I'm not sure "most of us think this way about the world we want for our kids"... at least I don't. Not at all. I find this toxic optimist "vision" utterly naive & disgusting. /1
When writing my #solarpunk essay to the Polish ZNAK magazine I was asked to write a section outlining the differences between the movement and #longtermism (together with #effectiveAltruism, #transhumanism and more).
I think it's important to understand what #TESCREAL (a term coined by Timnit Gebru) is and how it might be one of the dominating narratives on our future in the coming years.
So, the other "godfather" of AI, Turing Award Winner Yoshua Bengio has decided to FULLY align himself with the #TESCREAL bundle, writing a thing about "rogue AI" and prominently citing people like Nick Bostrom.
Take a good look at this text here. This is written by non other than Nick Bostrom, prominently featured by so many of these fathers and godfathers and sons and brothers and nephews of "AI" (given that its all men you know).
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.
I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.
One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.
But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?
Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.
Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death because of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.
Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things well; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.
The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.
They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.
The European commission tweeted saying: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority."
Same exact sentence from the stupid 22 word letter from the #TESCREAL orgs, this one being the Center for AI Safety. The same one whose founder, who just graduated I believe, wrote a "paper" with the title "Natural Selection Favors Artificial Intelligence."
I listened to your fascinating interview (1) with #ThomasZimmer. (1)
Also, I had a brief look at your #Wikipedia entry.
When I read in the shownotes that this was about your book, which I haven't read, "What Tech Calls Thinking" is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual..
(1)
Is This Democracy:
25. The Ideology of #SiliconValley vs the Idea of Democracy – with #AdrianDaub
The Future of Life Institute (weird TESCREAL cultists) has directly moved from open letters asking for "development pauses" for "AI" to producing podcasts talking about magical, perfect solutions to challenges.
"What if everyone got a unicorn that pooped chocolate bars?" is a question you can talk about while stoned and have a lovely time but pretending that this is helpful (or realistic) in any way is painfully dumb.
Who is Nick Beckstead? Lets go down #TESCREAL memory lane
"I am currenting consulting on AI safety & governance. In my last job, I was the CEO of the Future Fund...I was a Program Officer for Open Philanthropy, which I joined...as an early employee...I worked on global catastrophic risk reduction, science philanthropy, & effective altruism grants..I was a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University... https://www.nickbeckstead.com/
Just flipped through a few responses from within the TESCREAL crowd to the criticism leveled against them, and boy does it not help your case if your only reference that TESCREAL does care about actual social risks is a post by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
> Altruism stops for a child crossing the road.
>
> Effective Altruism keeps going so as not to
> delay the hundreds of people in traffic behind.
>
> "Longtermism" swerves to hit the child so no
> one will ever again be delayed by them or
> their descendants.
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> — Rúnar @runarorama, Sep 2022
Yep the #TESCREAL bundle is running the show. H/t Emile P. Torres.
"Leigh will borrow the estimate of Oxford philosopher Toby Ord in a speech on Friday exploring the intersection between catastrophic risk and extreme politics – a topic the former economics professor and assistant minister for competition has examined in a new book, What’s the Worst That Could Happen?"
The ultimate grift of #longtermism, of course, is that its proponents want you to focus on some abstract future waves hands grand problem/grand solution, and ignore the ones right in front of us today, because they are profiting handsomely by exacerbating today’s problems.
Some religious organizations also work this way. They are all grifts as well.
"Les milliardaires actuels de la Silicon Valley ont grandi en lisant la science-fiction classique américaine. Maintenant, ils essaient de la rendre réelle"
Musk, Bezos, Zuck, etc. : These men collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories that they read in their teens