting yet.
Pompidou 6y ago
I personnaly think AI more as a computer assisted culturals productions. The contents of theses productions are numerical, quantitaives stuff, so it look like the result of a pure intelligence. But if you take some distance with what is actually done with AI you can realize that AI is mostly the development of our current cultural environment. So AI is not ideology, but our current ideology let us see "AI" as a pure intelligence rather than a automated cultural production. What have to be questioned is why does AI produced stuff are seen as pure intelligence in our cultural context. What is called AI is "just" a cultural fact (but a fascinating one!).
rexreed 6y ago
This was written in 2018 on this topic: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2018/11/01/artificial-intelligence-is-not-a-technology/#5ea1faa05dcb https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2018/11/01/artif...
antipaul 6y ago
AI as “ideology” may be a stretch, but it tends there with all the mythos behind a word like “artificial intelligence”. Naming things matters. While the head of Apple’s ML/AI strategy likes “machine intelligence” [1], I prefer “machine learning”. “Intelligence” is a loaded word. I think (hope) that “learning” can be understood as narrowly and crudely as the field actually requires. A more sober term would help the entire world manage this better on average, IMO, than if we use the unnecessarily scary and confusing term “artificial intelligence”. [1] “For this reason and others, many AI experts (Giannandrea included) have suggested alternative terms like "machine intelligence" that don't draw parallels to human intelligence.” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/apple-explains-how-it-uses-machine-learning-across-ios-and-soon-macos/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/apple-explains-how-i...
kazinator 6y ago
"AI" is neither ideology nor technology. It's a term. In a nutshell, the term "AI" refers to any situation when software is contrived to massage data in some complicated way that produces useful answers, without any clear, rational explanation why. (The associated "ideology" consists mainly of the position that this is just terrific, and we should be doing more of it.)
ajuc 6y ago
Recently government of my country stated that "LGBT aren't people, they are an ideology" and used that as an argument to ban LGBT demonstrations and introduce local law in some regions where they have majority to create so called "LGBT-free zones" where "propagation of LGBT ideology" is banned or at least cannot have institutional support (like other forms of political activity enjoys). This is obviously not as bad (because AI isn't people (yet?)), but it follows a similar pattern of calling something "an ideology" to show it in a bad light and draw absurd conclusions. If you look that hard everything is an ideology. Stop playing with definitions and just say what you wanted to say in the first place.
- bserge 6y ago
  I'm going to guess Poland? Since I'm pretty much a regular on r/europe :D But yeah, it's a standard tactic of dehumanizing people. Except in this case, it's applied to AI. Which we don't really have yet. It's rather strange.
csours 6y ago
AI is a blanket term or a bucket term. It can mean Artificial General Intelligence - AGI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence - ANI. In my experience and opinion, as soon as something is well defined it becomes ANI - Vision systems, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Neural Networks - it loses the name "AI" and gets its own specific name. How AI is talked about depends on the audience. Nowadays, no one really thinks of rule based engines or scripts as AI, neither as ANI or AGI, but back in the day people thought maybe you could just have enough rules to replicate intelligence. So old ANI is just "an algorithm" To researchers, as soon as an approach is well defined it becomes ANI; at least so far. In future there may be an approach to AI that becomes AGI, but ANI is not considered AI to most researchers. For industry, AI generally denotes a handful of ANI approaches - Machine Learning and Neural Nets. If you say "AI" in a corporate environment, this is what people will think of.
currymj 6y ago
this article makes many valid points but I would have loved to read a version that was written without use of the terms "AI" or "artificial intelligence", as I think it would have been clearer and more interesting.
fizixer 6y ago
Every technology that hasn't materialized yet is an idealogy.
dhairya 6y ago
Jaron Lanier is a frustrating thinker. In general he's a pessimist and highly critical of AI and technology. I was at talk of his and asked him about open source AI models and suggestions for ethical frameworks to guide AI research. He gave a rambling answer about we need to pay all the human annotators ever involved in producing a model and that AI is fundamentally anti-human. His justification was as an odd anecdote about an elementary student asking what's the point of human life if robots will do everything in the future. Jaron doesn't provide a meaningful way to engage with his critique and it seems the logical conclusion of his view is that we abandon technology all together. I do agree with the underlying claim that modern AI research erases the human effort (everything from Mturkers to exploited labor) in producing the annotations that most AI system rely on. It's also fair the critique the proliferation of surveillance states and authoritarian governments that build upon and fund current AI research. There is isn't good ethical guidance and frameworks to help researchers navigate doing research and in understanding the implications of their works. I'd prefer critiques of AI help guide some sort ethical framework for understanding, developing, and deploying these technologies responsibly. I don't think we can just stick our heads in the sand and pretend the problem goes away or abandoning AI in liberal democracies somehow stops authoritarian regimes from building even worse things.
- Kalium 6y ago
  You make it sound like Jaron views AI as fundamentally unethical, for reasons that are at best not communicated clearly.
  - dhairya 6y ago
    He does. Perhaps not in this article but its position he's had in previous talks and articles. Here's the talk I attended:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB9v-OrAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB9v-OrAU
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > Jaron Lanier is a frustrating thinker. I agree. Like Slavoj but without the Zizek. > He gave a rambling answer about we need to pay all the human involved in producing that model (even those that are consumed as opensource models) and that AI is fundamentally anti-human. I do think this raises a very valid point in terms of intellectual property. If I train an AI to paint in the style of an artist whose art I scraped, does that artist have any claim as to its licensing? If not, should they not?
yarrel 6y ago
This article is status signaling, not critique.
dilyevsky 6y ago
Pieces like this remind me of soviet propaganda when they literally claimed that “cybernetics is capitalists’ whore”. Some people are just incapable of seeing past their political beliefs (or unwilling to)
specialist 6y ago
