1337JiveTurkey posted:

It’ll definitely happen at the business level that some merchandising AI is gonna poo poo the bed and start ordering and stocking just the weirdest stuff until some human nominally supervising it notices.

1337JiveTurkey posted:

It’ll definitely happen at the business level that some merchandising AI is gonna poo poo the bed and start ordering and stocking just the weirdest stuff until some human nominally supervising it notices.

Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:

Can't be much worse than the guy currently responsible for it. Always orders 1 or 2 pants in normal, human sizes for every clothing store and then 20 pairs of L, XL, XXL, XXXXL. The elephant pants then hang around unsold for months till they are shredded and turned into cheap wall insulation or something. Rinse& repeat for all eternity. Seriously, it's like they haven't looked at a BMI distribution of the pants buying population, ever.

(Sorry, I was just shopping. Don't mind me.)

Hot Dog Day #82 posted:

Matt Damon’s Elysium could also be a good look at the future, since it has a lot of super poor people just kind of milling around between working lovely soulless jobs and being policed by an unsympathetic justice system staffed by robots.

Xae posted:

They account for this. They break it down by the location and the intended demographics.

So you're buying clothes they expect overweight people to wear.

Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:

I highly doubt that blue denim jeans are fat people clothes. S and M are always the first sizes to be sold out with everything in the shop and the leftover sale rack is always ~90% clothes in L+. It's just incredibly lovely inventory management. Sentient inventory AI when? Why not done?

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I wonder how corrosive to society it is that current american pop culture fiction has been stuck on dystopias for several decades.

Like other times and places mixed it up, look back at 1960s sci-fi or Japanese sci-fi or whatever and you see them mixing it up between "the future is going to all go wrong and suck" and "here is a pretty okay future and we made up some stuff that might be cool if someone invented" but the US has sorta just put it's food on the dystopia peddle and rarely let off.

Like it's so obvious whenever anyone mentions anything that everyone is so able to barf out 50 hit movies from the past 5 years about how awful everything is but the opposite is always some weird lol anime or doctor who from england or a book from 1947. Like culture gives people so many words to talk about how doomed everything is and so few words to even think of any problem being solved or different problems existing in the future or whatever.

Like "the original star trek" is pretty much everyone's only touchstone for talking about anything hopeful, but everyone can rattle off brainlessly 50 movies about how bad every aspect of everything that exists is going to be soon.

Mukaikubo posted:

I'll argue with you that it's not just american at all. You know the Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu? He's currently the dean of Chinese scifi writers, screamingly popular, and his masterwork to date is a trilogy of novels that is depressing and nihilistic about the future on a scale that puts most American scifi to shame.

quote:

This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Doomsayers have been issuing similar warnings for some time, but never before have they commanded so much visibility. Musk isn’t necessarily worried about the rise of a malicious computer like Skynet from The Terminator. Speaking to Maureen Dowd for a Vanity Fair article published in April, Musk gave an example of an artificial intelligence that’s given the task of picking strawberries. It seems harmless enough, but as the AI redesigns itself to be more effective, it might decide that the best way to maximize its output would be to destroy civilization and convert the entire surface of the Earth into strawberry fields. Thus, in its pursuit of a seemingly innocuous goal, an AI could bring about the extinction of humanity purely as an unintended side effect.

This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies.

Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.

In psychology, the term “insight” is used to describe a recognition of one’s own condition, such as when a person with mental illness is aware of their illness. More broadly, it describes the ability to recognize patterns in one’s own behavior. It’s an example of metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking, and it’s something most humans are capable of but animals are not. And I believe the best test of whether an AI is really engaging in human-level cognition would be for it to demonstrate insight of this kind.

Insight is precisely what Musk’s strawberry-picking AI lacks, as do all the other AIs that destroy humanity in similar doomsday scenarios. I used to find it odd that these hypothetical AIs were supposed to be smart enough to solve problems that no human could, yet they were incapable of doing something most every adult has done: taking a step back and asking whether their current course of action is really a good idea. Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations. Corporations don’t operate autonomously, of course, and the humans in charge of them are presumably capable of insight, but capitalism doesn’t reward them for using it. On the contrary, capitalism actively erodes this capacity in people by demanding that they replace their own judgment of what “good” means with “whatever the market decides.

