AI is a tool and a weapon unlike any other that human beings have developed; it will almost certainly allow the already powerful to consolidate their power further.
So far, computers have been economic complements to high cognitive ability. Harari extrapolates that trend. He thinks that it leads to a loss of autonomy for the great mass of people who lack the highest cognitive ability.
George Gilder, in Life After Google, takes the opposite point of view.
In the early nuclear age there were fears about proliferation in which is was imagined that every country, company, group of militant extremists, etc. would one day be able to build or easily and quickly acquire their own bombs, and that this would have huge decentralizing (and disrupting) impact on power and geopolitical affairs.
It didn’t work out that way – quite the contrary. Turns out that building nukes remained challenging, time consuming, and expensive. The nuclear club has remained small-ish, and relations between the few powers with the nukes still undergird the global order.
I’m with Harari on this one. It seems to me that the ability to collect, story, and analyze the mountains of data needed to make some of those “AI” applications work will remain the province of a few powerful states and corporations, which will tend in the direction of centralization. I am not at all sold on Gilder’s vision of a future blockchain world / economy, or at least, probably not soon enough to matter, as it seems at the moment to turn out to be both pretty hard to pull off and lacking in popular interest and motivation.
I read the “Chapter 5: ‘The 10 Laws of the Cryptocosm'” excerpt at Townhall and frankly it didn’t make a lot of sense.
I think this speaks (poorly) for itself, but your mileage may vary.
I thought that Harari article was one of the most depressing things I’ve read in a while. It sounds too plausible…
My, to be sure poorly informed, impression is that the future is more likely to be headed in the direction of countries like China where individuals are identifed and monitored whereever they go through surveillance recognition technology that feeds into a social credit system that rewards or punishes. I recall reading about some journalist over there denied the ability to buy a plane ticket because he had been caught on camera jaywalking.
The whole notion of privacy on the internet is laughable. Does anyone in the US actually thinkthat their emails, texts, online browsing is not readily available to government intelligence agencies? I use the epic privacy browser yet I have little faith that is not recorded somewhere somehow. But that is nothing compared to how much data on us is available to others via our use of credit and debit cards, etc. Cash will be eliminated and driverless cars will know our movement patterns and when we step out of the car and go for a walk drones will be recording and recognizing everything.
Some of this is no doubt benign. Is there any problem with giving the grocery store a personal identifier so that they can better manage their marketing and stocking to their customer’ desires?
Maybe the bigger threat though is that rise of IT giants furthers the narrative advanced by Paul Krugman and others that government intervention will make us free from the “unfreedom” of dealing with businesses.
Krugman recently argued that “advocates of unrestricted corporate power and minimal worker protection have been getting away for far too long with pretending that they’re the defenders of freedom.” Fear of the big tech boogie man will be inflamed to justify even more government control, monitoring, and surveillance.
Krugman claims New York is freer than Florida. Yet, the number of people moving from New York to Florida is greater than that between any other two states.
Which brings us back to the bad penny of exit.
Perhaps a constitutional convention could strike a deal – in exchange for elimination of the electoral college, how about a secession clause by which an individual state could leave the union by notice following whatever process the state decides to adopt with no judicial review?
Yes a lot would be lost, but not having to consider Paul Krugman a fellow citizen? Priceless.
That Chinese social-credit stuff is part of what makes Harari’s suggestions so plausible. That could be the first step along the way of total control…
Knowledge is a distributed function. The AI machine in my hand always knows more about me than the centralized machine. The individual holds the ‘ad blocker’ still, thus has more control, not less.
Great article – tho far too little about the Human-AI teams. There will be quite a long period of AI-servants helping humans. There was talk about doctors, but what about teachers? The smartphone can, and soon will, have a study support AI app to help students learn more, and more quickly.
The fear of job loss seems to tie in with the Universal Basic Income push — I prefer a Job Guarantee, including more K-12 assistants and elderly & hospital care assistants.
Important conclusion near the end:
“Nationalization of data by governments could offer one solution; it would certainly curb the power of big corporations. But history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overmighty governments. So we had better call upon our scientists, our philosophers, our lawyers, and even our poets to turn their attention to this big question: How do you regulate the ownership of data?”
The USA gov’t should nationalize and demonetize Facebook, and break up Google. And increase privacy protection, require data sales to be registered and in a monthly note given as a digital message to the individuals — what info about you FB / Google / Yahoo sold to whoever bought it.
Every society has its mass of stupid people. Successful societies are those which can bottle up the stupid people, with gatekeepers making sure that only certain information reaches them.
Speaking as a Muslim, there was a time when our stupid people were protected from harming themselves. But then the internet came along and now every radical Islamist has access to them. And you’ve seen the results of radicalization.
Similarly, we have the same situation with Middle America. These people are ignorant about economics, which is a very difficult and counter-intuitive subject. But look at them now, talking about “trade deficits” and such. I doubt these people even understand the simplest ideas in economics. And then I’m reminded that these people vote.
So the way I see it, if you want to hurt a country, just use the internet to reach out to its stupid people. And destroy them that way.
Incidentally, in gematria, the letter “w” represents the number “6”. The internet is “www”, i.e., 666. Which is the number of the beast.
The China story, so far, seems to indicate AI will be used to control populations.