Duh. One hint is in the suffix -ology meaning "study of". With study comes frames, schools of thought, agendas, dogma. My intro to technology as ideology was Neil Postman's Technopoly [1992]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly Challenging ideas for a young technophile. FWIW, when referring to specifics, I'd be more comfortable with "techniques" instead of "technology". So a book title could be "Weaponizing AI Techniques to Maximize Dopamine Addiction via Social Mediums" instead of "Recognize Kitten Pictures With Awesome AI Technology for the LOLs". Of course Jaron Lannier is coauthor. Frequent go-to mildly provocative but still hip contrarian for Wired, the historically full throated Big Tech apologist, booster, and primary paid placement press release conduit.
tboyd47 6y ago
> Glen Weyl is Founder and Chair of the RadicalxChange Foundation and Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist (OCTOPEST). Jaron Lanier is the author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and Dawn of the New Everything. He (and Glen) are researchers at Microsoft but do not speak for the company. The statement that Lanier and Weyl "do not speak for the company" includes an unacknowledged assumption that their position is not tacitly influenced by Microsoft. I don't think this assumption is demonstrably true for these two, nor for anyone who works for a company. Rather, the general maxim applies: "It's difficult to make a man understand something when his sustenance depends on his not understanding it." That said, what are Lanier and Weyl incentivized not to understand? Let's look deeper at (what I believe is) the central thesis of the article. There is a problem: > When people provide data, behavioral examples, and even active problem solving online, it is not considered “work” but is instead treated as part of an off-the-books barter for certain free internet services. And the solution: > Active engagement is possible only if, unlike in the usual AI attitude, all contributors, not just elite engineers, are considered crucial role players and are financially compensated. AI is presented as a one-sided type of commerce where "contributors" (the vast majority of people) are unwittingly exploited by "elite engineers" -- Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, TikTok, etc. M$ plays in this space, but they lack a competitive advantage and do probably would prefer the whole idea disappear. I'll call these two groups "AI losers" and "AI winners" for clarity. Here's how I interpret this thesis: The AI losers consume, engage with, and create content, cluelessly leaving behind a trail of golden breadcrumbs ("data") for the AI winners to profit from. To change this, AI losers just need to wake up to the fact that they're all pooping out gold and start selling these nuggets to AI winners on some kind of open market. The question looming above all of this is, "Why haven't they already done so?" No one wants to ask this question, much less answer it. Why is that? In the mindset of Lanier, Weyl and the entire "humanist" camp (including Tristan Harris and his team), the AI losers aren't just being exploited, but they are too stupid to realize they're being exploited. Hence, the injustice will only stop if brilliant ethicists like themselves step in to intervene. At present, they are addressing the general public, but inevitably their crusade will take them to Washington, where either they will team up with the same people they're crusading against or fizzle out. What they are incentivized not to understand is that the AI losers are not stupid. I don't even agree that they're necessarily being exploited. They're getting world-class online services from giant tech companies without paying a cent. They're also engaging in collective bargaining with these giants to get their way (via the social lever of brand safety, which is flawed, but that's another issue). This is an equation that actually works in their favor; if the equation changes, you can't assume that their behavior will remain the same. Lanier and Weyl don't consider that perhaps the AI losers pay $0.00 these services not because they de-value their own privacy, but because these services are actually worth $0.00 to them. They don't see usage of technology as a choice on the part of consumers, but a compulsion that must be satisfied at any price. But they don't know how many users a $5/year Google would have, or a $5/month Facebook, if any at all. Another question that remains to be seen is what the legal environment is going to look like for these companies in the post-Snowden, post-Techlash environment. Is this "data" a trail of golden breadcrumbs (like all big tech spokespeople including Lanier and Weyl believe it is -- and in fact, their salary depends on that being so), or a trail of nuclear waste? Only time will tell, really. I agree that there is a form of commerce going on, but the commerce is three-sided, not two-. It's actually between the AI winners, AI losers, and the government, and it's much more complicated than the authors lead on. I submit that the AI "winners" are in a more tenuous position (financially and legally) than we are being led to believe.
egfx 6y ago
> the adornment and “deepfake” transformation of the human face, now common on social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, was introduced in a startup sold to Google by one of the authors; Uhh excuse me but deepfakes were not introduced at this company. It was a mobile qr and image recognition technology and that is all. I should know because I was the lead tester of this technology at Neven Vision. They must be talking about DeepDream a google project by the company founder many years later.
vinceguidry 6y ago
There isn't as much difference between the West and East as one might imagine. Westerners claim they want privacy, but see no problem giving it away for shinier toys. If you want privacy, it can be had, both in the East and West, you simply have to pay for it. Or learn how technology works and prioritize it. I moved off of Windows decades ago, OSX years ago, and am slowly tightening up all aspects of my digital life, for power, convenience, and yes, privacy. Privacy is a luxury good like everything else humans want. Available for the masses only if you're willing to spend the time and energy learning how to DIY, or can just be bought if you're rich. It was a weird experience today watching Apple's announcement video. Everything there is designed to keep you locked into their platform, and it was amusing when I saw how machine learning on your phone was given such significant space. They didn't even try to claim that this would help out ordinary people, jumping immediately to reducing costs of very very deep-pocketed customers, medical device manufacturers. Oh but an AR bird will know where your hand is maybe a bit better too. :rolleyes: I mean, that's Apple's market, along with "pro" users, with the HomePod tech being a sad afterthought, a bone tossed to the less-than-extremely-well-heeled users as an alternative to mass-market Amazon devices. America has a cult of the big and flashy, and the engine runs on our data so companies can predict and influence the behavior of the masses. Predictable revenue flows are the name of the game. China's government just has an added incentive to bake it all right into the social fabric. That's all.
ohiovr 6y ago
We may end up with machines that are not technology.
dcwca 6y ago
AI is best defined as whatever computers can’t quite do yet but we think they can do soon. It’s a moving target. Lots of things used to be “AI” that are commonplace now.

