this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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The technology itself may be very interesting and it may not be ultimately the core of the problem, but because there is no attempt to address the problems that arise as its use is spread, it can't help but harm our society. Consider how companies may forgo hiring people to use AI to replace them, which threatens not only influencers but anyone working with writing, visual arts, voice work and consequently communication and service. How it can be used manipulatively to exploit people at a rate never seen before. As many amazing uses there may be for it, there are just as many terrible possibilites.
Meanwhile the average person cannot do much with it beyond using it as a toy, really.
Ultimately the real problem is the system, but as the system refuses to change we are in a collision course. There are calls to ban AI, but that is not the ideal solution, and I don't think it can be done in any case. But we are not having the societal changes direly needed to be able to embrace it and end up with a better world. Sure it will bring massive profits to all sorts of business and industries, but that most likely will come at direct expense of people's livelihoods. Can we even trust the scientific and industrial uses when financial interests direct them in such a way that products are intentionally sabotaged to be less functional and durable, or even which believes "curing diseases is not a sufficiently profitable model"?
These days I just dread the future...
Since the forces that determine policy are largely tied up with corporate profit, promoting the interests of domestic companies against those of other states, and access to resources and markets, our system will misuse AI technology whenever and wherever those imperatives conflict with the wider social good. As is the case with any technology, really.
Even if "banning" AI were possible as a protectionist measure for those in white-collar and artistic professions, I think it would ultimately be unfavorable with the ruling classes, since it would concede ground to rival geopolitical blocs who are in a kind of arms race to develop the technology. My personal prediction is that people in those industries will just have to roll with the punches and accept AI encroaching into their space. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, if society made the appropriate accommodations to retrain them and/or otherwise redistribute the dividends of this technological progress. But that's probably wishful thinking.
To me, one of the most worrying trends, as it's gained popularity in the public consciousness over the last year or two, has been the tendency to silo technologies within large companies, and build "moats" to protect it. What was once an open and vibrant community, with strong principles of sharing models, data, code, and peer-reviewed papers full of implementation details, is increasingly tending towards closed-source productized software, with the occasional vague "technical report" that reads like an advertising spiel. IMO one of the biggest things we can lobby for is openness and transparency in the field, to guard against the natural monopolies and perverse incentives of hoarding data, technical know-how, and compute power. Not to mention the positive externality spillovers of the open-source scientific community refining and developing new ideas.
It's similar to how knowledge of the atomic structure gave us both the ability to destroy the world, or fuel it (relatively) cleanly. Knowledge itself is never a bad thing, only what we choose to do with it.