8 ms·

It is magical thinking to think 'the government' can stop a truly revolutionary technology. No, the technology will change the government, not the other way aro

It is magical thinking to think 'the government' can stop a truly revolutionary technology. No, the technology will change the government, not the other way around. AI is not the internet, not the mobile phone, not social media, it is the printing press, it is the horse. The roman empire and its legions were replaced by feudal kingdoms and knights. The knights, armed with massive improvements in horse-breeding, saddles and horseshoes, became massively more powerful than previous types of soldiers. 500 knights, plus 10000 peasants, would have demolished a roman legion of 10000 expert and well paid soldiers. Thus knights became their own social class, trained in warfare since childhood. Civilian based militaries absolutely could not compete, so societies moved away from imperial bureaucracies, into aristocratic courts. AI will be the same. People who use AI intensely, will be far more productive than those who don't, and don't think politicians will be able to stop this. Trump merely mastered social media, and it made him the president, you have no idea how powerful a politician who fully exploits AI will be. AI should be regulated, and people's livelihoods should be compensated to an extent. But if you think 'society can live without AI', then you'll soon find a changed society that can live without you. The rude reckoning will come for the people who think they can just regulate or ignore AI away, the wise know there's no turning back, and its time to surf the tsunami, for good or bad.

majormajor 4y ago
My issue with these projections is that they're so wildly ambitious yet so vague. What does "mastering AI" look like to you? Do you mean "mastering the generative language/image/video models we have today?" Are you expecting further massive leaps in capabilities and mean to refer specifically to people who master those? You compare it to knights and horses, yet "hard power" technologies like that have obvious aspects that today's "AI mastery" doesn't. (As an aside, I lose track of your telling of history, it seems like you're saying knights replaced Roman Legions but also that they made civilian militaries obsolete, but you also say those legions were "expert and well paid soldiers" already?) I'd also expect a lot of things to be more "reinforcing" effects vs "generating" effects. Trump, for instance, was already famous as both a big businessman and a television personality; lots of other people "merely" mastered social media and "only" got a bunch of money for it. Could Trump have become President before Twitter? Reagan did it... it took a slightly different path back then, but being famous is a REALLY BIG starting point.
- anonylizard 4y ago
  I do not know what mastering AI looks like, revolutionary technologies like these can't be predicted that far into the future. But it definitely does not look like 'banning AI'. The advantage of the knight, over the legionnaire. Was that one knight could crush 20 legionnaires (with support from peasants), yet supporting one knight costed far far less than 20 legionnaires. That's a military productivity advantage. The expertise and training of the legions were nothing in front of the full might of the warhorse. Legions were 'trained', but its an on-the-job training, rather than something you aim for since 5 years old. Legions are recruited from civilians, knights usually inherited. All these social changes, because of the horse. The printing press and the gun combined, cause the inverse effect. Bureaucracies became radically more efficient with cheap printed paper, and guns meant that a soldier trained for one year, could fight against knights trained for decades. Which lead to centralized empires, decline of the knights, and eventually the mass civilian movements and wars (French revolution, democracies, nazism and communism etc) How AI's effects on society will turn out, no one knows, not even Sam Altman knows. But better to start using it and understanding it, rather than hoping it'll be something you can close your eyes and it'll go away.