6 ms·

In the today's atmosphere, invention of AI would let the top few people (not percent, but people) absorb the entire wealth of the nation and have a completely l

by akomtu 6y ago

In the today's atmosphere, invention of AI would let the top few people (not percent, but people) absorb the entire wealth of the nation and have a completely loyal and merciless personal army powered by AI to cement their high status. Right now the too two persons in the US own more than the bottom 40%, but this status is shaky and depends on judicial framework run by people with their own opinions. AI would allow to remove this uncertainty.

jszymborski 6y ago
I think this statement rings true if your replace "AI" with most if not all technologies.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  The difference is that with other tech if you have enough capital you can try to compete. With AI capital is not enough, you need oceans of data which is only available to the few companies that were able to position themselves early enough at the data spigots. For example, no matter how much capital Microsoft throws at it they aren't able to get access to all the data generated by mobile.
  - aynyc 6y ago
    This! I work for a company with ridiculous amount of data that goes back years. I just don't see how any new startups (even well funded ones) is gonna compete. It's not like they can go and ask users to resubmit the data.
    - btowngar 6y ago
      It's entirely feasible that you don't need ridiculous amounts of data to generate an AI - that's just the approach being taken by the vast majority of research teams.
      - joe_the_user 6y ago
        Modern machine-learning/deep-learning takes a bunch of data and uses high-dimension, more-or-less brute-force methods to approximate that data with a curve. It works good often (seldom works "great" 'cause the data can't fully capture the situation). The appealing thing about this is the programmer doesn't have to understand anything. If you have little data, approximation just isn't going to capture the situation. Either the programmer gets an understanding of the system (extremely costs and time-consuming) or we create systems that are themselves capable of this understanding. But no one knows how to do this, all the "artificial intelligence" victories anyone has observed have come from throwing computing power at a problem. Maybe someone will figure out how to throw computing power at the general problem of understanding but I'm doubtful.
      - aynyc 6y ago
        That's totally fair. I'm not a AI researcher. From what I've heard from internal folks. A new competitor might be able to compete on one or two models to create some niche, but not in the entire market. The market is big enough that the competitors can still be viable companies, but we are not resting on our laurels either, so it'll be interesting to see.
    - joe_the_user 6y ago
      What makes you think all that data is going to be relevant? One of the points of fragility of deep learning systems is that the data they're trained on only represents the past and the conditions of the present can change. I mean, there are a few situations that can stay pretty constant but just think when a bunch of AI system are established, all thinking the world won't change, then a cascade of causes changes and the systems no longer working becomes part of that. Of course, we already saw fragility of modern systems with Covid, so let's add even more!
      - aynyc 6y ago
        Honestly, I don't know. Not a AI researcher. But for competitors to be viable, they also need to get users to give them data and the infrastructure to handle it, that's not an easy task. We actually lost a contract to handle massive (PB size data) user data a few years ago, but after a few years, our competitor lost that contract back to us because they simply can't handle the volume and the processing power.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    This is hardly a problem. I can assure you there's enough public information available on the Internet you won't be able to go through it with any equipment reasonably accessible to a single person.
ffhhj 6y ago
Nowadays AI can recognize speech and search for data. Someone should implement an AI application to compare political discourses with actual facts and show the inconsistences in realtime. That's a way AI would make the world better.
- akomtu 6y ago
  There's no AI yet. But if it's invented, it will be promptly used to create autonomous quadracopter style drones that patrol and police their territory and recharge themselves when necessary. It'll be used to make an "agent smith" type of surveillance bot that listens to people talking at their homes (over the alexa and such mics) and intelligently find dissenters with an extreme accuracy. That's something every dictator would pay half his empire for.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  That presumes that there is a completely unbiased person or group that knows what the objective truth is. What you can do is measure to some degree which direction certain publications or articles are leaning, such as left/right or establishment/anti-establishment. And whether they are more provocative, or more nuanced. That way you can be aware of biases and try to integrate information coming from different perspectives. https://www.improvethenews.org/ https://www.improvethenews.org/
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    We have a person like that in the US. In fact we have about 328,000,000 people that are fairly sure they are that sort of person. (well, we can probably subtract out the population under 2 years old, that's about the age my kids started strongly expressing their views on how things worked.)
- godelski 6y ago
  Ah yes, the Ministry of Truth, what a great idea. Who decides that truth? You or me? Because I'll change my thoughts on if it is a great idea depending which you decide. The problem here is that frequently there isn't an objective truth. There's often a substantial amount of nuance involved too (something ML can't really process yet). You'll notice that fact checkers often limit what they fact check to subjects that are well documented and not contentious in the realm of experts in the field. Unfortunately many problems don't fit under this umbrella. Of course, you could do this in a limited sense, but there's a can of worms that comes with it. Unfortunately we don't know how big that can is, just that if we open it that there's worms inside. So we should be cautious.
joe_the_user 6y ago
Your scenario would be plausible if what was being created now was true "artificial intelligence", an actual means to reach human or high performance (and with that, I'm not sure what how even a few top people could share that power - it seems a bit like Sauron's ring there). But if we're talking present day deep-learning/machine-learning/etc, these system are not doing much than pattern recognition in an impressive, sometimes useful but never reliable way. They'll add to the capital of those on top but not be a fundamental game changer unless something changes (and their seem clearer despite more and more processing power being thrown at them).
- patentatt 6y ago
  Agreed, but it would be kind of cool to have an Apollo-style program for real AGI. I would feel pretty comfortable placing a bet that with (essentially) unlimited funding and the resources of the US govt, a 2030 goal for real deal AGI is possible. Like, if it’s possible at all with anything remotely within our current technology set, we’ll know by 2030. Too bad we (as a country and somewhat as a species) don’t really do ‘big’ things anymore.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    I'm not sure that even unlimited funding would get us there anytime soon. Human mental health is a very difficult & intractable problem to solve in part because we have a very poor understanding of the closest thing we currently have to AGI-- ourselves. I wouldn't expect the human race to be capable of producing AGI that isn't batshit insane before we fill in some gaps of knowledge there first.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    I like the idea but I have describe how hard I'd see being. With things like either the flight to the moon or the atomic bomb, the basic principles involved were established and the engineering process to accomplish the task needed to be worked out (which isn't to deny these were huge, difficult projects). Unlike moon shots and Manhattan Projects, large bureaucracies have poor record for automating discovery. Add to that, that nearly everyone is lost on the question of how to get to AGI (if it's not by brute-force training). And those few people who have an opinion on the subject don't necessarily agree with each other and speak in generalities that can't really be implemented. Having 1000 or 10,000 people brain storming seems as plausible as anything but the problem keeping such pure research at all motivated and directed is itself very hard. The process actually is kind of like ... a university. In fact, universities are already where creative research tends to happen. But our universities, universities across the world, have evolved to keep researchers on a shorter and shorter leash. To get this unlimited speculation, you'd have to undo this - and lots people have an interest in keeping things this way. And it's worth considering that wingnuts and crazy people are very interested in AGI along with very smart people - sometimes you get someone who's all three things, even. So managing 1000 people trying to get to AGI would a serious challenge no matter how you cut it. Plus, the results of AGI might not be what anyone but it's creator(s) want, if that. So there are some hurdles.
ineedasername 6y ago
I really don't know what you mean here. There's no mention of AI being used to replace the judicial system. How do you see the judicial system being subverted by AI?