185 points by Geekette 6y ago

It's a self-serving ideology dreamed up by a group of elite psychopaths who think of themselves as value creators... When in fact they never created a single ounce of value in their entire lives; they only know how to trick and coerce others and capture the value which others have produced (thereby concentrating that value into their own pockets at the expense of everyone else).

gjvc 6y ago
are you speaking equally about academic researchers and those in industry?
- cryptica 6y ago
  I generally don't think of researchers as psychopaths though I'm sure a small number are. On the whole, I would think that they are more motivated by a thirst for knowledge and wanting to make something cool and gain social approval from other smart people. I'm more referring to the people at the top who make the decisions about the direction of AI innovation and use AI as an excuse for receiving tons of funding from the government (or from industry) that they don't deserve and could be better allocated to more productive things which will actually help people instead of trying to control people. Controlling people does not help them. AI tech related to productive industries like farming, construction, etc... That's great. But clearly that's not the kind of AI which Facebook is working on (there may be general overlap, but the goal is wrong).
  - coddle-hark 6y ago
    None of this has anything to do with AI. It’s just a barely tangential critique of... society? Capitalism? Either way it has nothing to do with the OP.
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    Man you didn't spend much time in academia. The number of psychopaths I encountered in academia quite easily exceeded those in Business, and I've been in business a lot longer. Maybe I was just unlucky/lucky; don't know. Anyway, "AI" is an actual subject, but as used in the marketing and press releases, and at this point on HN, is a sort of grandiose malapropism meaning "statistics and machine learning." The ideology spelled out by the author is ill presented, but fairly real. 1) "AI" as presented is a continuation of the program of the technocratic managerial "elite." The social class of people who more or less started in the time of Herbert Hoover, and while having some mild successes (the creation of the highway system, public health initiatives, WW-2 production), have mostly discredited themselves for decades (aka the shitty roads, a nation of fat diabetics, deindustrialization because muh free market reasons). Similar social classes also failed spectacularly in the Soviet Union. 2) Data collection is mostly useless. In intelligence work, in marketing, political work: most of it is completely useless, and collecting it and acting on it is a sort of cargo cult for technocratic managerial nerds, economists and other such human refuse. Oh, it pays off sometimes: it doesn't matter though; collecting it and performing actions based on it becomes is its own reward. There's an entire social class of "muh science" nerds who think it a sort of moral imperative to collect and act on data even if it is obviously useless. The very concept that their KPIs and databases might be filled with the sheerest gorp .... or that you might not be able to achieve marketing uplift no matter what you do... doesn't compute for some people. But it's real. I encounter bullshit like this every day. 3) "AI" as labor replacement is a wish, rather than a fact. They really mean your job will be replaced by an Alien or Immigrant, not a computer. As the article points out; the human proctored stuff on the web is the valuable stuff. They didn't point out that "AI" produces a ton of web (and email) spam content as well: and it's almost entirely shit. Something like a search engine is somewhat a somewhat valuable linear algebra way of organizing data in an automated fashion, which ding-dongs continue to conflate with "AI." Human proctored data is almost infinitely more valuable. I don't like Wikipedia, but if I had to pick between it and existing search engines; I'll take Wikipedia all day.
rusticpenn 6y ago
We are already using techniques fro AI (CI/ML) in several problems. I am not sure why you assume that no value was created.
The_rationalist 6y ago
Wtf machine learning has enabled humanity to solve real world problems that brought a LOT of value.
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  Example given?
  - Tarq0n 6y ago
    Machine translation is the most obvious one.
    - jhoechtl 6y ago
      Does this use AI? I mean it may use ANI = Artifical Narrow Inteligence. But frankly, that is basically Bayesian networks and a lot of big iron.
      - scottlocklin 6y ago
        I think a lot of it is ANN based now, but it worked pretty well when it was just KNN. Calling KNN "AI" is pretty cope; it's just a database query. Of course, the large ANN networks are also more or less just a database query refactored as a function transformer, but nobody likes to talk about that.
      - simsla 6y ago
        Most of this is a discussion about semantics, which is silly. In 99% of industry, AI is used as a synonym for Machine Learning. The remaining 1% refers to Artificial General Intelligence, which is a long term vision for what might be achieved using, again, Machine Learning.
      - The_rationalist 6y ago
        The state of the art is using transformers I believe, which are a special kind of ANN
      - 6y ago