Because corporations lack insight, we expect the government to provide oversight in the form of regulation, but the internet is almost entirely unregulated. Back in 1996, John Perry Barlow published a manifesto saying that the government had no jurisdiction over cyberspace, and in the intervening two decades that notion has served as an axiom to people working in technology. Which leads to another similarity between these civilization-destroying AIs and Silicon Valley tech companies: the lack of external controls. If you suggest to an AI prognosticator that humans would never grant an AI so much autonomy, the response will be that you fundamentally misunderstand the situation, that the idea of an ‘off’ button doesn’t even apply. It’s assumed that the AI’s approach will be “the question isn’t who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me,” i.e., the mantra of Ayn Randian libertarianism that is so popular in Silicon Valley.

The ethos of startup culture could serve as a blueprint for civilization-destroying AIs. “Move fast and break things” was once Facebook’s motto; they later changed it to “Move fast with stable infrastructure,” but they were talking about preserving what they had built, not what anyone else had. This attitude of treating the rest of the world as eggs to be broken for one’s own omelet could be the prime directive for an AI bringing about the apocalypse. When Uber wanted more drivers with new cars, its solution was to persuade people with bad credit to take out car loans and then deduct payments directly from their earnings. They positioned this as disrupting the auto loan industry, but everyone else recognized it as predatory lending. The whole idea that disruption is something positive instead of negative is a conceit of tech entrepreneurs. If a superintelligent AI were making a funding pitch to an angel investor, converting the surface of the Earth into strawberry fields would be nothing more than a long overdue disruption of global land use policy.

There are industry observers talking about the need for AIs to have a sense of ethics, and some have proposed that we ensure that any superintelligent AIs we create be “friendly,” meaning that their goals are aligned with human goals. I find these suggestions ironic given that we as a society have failed to teach corporations a sense of ethics, that we did nothing to ensure that Facebook’s and Amazon’s goals were aligned with the public good. But I shouldn’t be surprised; the question of how to create friendly AI is simply more fun to think about than the problem of industry regulation, just as imagining what you’d do during the zombie apocalypse is more fun than thinking about how to mitigate global warming.

There have been some impressive advances in AI recently, like AlphaGo Zero, which became the world’s best Go player in a matter of days purely by playing against itself. But this doesn’t make me worry about the possibility of a superintelligent AI “waking up.” (For one thing, the techniques underlying AlphaGo Zero aren’t useful for tasks in the physical world; we are still a long way from a robot that can walk into your kitchen and cook you some scrambled eggs.) What I’m far more concerned about is the concentration of power in Google, Facebook, and Amazon. They’ve achieved a level of market dominance that is profoundly anticompetitive, but because they operate in a way that doesn’t raise prices for consumers, they don’t meet the traditional criteria for monopolies and so they avoid antitrust scrutiny from the government. We don’t need to worry about Google’s DeepMind research division, we need to worry about the fact that it’s almost impossible to run a business online without using Google’s services.

It’d be tempting to say that fearmongering about superintelligent AI is a deliberate ploy by tech behemoths like Google and Facebook to distract us from what they themselves are doing, which is selling their users’ data to advertisers. If you doubt that’s their goal, ask yourself, why doesn’t Facebook offer a paid version that’s ad free and collects no private information? Most of the apps on your smartphone are available in premium versions that remove the ads; if those developers can manage it, why can’t Facebook? Because Facebook doesn’t want to. Its goal as a company is not to connect you to your friends, it’s to show you ads while making you believe that it’s doing you a favor because the ads are targeted.

So it would make sense if Mark Zuckerberg were issuing the loudest warnings about AI, because pointing to a monster on the horizon would be an effective red herring. But he’s not; he’s actually pretty complacent about AI. The fears of superintelligent AI are probably genuine on the part of the doomsayers. That doesn’t mean they reflect a real threat; what they reflect is the inability of technologists to conceive of moderation as a virtue. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that’s the attitude they adopted. (Of course, they saw nothing wrong with this strategy when they were the ones engaging in it; it’s only the possibility that someone else might be better at it than they were that gives them cause for concern.)

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

Which brings us back to the importance of insight. Sometimes insight arises spontaneously, but many times it doesn’t. People often get carried away in pursuit of some goal, and they may not realize it until it’s pointed out to them, either by their friends and family or by their therapists. Listening to wake-up calls of this sort is considered a sign of mental health.

We need for the machines to wake up, not in the sense of computers becoming self-aware, but in the sense of corporations recognizing the consequences of their behavior. Just as a superintelligent AI ought to realize that covering the planet in strawberry fields isn’t actually in its or anyone else’s best interests, companies in Silicon Valley need to realize that increasing market share isn’t a good reason to ignore all other considerations. Individuals often reevaluate their priorities after experiencing a personal wake-up call. What we need is for companies to do the same — not to abandon capitalism completely, just to rethink the way they practice it. We need them to behave better than the AIs they fear and demonstrate a capacity for insight.