by akomtu 6y ago

jszymborski 6y ago

I think this statement rings true if your replace "AI" with most if not all technologies.

bosswipe 6y ago
The difference is that with other tech if you have enough capital you can try to compete. With AI capital is not enough, you need oceans of data which is only available to the few companies that were able to position themselves early enough at the data spigots. For example, no matter how much capital Microsoft throws at it they aren't able to get access to all the data generated by mobile.
- aynyc 6y ago
  This! I work for a company with ridiculous amount of data that goes back years. I just don't see how any new startups (even well funded ones) is gonna compete. It's not like they can go and ask users to resubmit the data.
  - btowngar 6y ago
    It's entirely feasible that you don't need ridiculous amounts of data to generate an AI - that's just the approach being taken by the vast majority of research teams.
    - joe_the_user 6y ago
      Modern machine-learning/deep-learning takes a bunch of data and uses high-dimension, more-or-less brute-force methods to approximate that data with a curve. It works good often (seldom works "great" 'cause the data can't fully capture the situation). The appealing thing about this is the programmer doesn't have to understand anything. If you have little data, approximation just isn't going to capture the situation. Either the programmer gets an understanding of the system (extremely costs and time-consuming) or we create systems that are themselves capable of this understanding. But no one knows how to do this, all the "artificial intelligence" victories anyone has observed have come from throwing computing power at a problem. Maybe someone will figure out how to throw computing power at the general problem of understanding but I'm doubtful.
    - aynyc 6y ago
      That's totally fair. I'm not a AI researcher. From what I've heard from internal folks. A new competitor might be able to compete on one or two models to create some niche, but not in the entire market. The market is big enough that the competitors can still be viable companies, but we are not resting on our laurels either, so it'll be interesting to see.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    What makes you think all that data is going to be relevant? One of the points of fragility of deep learning systems is that the data they're trained on only represents the past and the conditions of the present can change. I mean, there are a few situations that can stay pretty constant but just think when a bunch of AI system are established, all thinking the world won't change, then a cascade of causes changes and the systems no longer working becomes part of that. Of course, we already saw fragility of modern systems with Covid, so let's add even more!
    - aynyc 6y ago
      Honestly, I don't know. Not a AI researcher. But for competitors to be viable, they also need to get users to give them data and the infrastructure to handle it, that's not an easy task. We actually lost a contract to handle massive (PB size data) user data a few years ago, but after a few years, our competitor lost that contract back to us because they simply can't handle the volume and the processing power.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  This is hardly a problem. I can assure you there's enough public information available on the Internet you won't be able to go through it with any equipment reasonably accessible to a single person.