st1x7 6y ago

The argumentation here is poor. - there is no explanation of what the "AI philosophy" or "AI way of thinking" is according to the authors - according to the authors this undefined philosophy has caused economical and social damage - the authors propose "focusing on the human" as an alternative but the two aren't mutually exclusive at all It's just a cheap formula - keep the target vague, blame the vague target for real problems without proving causation, propose an alternative that's good on its own but doesn't contradict any real form of the vaguely defined target. I haven't read a lot of Wired but this just comes accross as poorly thought out at best. Or worse, it's just manipulative.

sheeshkebab 6y ago
> the authors propose "focusing on the human" as an alternative but the two aren't mutually exclusive at all the holy grail of AI, it's ultimate goal, is AGI, which is quite opposite of human focus.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- arethuza 6y ago
  "the holy grail of AI, it's ultimate goal, is AGI" I don't think it is an explicit goal for many people - most people seem to be focusing on using 'AI' techniques to solve narrowly defined practical problems that were difficult or impossible with other techniques. Edit: AGI was perhaps more of an explicit goal during the phase of "good old fashioned" symbolic AI the peaked in the 1980s and early 1990s.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  Full AGI has little economic use aside from a brief resurgence of slavery. Its real value lies in creating an alien, terrestrial, intelligence to which we can compare and learn about ourselves. Philosophically AGI is ancient and has always been about humans.
qsort 6y ago
There's a famous paper by Dijkstra where he claims that using anthropomorphic terms for computers is a sign of immaturity of the discipline. I used to think that was a bit extreme, but the more people keep talking about fucking AI, the more I'm convinced he was actually right. Machine learning is linear algebra, nothing more nothing less. Making a model, using it wrong, and then complaining that "the model failed" is a unique kind of stupidity that's becoming more and more popular with "hoi polloi" due to garbage articles like this.

sadness2 6y ago

This article is an Idealogue, not Journalism.

classified 6y ago
It's not obvious on the page itself but the URL classifies this article as "opinion". Do your opinions equal journalism?

futureofaiisnot 6y ago

Still waiting for ai to predict or at least help with a solution for covid. Jokes aside, ai has done a great job for chatbots, deep fakes, profiling customers and analysing stats about data. Beyond that its mostly sensationalism.

dynamite-ready 6y ago
Controversial... How about Oncology? It appears to be making a big difference there. Plus there was AlphaGo, which was thought to be impossible, up until the very moment it actually worked, right?
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  Not yet it isn't. Nobody trusts it enough to not require a trained oncologist to look at the samples. Not to mention the machines or software are unavailable for end user doctors. It's in research.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >How about Oncology? It appears to be making a big difference there It doesn't really. I'm not aware of any oncology work that has yet been replacement by a machine, a few hype articles aside every year or so. >Plus there was AlphaGo, which was thought to be impossible, up until the very moment it actually worked, right? Also no. After the AI winter people were more conservative about when computers would be able to compete in Go, and people generally thought it was five more years away or so. But nobody believed playing go was impossible or even out of reach, why would anyone have thought that
AstralStorm 6y ago
You missed voice recognition, machine translation and copyright violation detection. (Where it creates problems for content creators.) And some automated blood morphology analysis and MRI/CT/scintigraphy/X-ray analysis, but that's in research so far.
visarga 6y ago
There are plenty of indirect applications of AI in COVID but the core problem is not learning, it's searching and testing solutions. So a simulator would serve better. Learning comes after you already have the training data and want a model to solve similar cases.

danielEM 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence Machine Learning algorithms and Artificial Neural Networks are still mostly adequate terms for what's going on in the industry thus abusing of term "AI" (artificial intelligence) makes it just a marketing BS.

