[HN Gopher] Ethics, politics, and society in the age of artifici...
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       Ethics, politics, and society in the age of artificial intelligence
       (2020)
        
       Author : sbdaman
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2023-04-11 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bostonreview.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bostonreview.net)
        
       | sbdaman wrote:
       | An old favorite that might find new relevance with the growth of
       | OpenAI. Substance of the article begins after the quote from John
       | Stuart Mill. Some of my favorite passages:
       | 
       | "One reason for my own skepticism is the fact that in recent
       | years the AI landscape has come to be progressively more
       | dominated by AI of the newfangled 'deep learning' variety [...]
       | But if it's really AI-as-cognitive science that you are
       | interested in, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that
       | it may take a bit more than our cool new deep learning hammer to
       | build a humanlike mind.
       | 
       | [...]
       | 
       | If I am right that there are many mysteries about the human mind
       | that currently dominant approaches to AI are ill-equipped to help
       | us solve, then to the extent that such approaches continue to
       | dominate AI into the future, we are very unlikely to be inundated
       | anytime soon with a race of thinking robots--at least not if we
       | mean by "thinking" that peculiar thing that we humans do, done in
       | precisely the way that we humans do it."
        
         | pmoriarty wrote:
         | It's not clear that "cognitive science" will be our savior
         | here.. though I'm not opposed to them trying.
        
       | guywithahat wrote:
       | I'm confident in 10 years we'll look back on this and laugh at
       | how people thought AI would take over, and in 200 years we'll be
       | upset they didn't do more
        
       | nh23423fefe wrote:
       | > How shall we find meaning and purpose in a world without work?
       | 
       | What? Everyone in the world is brain damaged enough to all keep
       | repeating this useless idea.
       | 
       | Work is just the shit you do for other people to stay alive. If a
       | robot is doing that thing, I'll do something else. If robots do
       | everything a person can do for zero marginal cost, then the we
       | are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad?
        
         | sobkas wrote:
         | > Work is just the shit you do for other people to stay alive.
         | If a robot is doing that thing, I'll do something else. If
         | robots do everything a person can do for zero marginal cost,
         | then the we are in a post-scarcity utopia, why is that bad?
         | 
         | We already live in post-scarcity thing(don't know if it is
         | utopy or dystopy, but for some people it's former while for
         | some later, for some reason I think dystopy have higher
         | population), but the surplus of production is destroyed/put
         | into landfills(with police security so no one can steal it from
         | trashcan).
        
         | flangola7 wrote:
         | >Work is just the shit you do for other people to stay alive.
         | 
         | A disheartening realization my sister-in-law pointed out is
         | that we don't perform work, we perform _jobs_. Even the
         | unemployed and retired have many jobs. Sibling, friend, parent,
         | child, partner, spouse. Our most vital and rewarding jobs don
         | 't have a uniform or an RFID badge, but the robots may
         | nevertheless take them too.
         | 
         | You and I might be hesitant to replace friends and family with
         | artificial people but they might not feel the same way. Why
         | risk rejection when compatibility can be programmed?
        
         | SoftTalker wrote:
         | Work and accomplishing tasks is baked into our sense of
         | purpose. Look at anyone who's long-term unemployed. They mostly
         | lay around ths house playing video games or watching TV at
         | best, or they get involved in criminal stuff at worst.
         | Alcoholism and drug abuse are commonplace. Neglect of
         | dependents is commonplace.
         | 
         | People need work to feel that their lives have meaning.
         | 
         | Post-scarcity utopia is exactly that. A fantasy. If people have
         | nothing to do then civilization will collapse.
        
         | panxyh wrote:
         | >> If a robot is doing that thing, I'll do something else.
         | 
         | You'll do some other work.
        
         | pmoriarty wrote:
         | Power is going to be vacuumed up by few people who are good at
         | doing that, and when the vast majority of the rest population
         | is both comparatively powerless and useless to the elites, what
         | incentive will the elites have to keep them around?
        
         | politician wrote:
         | It requires a collective leap of altruism for humanity to
         | bridge the gap from "work for food" to a society free from
         | scarcity. The most likely outcome is a society that drowns in
         | its own selfishness as the fires that sustain our current world
         | order cool.
        
         | gensym wrote:
         | In the land/labor/capital triad, the only thing that will be
         | post-scarcity due to AI will be labor. Anyone who lacks one of
         | the others will be screwed since the only they have to trade -
         | their labor - will be worthless.
        
           | SoftTalker wrote:
           | If nobody can buy your land or trade your capital, what do
           | you really have? We need the value produced by labor for
           | there to be a market for anything else.
        
       | eep_social wrote:
       | > When the system does need a human pilot to do something, it
       | usually just needs the human to expertly execute a particular
       | sequence of maneuvers. Mostly things go right. Mostly the humans
       | do what they are asked to do, when they are asked to do it. But
       | it should come as no surprise that when things do go wrong, it is
       | quite often the humans and not the machines that are at fault.
       | 
       | Actually that's dead wrong, it is the system that is at fault
       | here, rarely or never the human. Otherwise I thought this was a
       | really good read.
        
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