Why Technology Favors Tyranny

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/?single_page=true

by winterismute • 8 years ago

120 104 8 years ago

theatlantic.com

doombolt• 8 years ago

If you as a society ignore it and let it loose, why won't it?

See GDPR as a solid example of trend reversal.

BjoernKW2• 8 years ago

The jury is still out on if GDPR will actually be beneficial to consumers and citizens in general or if it’ll rather end up benefiting exactly those companies that don’t respect user privacy it supposedly was targeted at.

The intent behind GDPR certainly is good. I’m worried about the implementation though. In that respect I don’t really consider it a solid effort.

mar77i4• 8 years ago

Besides being worded clearly against a certain kind of data-driven dystopia, it's also a start in the right direction. I, for one, do not expect EU to completely turn this policy upside down in the next years to come.

village-idiot12• 8 years ago

The rather intense fines should solve the tragedy of the commons aspect, so long as the courts remain powerful and reasonably uncorrupt.

dasil003• 8 years ago

I’ve heard this argument a lot from startup people, but it rings of envy of being late to the gold rush. The only reason to be more worried about Google/Facebook is because of the power they have, small startups are not inherently more ethical, and I’ve met enough small SV founders to know that as a group they don’t hold any kind of moral high ground.

Framing the conversation as tech company winners and losers is to totally miss the point. The real question is whether GDPR will actually help stem data abuses, and frankly I don’t see how it can’t be at least a marginal net positive.

toss1• 8 years ago

GDPR does sem like a good (albeit small) step of trend reversal, attempting to limit the power of data accumulators for the general good.

In contrast, a not so good step is the recent partisan calls by Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Laura Ingram, etc. to nationalize Google, Facebook, etc. because "the results are rigged against Trump", attempting to seize the power in service of a particular party currently with authoritarian tendencies, just as TFA warned. That said, I doubt this will get far soon.

mar77i4• 8 years ago

"The growing fear of irrelevance"?

Well duh. First of all, get that out of the way. You are irrelevant, the universe at a greater scale indeed doesn't even hint a proper damn about you. I'm more concerned with all those snowflakes out there losing touch with reality insisting that they are who is relevant when in fact any attention you give them whatsoever is a waste of time, and stolen from you and just not worth it.

I've about had it with this civilization, and phrasings like that... oh look, technology enables a new kind of totalitarianism. Yeah. Well. If that's what you make of it, fine. Of course it doesn't need to be that way, but now that you said it out loud, it'll become more true among your kin.

I'll just stay in my little bubble that thinks technology can help increasing the awesomeness in everyone's life, at least this 300 foot pole away from your orwellian dystopias - far enough for government work.

swift5322• 8 years ago

I wouldn't personally want to help create tyranny powered by advanced technology, but I don't think that's to say I shouldn't be worried about it. I'm worried about what others will make of it, so I don't think we should be too idealistic about it.

mar77i4• 8 years ago

If you have concerns, please add your concerns to the license and contracts around your product.

Also, for someone who says "I don't think that's to say I shouldn't be worried about it", you sure seem to take a liberal - maybe even a bit contradicting? - stance not wanting to be too idealistic about it.

murph-almighty• 8 years ago

I think this speaks well to my recent pessimism on the Internet as a whole.

I thought reddit was great until I saw the monetization of speech push discussion in a different direction: first with corporate astroturfing, then by paying people to conduct psyops.

I thought Facebook was pretty great until I realized that anything I post there is visible by people who I might not want to see it- I think of the uncles who unironically post about how "monkey is suddenly a racist word", but also "influential people saw this post that I made five years ago that might have been funny five years ago but definitely isn't now" (read: James Gunn).

I thought Instagram was pretty cool until adverts and the realization that you only see the positives of people's lives through the filter they operate, and that it affected how I felt about myself!

This isn't to say that everything we're producing is bad. We now have cheap, readily available sources of reliable knowledge that update quickly (encyclopedias take a year and were pretty pricey, by comparison). I also think functions like online banking and simple government actions (think re-registering your car) seriously extend our ability to operate in society.

But I'm finding that the honeymoon phase of the next big internet product is all too sweet- The first six months is generally okay, then we find a few edge cases of malice, followed by the real underbelly as bad actors take over the platform.

oblio6• 8 years ago

Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful.