bonoboTP 6y ago
> Machine Learning algorithms and Artificial Neural Networks are still mostly adequate terms for what's going on in the industry thus abusing of term "AI" (artificial intelligence) makes it just a marketing BS. It's true that the terms ML and ANN predate the current hype but they were introduced/kept in use for the same reason: talking in mathematical terms does not excite research grant decision makers or business customers. Neural is a buzzword, it's easy to interpret for laypeople. If you talk about Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Support Vector Regression, Projection Pursuit, Principal Component Analysis, Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces, Reverse-Mode Automatic Differentiation etc etc, then people yawn. Why do we call linear programming "programming"? It has nothing to do with machine instructions. The answer: the name was made up for the hype and for securing research grants, when math funding was dry, but CS research was popular. Why call "dynamic programming" like that? What's dynamic about it? Because the inventor wanted a name nobody can object to and sounds buzzy enough. People try to name things in sexy ways to gain an edge.

wrinkl3 6y ago

This is one of those weird articles where the author's intent becomes clearer the moment you replace "AI" with "capitalism". Anthropomorphizing technology goes well beyond AI and has been a thing pretty much ever since we've had gizmos. When we talk about a car or a fridge or a calculator that we own, we don't talk about the 300+ people that were complicit in its design and production, so I'm not sure how this has got anything to do with AI specifically. When you buy groceries from your supermarket, are you thankful to every single person it took to get them there? It's also strange how the article references GPT-3, and in the same breath talks about how there's a need to provide "actively engaged" and "high-quality" training data, even tho GPT-3 was a success specifically because it relied on neither.

visarga 6y ago
GPT-3 training data was 'actively engaged', it just wasn't supervised (labelled by hand).
- wrinkl3 6y ago
  I have no clue what "actively engaged" data actually means, since the author doesn't provide any links to the studies asserting its superiority. GPT-3 was trained on 45TB of text, little of which was written with AI training in mind.
randcraw 6y ago
I think “actively engaged” here means “curated”, where a human had to provide labels or guidance. Obviously the rise of big data and deep models that can induce probabilities is the source of pretty much all advancement in AI since heavy reliance on curation and logic were abandoned. As such, AI really is as much a technology now as it has ever been. It seems that the central revelation in the field since the demise of symbolic AI (aka GOFAI) has been that so much useful pattern matching can be achieved by 1) the inducing of sufficient probability from large data to enable high levels of (narrow) intelligent behavior and 2) doing it using so little human curation. Perhaps the author is suggesting that recent advances in AI are not really based in intelligence or cognition, and thus is only a trivially small subset of the greater endeavor of building machines that can think. If so, then the misnomer she objects to isn't “AI”, it's “intelligence”.

visarga 6y ago

> this gets little attention from investors who believe “AI is the future,” encouraging further automation. This has contributed to the hollowing out of the economy Automation == "hollowing out of the economy" does not follow. Companies can use automation to grow their output while keeping their workforce intact by taking on new projects that were not previously possible. If automation were that dangerous, then being a software developer should be the worst job because it automates itself away. But no, in reality we do more and still need even more devs. On the other hand, not automating is wasteful and a future time bomb. This anti-automation rhetoric is like children hating school while their parents force them to attend - preferring short term ease that comes with a much bigger long term penalty (temporal discounting at work).

stallmanite 6y ago
Your argument doesn’t follow. How would being a software developer be the worst job because they “automate their own work away” when in fact they’d have a job until they automated everyone’s work away? It’s likely a given developer would reach retirement before that happens. Meanwhile tons of other people are out of a job.
- codekansas 6y ago
  I think the point is that software automation tools (automatic testing, nice IDEs) generally don't lead to companies hiring fewer devs, it leads to companies being able to do more with the same number of devs and consequently hiring more. Same thing in construction or any globally competitive industry
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  Point being that software developers automate away their own manual tasks (and even entire jobs) faster than they automate anything else.
sjwright 6y ago
Automation certainly doesn’t hollow out the “economy” but it certainly can contribute to wealth inequality by reducing the number of employed humans required to generate value. At the extreme it could permanently upend the concept of full employment in the economy.

OliverJones 6y ago

For a long time, "AI" meant "unsolved hard problem" to hackers like us. Speech synthesis and recognition was AI. Text recognition was AI. Some compiler optimization was AI. Search was AI. Now, those things are, well, those things. They work. Things are a little different now. The feasibility of neural networks trained up on vast data sets means we have non-human systems with hunches. That is, we have AIs capable of delivering results without explanations. Take a look at Neal Stephenson's recent "Fall" for a social network that uses AI to generate "news" stories where the training metric is engagement. The consequence is the construction of an alternate social universe, and the kind of dystopia only Stephenson can dream up. https://www.worldcat.org/title/fall-or-dodge-in-hell/oclc/1148063262 https://www.worldcat.org/title/fall-or-dodge-in-hell/oclc/11... Human hunches are often accompanied by a sense of ethics. The agricultural savant who sexes hatchling baby chickens knows the success of the farm depends on a low error rate. The judge sentencing a culprit knows the consequence of making mistakes. I wonder how hard it would be to add a sense of ethics to neural network results? Maybe it's just a matter of managing the error rates. But this article suggests otherwise.

