Human intellect is the source of many of its own problems. Errors in thinking and biases. Will express itself in AI, robots.
Resistance isn’t futile.
AI fulfills that dread of undemocratic technologies. There is zero transparency in the development of these technologies that end up governing much of our lives, leading to widespread paranoia and foreboding.
Instead of tools being manufactured by people to achieve specific public goals, the technologies are introduced without any specific aim (besides making private money) & end up manufacturing the public that uses them by warping its behavior. It is a scary situation that has already come to pass.
The easiest response is to tell people “just don’t adopt” new technologies but that becomes impossible as society as a whole ends up being developed around them.
But what is AI?
There is no consensus definition or instantiation of what ‘it’ is, and this constraints any policy infrastructure to resolve the dread. So, absent a resolution, politicians reiterate and amplify the fear and act in service to their corporate benefactors.There are currently no ‘true’ Artificial Intelligence systems.
There are narrow ad-hoc A.I. ‘learning’ systems.
Lets reverse engineer the systems that exist today, all of these fall generations short of fully replicating human intelligence.
Machine Learning: algorithms capable of ‘self-learning,’ and improving their output through experience. This is supervised learning by humans who teach the computer how to do something. And there is unsupervised learning the machine learns by itself . This is the engine Netflix uses to recommend the next movie you should watch
Deep Learning: are the high hanging fruit problems and is quickly approaching human-level performance on some object recognition benchmarks and object detection
Reinforcement Learning: interacts with its environment and, upon observing the consequences of its actions, can learn to alter its own behaviour in response to rewards received. It is the killer robot dog
Deep Reinforcement Learning:  capable of learning how to adapt in the real world.
Indeed, perhap it can make an iPhone cheaper, but it is difficult to coherently argue that the iPhone is a service to humanity that justifies a chihuahua terminator.
Are the problems it creates worth the meager savings and shareholder value it creates.
Who is driving the AI hysteria and why. Who is putting the scripts in the pundits hands, writing the copy for tech journalists and celebrating the ‘with-it’ politicians?
It is the companies that care about me, and indeed, humanity, and indeeder, improving shareholder return. What a bettr* world it would be, if they had it their way, which they likely will, and massively fired their frothy workforce, moving those lives to the public pocketbook.
Let’s do the forensics on how the tech oligarchs and their spokesmodels want to soothe the troubled minds: Universal Basic Income
Bill Gates argues that if today human workers’ income is taxed, and then a robot comes in to do the same thing, it seems logical to think that we would tax the robot at a similar level. The first problem here is the how to discern new technology that complements humans and new technology that replaces them. Oh, also, Microsoft, surely an early adopter of AI and robots, hides its money overseas to escape the wrath of the IRS
Jeff Bezos, the pillar of Amazon says a lot about being good and compassion, but all that seems to stop at the tax calculator. He should STFU, they’ve been (illegally?) hiding their taxes for a decade+, read this: Taxes on sale at Amazon
European Union In February, 2017, proposed legislation to regulate the rise of robots, including an ethical framework for their development and deployment, but imposing a robot tax on owners. But Juncker, now the president of the EU, while he was the Finance minister of Luxembourg allowed overseas companies to use its tax havens, this was only discovered via a wikileaks dump
Lawrence Summers (Old man with a bowtie, pundit) thinks that robots are wealth creators, taxing them is illogical and Gates’ robot tax would amount to “protectionism against progress”.
Corporations, realizing the golden opportunity to make new shit for cheaper, are reaping the PR seeds they planted and the sermons they have given.
Worshipping tech and algorithms
Algorithms are gospel because we have made computers our idols. Data is theologized. It’s a worship that binds its practitioners into faith that any kind of computational social change is pre-determined and inevitable. And therefore…
Resistance is futile. Technological religiosity eases its adherents from any responsibility for their choices regarding development, adoption, and implementation of new technologies. Amazon is something we don’t have to think about, it is ‘there’. It offers same day delivery.
Algorithms turns computers into gods and their outputs as scripture.
That core of disciples are technically proficient, digitally minded people that reject traditional religions and superstitions. They have set out to come up with a better, more scientific framework. But then they re-create versions of those old religious superstitions. In the technical world these same superstitions are just as damaging, and in similar ways, as before.
The End (Apocalypse?)