His Divine Shadow posted:

Not sure were this goes, this thread feels kinda relevant thogh.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

His Divine Shadow posted:

Not sure were this goes, this thread feels kinda relevant thogh.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Nevvy Z posted:

When Asimov thought up robots the first rule he gave them was "don't hurt people."

Teal posted:

The fact the mistreatment of the Poor was a perfect example of 100% irrational meaningless malice aside, remember the movie ended on the note that all it took for the world to flip from dystopia to uptopia was for somebody to edit "worldAI.conf" to change "people = theRich;" to "people = everyone;".

The movie manages to be both irrationally pessimistic and optimistic at the same time.

Also I think Blokamp must have gotten bullied by some Australian as a kid a lot.

Mozi posted:

"It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."

This very much rings true for me.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Asimov mostly wrote books about how making an absolute law saying "don't hurt people" hurts people over and over in all sorts of 5-35 page logic puzzle mysteries about how a robot could do a thing that seemingly broke the rules. So I'm not really sure he thought the rules were a super effective idea.

Tei posted:

The kid is not sentenced, the news celebrate it, and the public opinion is with this kid.

Tei posted:

Mozi posted:

"It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."

This very much rings true for me.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I'm not convinced people aren't going to be really crushed if the future comes and some stuff is good and some stuff is bad and their childhood fantasy of megadeath punishing the wicked never come.

Slavvy posted:

Good stuff: home sapiens lives to fight another day, capitalism dies in practice if not in law, art, culture, science preserved and safe in the arcologies,. Bad stuff: 99% of humanity is either dead or eating itself. Wickedness punished: arbitrary and neither here nor there.

Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:

Can't be much worse than the guy currently responsible for it. Always orders 1 or 2 pants in normal, human sizes for every clothing store and then 20 pairs of L, XL, XXL, XXXXL. The elephant pants then hang around unsold for months till they are shredded and turned into cheap wall insulation or something. Rinse& repeat for all eternity. Seriously, it's like they haven't looked at a BMI distribution of the pants buying population, ever.

(Sorry, I was just shopping. Don't mind me.)

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Like if you grow old are you going to be angry at the world when none of this hyperbolic stuff happens? Or will you be relieved? or will it just be a postponed doomsday thing where you are 109 years old and you are still telling everyone any minute now judgement day is coming?

Like when global warming gets bad and 100+ million people die are you going to be running around yelling at everyone because it's the worst thing that ever happened in all of human history but you wanted it to be total annihilation of all things?

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I'm not convinced people aren't going to be really crushed if the future comes and some stuff is good and some stuff is bad and their childhood fantasy of megadeath punishing the wicked never come.

Slavvy posted:

My view: humanity will shortly have a set of tools that allow a level of social transformation hitherto impossible but the structure of civilisation today is such that these tools will almost certainly be used to the detriment of 90% of humanity. This view is informed by millennia of precedent.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I disagree with the assertion that there actually is millennia of precedent of tools being used to the detriment of 90% of humanity in any systematic way.

Look at something like world hunger or poverty or access to water or disease or whatever. It's stuff that goes up and down over the years with it seemingly generally going down. Less people are in global poverty today than were 10 years ago. Less people are starving. Less people have guinea worms.

Bad things happen too. Some years hunger goes way up, or disease. The US is a mess and we have way more hook worms than we have in 100 years. There is no absolute rule every single thing improves every single year and nothing ever goes backwards. But there is no rule that everything is bad forever and no one ever uses tools to make anything better.

Someone somewhere is fixing water access. The amount of people without water has gone generally down overall over time. Either some dumb elite that doesn't know better that they were supposed to be satan incarnate and are being nice when they shouldn't be, some elite that is being seemingly nice but has ulterior motives or some non-elite that is fixing their own problem because water is such a widespread technology that it's within their reach now too. There hasn't been some rising tide of people having less and less water as elites grow in power. (nor have elites always grown only more powerful, with that being another thing that sometimes gets better and sometimes gets worse year to year, for both political and technological reasons). I bet in the US there will be less people with access to water in 5 years than there was 5 years ago. I bet globally the opposite.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

There are plenty of non-capitalistic societies in science fiction. See anything from Ian M. Banks' Culture series to Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed.

Yuli Ban posted:

Anyone following news on the front of generative adversarial networks?

Teal posted:

There's still a heap of kinda big deal issues;