pritovido 6y ago

The article is confusing. There are private intelligence agencies like google and facebook that make money from extracting all the information they can of individuals in the society. There is a huge interest on their part on ending privacy restrictions, of course. There is lots of money too, and people in charge in governments that are interested in using private security agencies like public security agencies because the private sector is usually way more efficient than the public one. That also applies to spies. This is prone for abuses, and society should react to protect themselves. You can easily create a "dictatorship in practice" from a democracy with it. Now, AI is just the technology that makes global surveillance possible, machines are cheap and easy to control. The alternative humans are expensive and prone to whistle blowers denouncing your abuses. But AI is not an ideology, it is just a technique set, and you can use it for very good things, like counting blood cells, driving cars or watch your house while you are away. It is a good thing that exist, only that it must be controlled by the users and not be the controller itself.

robertlagrant 6y ago

> At its core, "artificial intelligence" is a perilous belief that fails to recognize the agency of humans. This article fails at the very first sentence.

mc32 6y ago
Maybe not necessarily, if long term the end result is fewer people making a living and instead relying on a centralized system that props them up economically or otherwise “provides” for them. In that scenario agency is removed from people. Historical or modern slaves also lack some aspects of agency. In that sense you can see that to allow AI you have to be okay with people having less agency. To fib that it’s easier when you can ignore their natural agency.

Traubenfuchs 6y ago

AI is a buzzword. A fresh label slapped on old technology that became much more usable in the last years and allows us to tell apart cats and dogs with 98.6% accuracy.

awkward 6y ago

This is a full reversion of where we were at the start of the century. Back then, the AI paradox was in full effect - if no reliable implementation had been found, it was AI. If you could just A* your way through a maze, it wasn't intelligent routefinding anymore, it was just a simple algorithm. The change is mostly in terms of money. The promise of AI has become a draw for investment rather than a repellant. Additionally, there is an interest in turning the mountains of surveillance data that exist now from a situationally useful tool to a tradable commodity.

nathias 6y ago

Broadly understood this thesis could be properly developed, AI approaches are based on aggregated data not the particular user, and will in a conflict of interests always go against the particular user. There is a lot of ideology present in the way platforms operate, but mostly its to embellish that they are profit driven.

yannis7 6y ago

well, no matter if you agree or disagree with JL, I think it's great WIRED can still occasionally publish great articles like that

stereolambda 6y ago

The hostility here to this article is interesting. To me, a reasonable interpretation is that it criticizes the way we understand/conceptualize some areas of modern technology. Indeed, if for some legal or practical reason research labs wouldn't have access to the data generated by the public (i.e. humans), many breakthroughs wouldn't happen. This is the other side to emphasizing the progress in algorithms (which is of course hard to deny). You can't fully extricate technology from the societies where it exists, and things like naming, branding, institutions, and of course ideologies. There is a tendency to treat some areas of technology like some kinds of ancient gods or idols that have their own "needs" and "mandates" to force on their environment no matter what. I happen to like[1] some their political proposals, like forcing the barter "data for services" to some fully disclosed monetary form. Also, coming up with some method of using these technologies that is compatible with individual freedom is a big concern. Even from purely practical standpoint, people trying and doing what they want has obvious value compared to everything having to be accepted by some (always to some extent self-interested and narrow-minded) authority. Shifting the language to talking about how we can enable and shape "AIs" as humans and societies seems reasonable: emphasizes that we have natural agency in all this. [1] Liking doesn't necessarily mean supporting yet.

Pompidou 6y ago

I personnaly think AI more as a computer assisted culturals productions. The contents of theses productions are numerical, quantitaives stuff, so it look like the result of a pure intelligence. But if you take some distance with what is actually done with AI you can realize that AI is mostly the development of our current cultural environment. So AI is not ideology, but our current ideology let us see "AI" as a pure intelligence rather than a automated cultural production. What have to be questioned is why does AI produced stuff are seen as pure intelligence in our cultural context. What is called AI is "just" a cultural fact (but a fascinating one!).

rexreed 6y ago

This was written in 2018 on this topic: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2018/11/01/artificial-intelligence-is-not-a-technology/#5ea1faa05dcb https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2018/11/01/artif...

antipaul 6y ago

AI as “ideology” may be a stretch, but it tends there with all the mythos behind a word like “artificial intelligence”. Naming things matters. While the head of Apple’s ML/AI strategy likes “machine intelligence” [1], I prefer “machine learning”. “Intelligence” is a loaded word. I think (hope) that “learning” can be understood as narrowly and crudely as the field actually requires. A more sober term would help the entire world manage this better on average, IMO, than if we use the unnecessarily scary and confusing term “artificial intelligence”. [1] “For this reason and others, many AI experts (Giannandrea included) have suggested alternative terms like "machine intelligence" that don't draw parallels to human intelligence.” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/apple-explains-how-it-uses-machine-learning-across-ios-and-soon-macos/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/apple-explains-how-i...

kazinator 6y ago

"AI" is neither ideology nor technology. It's a term. In a nutshell, the term "AI" refers to any situation when software is contrived to massage data in some complicated way that produces useful answers, without any clear, rational explanation why. (The associated "ideology" consists mainly of the position that this is just terrific, and we should be doing more of it.)

