"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
― Frank Herbert, Dune
However, AI at present is just a tool and how you use it is what determines the outcomes. There are several things to consider:
First, do you have guaranteed access to and control over your tools? If not, then becoming reliant on those tools places you in a position of helpless dependency.
Second, do the tools really result in more productivity per hour of effort? If so, they are good and useful tools.
The issue of how those productivity gains are distributed throughout society, or not, is a separate question. Here we again have modern agriculture to look to - the tractor, the seed drill, the combine harvester, the cotton gin and hemp decorticator, etc. all meant that a few people with these tools could be as productive as several hundred field laborers. In some cases, the field laborers could then have the freedom to get an education (many were children), and produce other items, like printing presses and medical knowledge - and in other cases, they were forced off the land and into slums (see colonial export agriculture systems).
Here's an illustrative question: can AI more efficiently and productively distribute capital to promising enterprises than human beings can? Since the AI doesn't need to buy superyachts as an AI status symbol (I hope not anyway), this would be much more efficient than billionaire-run investment capitalism would be, correct? Think of how much money could be saved if all corporate boards could be automated away with AI.
China might be running something curiously like this at present, what with their state-backed investment fund model:
The real magic is that, you will believe you chose that, and that you
want it. You'll look back at digitally revised history - available not
as "documents" to search, but as 'answers' from the system to your
questions - and recoil at the horror of the primitive pre-AI world.
I think so, yes. Thinking about Fahrenheit 451, and the memory hole of
Nineteen Eighty Four it always seemed implausible for any regime to
completely expunge the past. That said, one our commenters (fong? who
I presume is Chinese) was telling me how, between the end of the Qing
dynasty and Mao, 5000 years of cultural history was more or less
erased. What I see with AI is a much stronger possibility for radical
revisionists and deniers to use "guardrails and "safety" to airbrush
out all the distasteful bits of history.
> can AI more efficiently and productively distribute capital to promising enterprises than human beings can?
Sure, but why would the billionaires who own the warehouse full of GPUs permit that to happen? There's a ton of better ways capital could be distributed, and the barriers to implementing them seem to be primarily extant rich people, not the lack of super-awesome ai venture capitalists.
However, AI at present is just a tool and how you use it is what determines the outcomes. There are several things to consider:
First, do you have guaranteed access to and control over your tools? If not, then becoming reliant on those tools places you in a position of helpless dependency.
Second, do the tools really result in more productivity per hour of effort? If so, they are good and useful tools.
The issue of how those productivity gains are distributed throughout society, or not, is a separate question. Here we again have modern agriculture to look to - the tractor, the seed drill, the combine harvester, the cotton gin and hemp decorticator, etc. all meant that a few people with these tools could be as productive as several hundred field laborers. In some cases, the field laborers could then have the freedom to get an education (many were children), and produce other items, like printing presses and medical knowledge - and in other cases, they were forced off the land and into slums (see colonial export agriculture systems).
Here's an illustrative question: can AI more efficiently and productively distribute capital to promising enterprises than human beings can? Since the AI doesn't need to buy superyachts as an AI status symbol (I hope not anyway), this would be much more efficient than billionaire-run investment capitalism would be, correct? Think of how much money could be saved if all corporate boards could be automated away with AI.
China might be running something curiously like this at present, what with their state-backed investment fund model:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-launch-new-40-bln-s...