ffhhj 6y ago

Nowadays AI can recognize speech and search for data. Someone should implement an AI application to compare political discourses with actual facts and show the inconsistences in realtime. That's a way AI would make the world better.

akomtu 6y ago
There's no AI yet. But if it's invented, it will be promptly used to create autonomous quadracopter style drones that patrol and police their territory and recharge themselves when necessary. It'll be used to make an "agent smith" type of surveillance bot that listens to people talking at their homes (over the alexa and such mics) and intelligently find dissenters with an extreme accuracy. That's something every dictator would pay half his empire for.
ilaksh 6y ago
That presumes that there is a completely unbiased person or group that knows what the objective truth is. What you can do is measure to some degree which direction certain publications or articles are leaning, such as left/right or establishment/anti-establishment. And whether they are more provocative, or more nuanced. That way you can be aware of biases and try to integrate information coming from different perspectives. https://www.improvethenews.org/ https://www.improvethenews.org/
- ineedasername 6y ago
  We have a person like that in the US. In fact we have about 328,000,000 people that are fairly sure they are that sort of person. (well, we can probably subtract out the population under 2 years old, that's about the age my kids started strongly expressing their views on how things worked.)
godelski 6y ago
Ah yes, the Ministry of Truth, what a great idea. Who decides that truth? You or me? Because I'll change my thoughts on if it is a great idea depending which you decide. The problem here is that frequently there isn't an objective truth. There's often a substantial amount of nuance involved too (something ML can't really process yet). You'll notice that fact checkers often limit what they fact check to subjects that are well documented and not contentious in the realm of experts in the field. Unfortunately many problems don't fit under this umbrella. Of course, you could do this in a limited sense, but there's a can of worms that comes with it. Unfortunately we don't know how big that can is, just that if we open it that there's worms inside. So we should be cautious.

joe_the_user 6y ago

Your scenario would be plausible if what was being created now was true "artificial intelligence", an actual means to reach human or high performance (and with that, I'm not sure what how even a few top people could share that power - it seems a bit like Sauron's ring there). But if we're talking present day deep-learning/machine-learning/etc, these system are not doing much than pattern recognition in an impressive, sometimes useful but never reliable way. They'll add to the capital of those on top but not be a fundamental game changer unless something changes (and their seem clearer despite more and more processing power being thrown at them).

patentatt 6y ago
Agreed, but it would be kind of cool to have an Apollo-style program for real AGI. I would feel pretty comfortable placing a bet that with (essentially) unlimited funding and the resources of the US govt, a 2030 goal for real deal AGI is possible. Like, if it’s possible at all with anything remotely within our current technology set, we’ll know by 2030. Too bad we (as a country and somewhat as a species) don’t really do ‘big’ things anymore.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  I'm not sure that even unlimited funding would get us there anytime soon. Human mental health is a very difficult & intractable problem to solve in part because we have a very poor understanding of the closest thing we currently have to AGI-- ourselves. I wouldn't expect the human race to be capable of producing AGI that isn't batshit insane before we fill in some gaps of knowledge there first.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  I like the idea but I have describe how hard I'd see being. With things like either the flight to the moon or the atomic bomb, the basic principles involved were established and the engineering process to accomplish the task needed to be worked out (which isn't to deny these were huge, difficult projects). Unlike moon shots and Manhattan Projects, large bureaucracies have poor record for automating discovery. Add to that, that nearly everyone is lost on the question of how to get to AGI (if it's not by brute-force training). And those few people who have an opinion on the subject don't necessarily agree with each other and speak in generalities that can't really be implemented. Having 1000 or 10,000 people brain storming seems as plausible as anything but the problem keeping such pure research at all motivated and directed is itself very hard. The process actually is kind of like ... a university. In fact, universities are already where creative research tends to happen. But our universities, universities across the world, have evolved to keep researchers on a shorter and shorter leash. To get this unlimited speculation, you'd have to undo this - and lots people have an interest in keeping things this way. And it's worth considering that wingnuts and crazy people are very interested in AGI along with very smart people - sometimes you get someone who's all three things, even. So managing 1000 people trying to get to AGI would a serious challenge no matter how you cut it. Plus, the results of AGI might not be what anyone but it's creator(s) want, if that. So there are some hurdles.

ineedasername 6y ago

I really don't know what you mean here. There's no mention of AI being used to replace the judicial system. How do you see the judicial system being subverted by AI?