ajuc 6y ago

Recently government of my country stated that "LGBT aren't people, they are an ideology" and used that as an argument to ban LGBT demonstrations and introduce local law in some regions where they have majority to create so called "LGBT-free zones" where "propagation of LGBT ideology" is banned or at least cannot have institutional support (like other forms of political activity enjoys). This is obviously not as bad (because AI isn't people (yet?)), but it follows a similar pattern of calling something "an ideology" to show it in a bad light and draw absurd conclusions. If you look that hard everything is an ideology. Stop playing with definitions and just say what you wanted to say in the first place.

bserge 6y ago
I'm going to guess Poland? Since I'm pretty much a regular on r/europe :D But yeah, it's a standard tactic of dehumanizing people. Except in this case, it's applied to AI. Which we don't really have yet. It's rather strange.

csours 6y ago

AI is a blanket term or a bucket term. It can mean Artificial General Intelligence - AGI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence - ANI. In my experience and opinion, as soon as something is well defined it becomes ANI - Vision systems, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Neural Networks - it loses the name "AI" and gets its own specific name. How AI is talked about depends on the audience. Nowadays, no one really thinks of rule based engines or scripts as AI, neither as ANI or AGI, but back in the day people thought maybe you could just have enough rules to replicate intelligence. So old ANI is just "an algorithm" To researchers, as soon as an approach is well defined it becomes ANI; at least so far. In future there may be an approach to AI that becomes AGI, but ANI is not considered AI to most researchers. For industry, AI generally denotes a handful of ANI approaches - Machine Learning and Neural Nets. If you say "AI" in a corporate environment, this is what people will think of.

currymj 6y ago

this article makes many valid points but I would have loved to read a version that was written without use of the terms "AI" or "artificial intelligence", as I think it would have been clearer and more interesting.

fizixer 6y ago

Every technology that hasn't materialized yet is an idealogy.

dhairya 6y ago

Jaron Lanier is a frustrating thinker. In general he's a pessimist and highly critical of AI and technology. I was at talk of his and asked him about open source AI models and suggestions for ethical frameworks to guide AI research. He gave a rambling answer about we need to pay all the human annotators ever involved in producing a model and that AI is fundamentally anti-human. His justification was as an odd anecdote about an elementary student asking what's the point of human life if robots will do everything in the future. Jaron doesn't provide a meaningful way to engage with his critique and it seems the logical conclusion of his view is that we abandon technology all together. I do agree with the underlying claim that modern AI research erases the human effort (everything from Mturkers to exploited labor) in producing the annotations that most AI system rely on. It's also fair the critique the proliferation of surveillance states and authoritarian governments that build upon and fund current AI research. There is isn't good ethical guidance and frameworks to help researchers navigate doing research and in understanding the implications of their works. I'd prefer critiques of AI help guide some sort ethical framework for understanding, developing, and deploying these technologies responsibly. I don't think we can just stick our heads in the sand and pretend the problem goes away or abandoning AI in liberal democracies somehow stops authoritarian regimes from building even worse things.

Kalium 6y ago
You make it sound like Jaron views AI as fundamentally unethical, for reasons that are at best not communicated clearly.
- dhairya 6y ago
  He does. Perhaps not in this article but its position he's had in previous talks and articles. Here's the talk I attended:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB9v-OrAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB9v-OrAU
gridlockd 6y ago
> Jaron Lanier is a frustrating thinker. I agree. Like Slavoj but without the Zizek. > He gave a rambling answer about we need to pay all the human involved in producing that model (even those that are consumed as opensource models) and that AI is fundamentally anti-human. I do think this raises a very valid point in terms of intellectual property. If I train an AI to paint in the style of an artist whose art I scraped, does that artist have any claim as to its licensing? If not, should they not?

yarrel 6y ago

This article is status signaling, not critique.

dilyevsky 6y ago

Pieces like this remind me of soviet propaganda when they literally claimed that “cybernetics is capitalists’ whore”. Some people are just incapable of seeing past their political beliefs (or unwilling to)

specialist 6y ago

Duh. One hint is in the suffix -ology meaning "study of". With study comes frames, schools of thought, agendas, dogma. My intro to technology as ideology was Neil Postman's Technopoly [1992]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly Challenging ideas for a young technophile. FWIW, when referring to specifics, I'd be more comfortable with "techniques" instead of "technology". So a book title could be "Weaponizing AI Techniques to Maximize Dopamine Addiction via Social Mediums" instead of "Recognize Kitten Pictures With Awesome AI Technology for the LOLs". Of course Jaron Lannier is coauthor. Frequent go-to mildly provocative but still hip contrarian for Wired, the historically full throated Big Tech apologist, booster, and primary paid placement press release conduit.