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    Thanks for expanding on the horse stuff! I also don't know what AI's effects will be, but ... that's why I'm not convinced it will be a "horse" vs a "printing press" vs an "internet" vs a "word processor/photoshop". From my usage of GPT4 so far, that particular tool is most like "word processor/power tool," but I certainly wouldn't confidently claim that future developments wouldn't be more transformative. But I'm also not convinced they will be.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      If we get a 'general AI' any time soon, I do not see how it could not be transformative. Already LLMs seem really damned good at intent modeling and summarization. That alone is going to have huge ripples in society as we have systems that attempt to classify based on heuristics everywhere, and many of them break easily. It gets a little more worrisome when it comes human monitoring systems because now an AI system can take your audio/visual/textual data and easily (as compared to the past) figure out what your beliefs are. When we reach general intelligence, that is human level reasoning, the person that can buy the most processors and connect to the most data has a significant advantage over any individual without said computing power.
jltsiren 4y ago
Knights were a sign of decline, not progress. They dominated West European battlefields for a few centuries, because professional infantry did not exist. States did not have the financial and administrative capacity to have standing armies. They had to rely on local warlords and their unreliable webs of mutual support. The Byzantine Empire continued to have professional infantry, because they were still wealthy enough and capable enough to support a standing army. They also had horse archers, which had been a key component of the army in the late Western Roman Empire but had almost disappeared in the West afterwards. And before their decline, their heavy cavalry also consisted of professional soldiers instead of individual warriors. Professional infantry reappeared in the West in the late middle ages in the form of mercenaries. Then it turned out that pikemen were generally more effective than knights. While a charging horse is big and scary, it's not actually large enough to crash through infantry lines. If the infantry doesn't chicken out, the charging knight has to.
- anonylizard 4y ago
  Pikemen alone are not good enough against knights. Pepper pikemen with skirmishers (bows + thrown spears), and they'll eventually break. The pikemen cannot charge the cavalry in open terrain, or they'll lose formation and get annihalated. If pikes worked well, the byzantine empire would have never needed cataphracts, just follow their Macedonian ancestors and revive the greek sarissas. Its pike and shot that pushed knights out. Only then did civilian armies have effective ranged options that could threaten knights. Also the byzantine empire got eventually destroyed by the turks The byzantine government which relied on tax collector->emperor->soldier was less efficient than the simplicity of the knight->king structure of the turks. The more aristocratic Franks and Spaniards had no problems pushing back the moors, because turns out the motley crew of vagrant crusaders were more effective than an easily corruptable bureaucracy.
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    Pikemen dominated European battlefields after advances in infantry tactics made them effective. Pike and shot was a later development that replaced pure pike squares long after pikemen had ended the dominance of heavy cavalry. The key development in the pike square was mobility. Earlier infantry forces using similar weapons had more rigid formations, with a single direction that was supposed to point towards the enemy. That made them vulnerable to outflanking by cavalry / skirmishers / archers. Pike squares drilled rapid turns, which made outflanking them much more difficult. The Byzantine Empire remained capable and strong until around 1200, when a series of incompetent emperors destroyed it. In particular, one of them had the clever idea of using the Fourth Crusade in a power struggle against another. That resulted in the loss of Constantinople. While the empire eventually got its capital back, it never recovered. The empire that the Ottomans later defeated was only a shadow of its former self. As for the supposed effectiveness of the Franks and Spaniards: the Reconquista was a series of wars from 718 or 722 until 1492.