I have a problem with this premise. Anyone that knows history knows that humans were as tame, if not tamer, in the past. Plus uneducated.

Most of humanity has never been agile, curious and resourceful. Historically a handful of people were, and they tried to steer everyone around them.

I'd say we are less cow-like than we've ever been. A ton more people have access to education than they ever did. The only thing the new technologies (like the internet) are exposing is the depth of the veneer of education the vast majority of people had, and that depth was very shallow.

I'd say that in some regards this is actually better. Transparency tends to help and now a lot more people can see through the covers. It will just take time to adjust.

Nota bene: I still believe that most people, most of the time, are passive. Being active is a lot of work and truly active people will be always the outliers. It's just that we can increase the percentage of active people by making it easier for them to be active.

Treegarden2• 8 years ago

Also humanity in the past was far more violent and gruesome. So if being tame means not slaughtering each other it seems like a good thing.

This book from Steven Pinker talks about this topic and its one of the best books I have read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

Balero4• 8 years ago

Personally the idea of being tame revolts me. Maybe even more so than our violent and gruesome past.

I also don't think they are linked. There is a definite difference to being civilised and being tame. MLK and Gandhi were civilised, and non-violent, but were certainly not tame.

packet_nerd• 8 years ago

Also humanity in the past was far more violent and gruesome.

Looks like an interesting book.

I know that percentage wise, violence has been decreasing. But is it simply that modern governments are bigger, more powerful, and can better contain and direct violence? Or are modern people actually less violent as far as their culture and psychology? I wonder because even in modern times we've seen incredibly developed and cultured societies turn violent and gruesome very quickly.

pvaldes• 8 years ago

Also humanity in the past was far more violent and gruesome

They needed to kill humans one by one with blades and rocks and this was cumbersome and messy. At 3000 kills by minute we, definitely, are much more violent than they.

evrydayhustling2• 8 years ago

Most of humanity has never been agile, curious and resourceful. Historically a handful of people were, and they tried to steer everyone around them.

I have a problem with this premise! My experience has been that when you look closely enough, most people are agile and curious within the sphere of their own action. What varies is the scale they believe they can act at, which can be a matter of internal motivation, social pressures and molding, or hard constraints.

The history you are referring to is one where people with the spare time and education to write histories have consistently assumed that masses have low ambition due to missing internal drive. That perspective is blind to forces that make high ambitions impractical for many people. This article is about how technology can sometimes contribute to those forces.

All that said, I agree with where you land here: the fix is for us to make tech that makes it easier for more people to be active.

oblio6• 8 years ago

Well, my premise was summarized before: "most people are not active most of the time".

If we look at examples of people who historically have had access to all the base resources they required, they weren't all active. Examples: Roman aristocracy, medieval feudal classes, modern day tycoon fortune inheritors. Only a small percentage were truly active most of the time.

In my opinion it's not even healthy to be always active. It generally takes time away from down time with your friends and family.

village-idiot12• 8 years ago

You do realize that modern humans are weaker and have a smaller brain than their hunter gatherer ancestors, right? And not by a trivial amount, but by like 10% or so.

frockington• 8 years ago

Most of us no longer hunt and gather all day so it would make sense that we would not need to be as big.

Balero4• 8 years ago

Homo-sapiens were weaker and had a smaller brain, and less advanced culture and technology then Neanderthals. But we're here and they are not (except in like 4% of European DNA).

What matters is how adaptable we are. And we certainly are the most adaptable we have ever been. It might be thought that people use all of the technology as a crutch and would not be able to survive if they were transported to a world without it. But, after a couple of days, modern people would get used to what they have, make do, and be creative in solving problems. It would be hard and painful, but that's the nature of adapting.

MrEfficiency• 8 years ago

I can confirm I know more and likely am stronger than every hunter gatherer.

Hunter gatherers didnt know what chemicals to mix to create a battery, or use that battery to power magnets, and that if you power them in the correct order you can spin things, and with spinning, you have our modern way of moving energy.

I also lift weights, likely unbelievable weights that couldnt be sustained for a hunter gatherer due to lack of food.