tboyd47 6y ago

> Glen Weyl is Founder and Chair of the RadicalxChange Foundation and Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist (OCTOPEST). Jaron Lanier is the author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and Dawn of the New Everything. He (and Glen) are researchers at Microsoft but do not speak for the company. The statement that Lanier and Weyl "do not speak for the company" includes an unacknowledged assumption that their position is not tacitly influenced by Microsoft. I don't think this assumption is demonstrably true for these two, nor for anyone who works for a company. Rather, the general maxim applies: "It's difficult to make a man understand something when his sustenance depends on his not understanding it." That said, what are Lanier and Weyl incentivized not to understand? Let's look deeper at (what I believe is) the central thesis of the article. There is a problem: > When people provide data, behavioral examples, and even active problem solving online, it is not considered “work” but is instead treated as part of an off-the-books barter for certain free internet services. And the solution: > Active engagement is possible only if, unlike in the usual AI attitude, all contributors, not just elite engineers, are considered crucial role players and are financially compensated. AI is presented as a one-sided type of commerce where "contributors" (the vast majority of people) are unwittingly exploited by "elite engineers" -- Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, TikTok, etc. M$ plays in this space, but they lack a competitive advantage and do probably would prefer the whole idea disappear. I'll call these two groups "AI losers" and "AI winners" for clarity. Here's how I interpret this thesis: The AI losers consume, engage with, and create content, cluelessly leaving behind a trail of golden breadcrumbs ("data") for the AI winners to profit from. To change this, AI losers just need to wake up to the fact that they're all pooping out gold and start selling these nuggets to AI winners on some kind of open market. The question looming above all of this is, "Why haven't they already done so?" No one wants to ask this question, much less answer it. Why is that? In the mindset of Lanier, Weyl and the entire "humanist" camp (including Tristan Harris and his team), the AI losers aren't just being exploited, but they are too stupid to realize they're being exploited. Hence, the injustice will only stop if brilliant ethicists like themselves step in to intervene. At present, they are addressing the general public, but inevitably their crusade will take them to Washington, where either they will team up with the same people they're crusading against or fizzle out. What they are incentivized not to understand is that the AI losers are not stupid. I don't even agree that they're necessarily being exploited. They're getting world-class online services from giant tech companies without paying a cent. They're also engaging in collective bargaining with these giants to get their way (via the social lever of brand safety, which is flawed, but that's another issue). This is an equation that actually works in their favor; if the equation changes, you can't assume that their behavior will remain the same. Lanier and Weyl don't consider that perhaps the AI losers pay $0.00 these services not because they de-value their own privacy, but because these services are actually worth $0.00 to them. They don't see usage of technology as a choice on the part of consumers, but a compulsion that must be satisfied at any price. But they don't know how many users a $5/year Google would have, or a $5/month Facebook, if any at all. Another question that remains to be seen is what the legal environment is going to look like for these companies in the post-Snowden, post-Techlash environment. Is this "data" a trail of golden breadcrumbs (like all big tech spokespeople including Lanier and Weyl believe it is -- and in fact, their salary depends on that being so), or a trail of nuclear waste? Only time will tell, really. I agree that there is a form of commerce going on, but the commerce is three-sided, not two-. It's actually between the AI winners, AI losers, and the government, and it's much more complicated than the authors lead on. I submit that the AI "winners" are in a more tenuous position (financially and legally) than we are being led to believe.

egfx 6y ago

> the adornment and “deepfake” transformation of the human face, now common on social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, was introduced in a startup sold to Google by one of the authors; Uhh excuse me but deepfakes were not introduced at this company. It was a mobile qr and image recognition technology and that is all. I should know because I was the lead tester of this technology at Neven Vision. They must be talking about DeepDream a google project by the company founder many years later.

vinceguidry 6y ago

There isn't as much difference between the West and East as one might imagine. Westerners claim they want privacy, but see no problem giving it away for shinier toys. If you want privacy, it can be had, both in the East and West, you simply have to pay for it. Or learn how technology works and prioritize it. I moved off of Windows decades ago, OSX years ago, and am slowly tightening up all aspects of my digital life, for power, convenience, and yes, privacy. Privacy is a luxury good like everything else humans want. Available for the masses only if you're willing to spend the time and energy learning how to DIY, or can just be bought if you're rich. It was a weird experience today watching Apple's announcement video. Everything there is designed to keep you locked into their platform, and it was amusing when I saw how machine learning on your phone was given such significant space. They didn't even try to claim that this would help out ordinary people, jumping immediately to reducing costs of very very deep-pocketed customers, medical device manufacturers. Oh but an AR bird will know where your hand is maybe a bit better too. :rolleyes: I mean, that's Apple's market, along with "pro" users, with the HomePod tech being a sad afterthought, a bone tossed to the less-than-extremely-well-heeled users as an alternative to mass-market Amazon devices. America has a cult of the big and flashy, and the engine runs on our data so companies can predict and influence the behavior of the masses. Predictable revenue flows are the name of the game. China's government just has an added incentive to bake it all right into the social fabric. That's all.

ohiovr 6y ago

We may end up with machines that are not technology.

dcwca 6y ago

AI is best defined as whatever computers can’t quite do yet but we think they can do soon. It’s a moving target. Lots of things used to be “AI” that are commonplace now.