majormajor 4y ago

My issue with these projections is that they're so wildly ambitious yet so vague. What does "mastering AI" look like to you? Do you mean "mastering the generative language/image/video models we have today?" Are you expecting further massive leaps in capabilities and mean to refer specifically to people who master those? You compare it to knights and horses, yet "hard power" technologies like that have obvious aspects that today's "AI mastery" doesn't. (As an aside, I lose track of your telling of history, it seems like you're saying knights replaced Roman Legions but also that they made civilian militaries obsolete, but you also say those legions were "expert and well paid soldiers" already?) I'd also expect a lot of things to be more "reinforcing" effects vs "generating" effects. Trump, for instance, was already famous as both a big businessman and a television personality; lots of other people "merely" mastered social media and "only" got a bunch of money for it. Could Trump have become President before Twitter? Reagan did it... it took a slightly different path back then, but being famous is a REALLY BIG starting point.

anonylizard 4y ago
I do not know what mastering AI looks like, revolutionary technologies like these can't be predicted that far into the future. But it definitely does not look like 'banning AI'. The advantage of the knight, over the legionnaire. Was that one knight could crush 20 legionnaires (with support from peasants), yet supporting one knight costed far far less than 20 legionnaires. That's a military productivity advantage. The expertise and training of the legions were nothing in front of the full might of the warhorse. Legions were 'trained', but its an on-the-job training, rather than something you aim for since 5 years old. Legions are recruited from civilians, knights usually inherited. All these social changes, because of the horse. The printing press and the gun combined, cause the inverse effect. Bureaucracies became radically more efficient with cheap printed paper, and guns meant that a soldier trained for one year, could fight against knights trained for decades. Which lead to centralized empires, decline of the knights, and eventually the mass civilian movements and wars (French revolution, democracies, nazism and communism etc) How AI's effects on society will turn out, no one knows, not even Sam Altman knows. But better to start using it and understanding it, rather than hoping it'll be something you can close your eyes and it'll go away.
- majormajor 4y ago
  Thanks for expanding on the horse stuff! I also don't know what AI's effects will be, but ... that's why I'm not convinced it will be a "horse" vs a "printing press" vs an "internet" vs a "word processor/photoshop". From my usage of GPT4 so far, that particular tool is most like "word processor/power tool," but I certainly wouldn't confidently claim that future developments wouldn't be more transformative. But I'm also not convinced they will be.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    If we get a 'general AI' any time soon, I do not see how it could not be transformative. Already LLMs seem really damned good at intent modeling and summarization. That alone is going to have huge ripples in society as we have systems that attempt to classify based on heuristics everywhere, and many of them break easily. It gets a little more worrisome when it comes human monitoring systems because now an AI system can take your audio/visual/textual data and easily (as compared to the past) figure out what your beliefs are. When we reach general intelligence, that is human level reasoning, the person that can buy the most processors and connect to the most data has a significant advantage over any individual without said computing power.

jltsiren 4y ago

Knights were a sign of decline, not progress. They dominated West European battlefields for a few centuries, because professional infantry did not exist. States did not have the financial and administrative capacity to have standing armies. They had to rely on local warlords and their unreliable webs of mutual support. The Byzantine Empire continued to have professional infantry, because they were still wealthy enough and capable enough to support a standing army. They also had horse archers, which had been a key component of the army in the late Western Roman Empire but had almost disappeared in the West afterwards. And before their decline, their heavy cavalry also consisted of professional soldiers instead of individual warriors. Professional infantry reappeared in the West in the late middle ages in the form of mercenaries. Then it turned out that pikemen were generally more effective than knights. While a charging horse is big and scary, it's not actually large enough to crash through infantry lines. If the infantry doesn't chicken out, the charging knight has to.

anonylizard 4y ago
Pikemen alone are not good enough against knights. Pepper pikemen with skirmishers (bows + thrown spears), and they'll eventually break. The pikemen cannot charge the cavalry in open terrain, or they'll lose formation and get annihalated. If pikes worked well, the byzantine empire would have never needed cataphracts, just follow their Macedonian ancestors and revive the greek sarissas. Its pike and shot that pushed knights out. Only then did civilian armies have effective ranged options that could threaten knights. Also the byzantine empire got eventually destroyed by the turks The byzantine government which relied on tax collector->emperor->soldier was less efficient than the simplicity of the knight->king structure of the turks. The more aristocratic Franks and Spaniards had no problems pushing back the moors, because turns out the motley crew of vagrant crusaders were more effective than an easily corruptable bureaucracy.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  Pikemen dominated European battlefields after advances in infantry tactics made them effective. Pike and shot was a later development that replaced pure pike squares long after pikemen had ended the dominance of heavy cavalry. The key development in the pike square was mobility. Earlier infantry forces using similar weapons had more rigid formations, with a single direction that was supposed to point towards the enemy. That made them vulnerable to outflanking by cavalry / skirmishers / archers. Pike squares drilled rapid turns, which made outflanking them much more difficult. The Byzantine Empire remained capable and strong until around 1200, when a series of incompetent emperors destroyed it. In particular, one of them had the clever idea of using the Fourth Crusade in a power struggle against another. That resulted in the loss of Constantinople. While the empire eventually got its capital back, it never recovered. The empire that the Ottomans later defeated was only a shadow of its former self. As for the supposed effectiveness of the Franks and Spaniards: the Reconquista was a series of wars from 718 or 722 until 1492.