A good sober look at it all. I especially liked the part where she talks about recursive improvement in the context of new physical infrastructure that would need to be built. It’s a vital part of any predictions about the world going forward. Physical infrastructure and resource limitations is the most influential, not ideas. Colonialism, empires, etc. didn’t do it for kicks; they wanted control over resources, land, labor. And it sure is curious that the biggest source of fear-mongering about AI having that kind of behavior is the global capitalist white empire itself! Who can guess where it would get the idea that anything would ever want to do that. Seems like classic projection to me.
Now, the white empire doing its usual atrocities and then blaming it on AI? That is not only a likely scenario, it has probably already happened (IIRC, it in fact did happen with the murder of the schoolchildren in Minab).
I really liked this article from Ted Chiang incidentally where where he points out how capitalist enterprise already has an alignment problem with humanity. We don’t need AI for that. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway
Good points made in it. Reminds me of Indi talking about “corporate AI”: https://indi.ca/we-live-under-an-evil-ai-empire-already/
Which is like a technological take on this: https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/
The consistent theme seems to be an analysis that understands capitalism as operating through indirection (corporations, capital) to the extent that it becomes hard to nail it down as deriving from any one individual. With a monarchy, for example, we could point at the king and says he’s to blame. But with capitalism, the system is more insidiously ensnared; it’s always nobody’s fault, somebody else’s problem, beyond anyone’s control, and yet somehow the fault of the individual whose life sucks (how nonsense!). This is not actually, materially true that it’s nobody’s fault at the top, but there’s some truth in it. Taking out a single capitalist without doing anything else is like pulling out a single weed for all the difference it makes in the long-term. Granted, previous systems of power are not entirely dissimilar. We could also say that taking out a single king does not in itself destroy monarchy. But it is a much more direct path to changing hands of power. Capital, by contrast, operates with a mindset of diversifying, both in investment strategy and in power struggle.
Then there’s marxists, who worked out the shell game the capitalists were doing with power and honed in on the means of production and distribution. And only then were they able to wrestle control from the capitalists at the source, instead of getting distracted with the blame-shifting. But I’m preaching to the choir.
What I particularly liked about Ted Chiang’s analysis is that he treats the corporation as an entity in its own right. It’s not just an aggregate of interests of people working at a company, they are akin to cells living within a larger organism. The corporation represents a qualitatively different type of entity with its own goals shaped by the selection pressures of the capitalist system. And these goals can be highly divergent from those of humanity.
Huh. I feel privileged having the ability and will to get to the end of that if what she says is true.
It’s even handed, yeah. Insufficient data to jump to hard conclusions. I still want to see what happens when the Chinese hardware improvements hit.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