Size doesnt matter as much as environment. I have an abundance of food and information, while this was scarce 10,000 years a go.

commandlinefan• 8 years ago

a smaller brain

Sperm whale's brains are more than 6 times the size of ours. Maybe size doesn't matter as much as you think it does.

mannykannot• 8 years ago

I am not sure what reading of history led you to conclude that people were tame in the past, but one thing to consider is that, as most history is written by the victors (or, at least, about them), the losers, victims, foot-soldiers and general populace can end up looking like nothing more than stage props in a costume drama.

oblio6• 8 years ago

Most of history is actually about humans enduring routine unimaginable* suffering their whole lives and very brief outbursts (revolutions, wars, etc.).

I think I have a pretty accurate reading of history...

* Unimaginable to modern day people.

coldtea3• 8 years ago

I have a problem with this premise. Anyone that knows history knows that humans were as tame, if not tamer, in the past. Plus uneducated.

The past is full of revolutions, revolts, regional struggles, dethronings, and so on -- since time immemorial.

Humans were anything than tame.

Most of humanity has never been agile, curious and resourceful. Historically a handful of people were, and they tried to steer everyone around them.

That's the myth of the "sole inventor" and the "great leader".

Most of progress have been a much more mass struggle...

oblio6• 8 years ago

Humans were anything than tame.

If you'd put me in the living conditions lived their whole lives, I'd be waaay less tame then they were. Trust me, they were tame (in good part because they didn't know any better). And I'm not only talking about physical conditions, but about psychological degrading ones.

They'd blow up only when they were literally starving (or their families were).

Now we become violent for things which in the past were day-to-day life.

evrydayhustling2• 8 years ago

Articles like this often risk conflating many distinct concerns about tech in a way that makes the whole set feel alarmist rather than actionable. This author does a good job of cataloguing each risk separately. His closing prescription deserves a place in the article's tl;dr:

...if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society—then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing. These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy.

matt4077• 8 years ago

Among dystopias, this one is remarkably well-argued...

It is rather frustrating to see how illiberality and strive have come back. In the nineties, the "End of History" made for a convincing hypothesis: Market economies in functioning democracies had proven that they were capable of providing decent quality of life for everyone. Competition had moved on from natural resources to human ingenuity, rendering the supposed motivation for all the wars of history irrelevant. Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited; instead, they had a standing invite to this future of plenty, and Asia took them up on it.

But China's economic rise didn't effect any democratic change. It seemed that democracy did not, after all, win the cold war. Communism merely lost it. Dictatorships can be as productive as open societies, as long as you don't saddle them with too much incompetence or self-defeating ideology.

So we are now in this new battle of the systems, and too often, we're loosing: China and Russia are obvious. But Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, and Poland are more recent converts to the prosperity gospel of strongman leadership. With Trump, Brexit, and several recent election results in Europe, the hits keep coming closer.

Maybe humans never actually liked democracy. They just enjoyed its spoils. Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed.

pjc506• 8 years ago

Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited

Apart from the literal carve-up of colonialism, and businesses like the United Fruit Company?

Asia very much did not have a "standing invite". Japan was explicitly rebuilt. China had a number of false starts with mass death before settling on export-led state capitalism. Vietnam tried to escape colonialism and was bombed flat. Cambodia was bombed for being next to Vietnam. South Korea and Singapore are probably closest to this ideal, which both relied on the state "picking winners" for support. Philippines exports people, and was once a byword for corruption under Marcos. Indonesia .. is never in the news?

Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed.

There's a minority for whom this is very much true, unfortunately.

(WRT Russia, there's a strong case for what happened being "democracy" and "capitalism" but without rule of law, resulting in a gangster takeover)

lubonay• 8 years ago

Very good point about Russia - and I would expand it to most of the former Soviet block and Eastern Europe.

Democracy only works if voters are competent and the vote counting process is fair. Without rule of law, you get coerced/bribed voters filling ballot boxes and criminals tallying the results.

village-idiot12• 8 years ago

While it’s obvious that their Psyops worked in 2016, it’s hard to argue that Russia’s system is superior to our right now. Russia is deeply corrupt, incompetent, and basically a 3rd tier economy or lesser. Italy tosses out more GDP than Russia.

China is a far better case for your thesis. They’re doing much better economically and the government is both totalitarian and largely accepted by the populace. This situation is also very new, since they accepted open markets at least, and it will be interesting to see how stable it really is.

pjc506• 8 years ago

China's situation is like someone trying to dilute acid with water: put in a few drops of freedom, wait for the fizzing to subside, put in a few more, all while hoping to avoid an explosion.

China is accepted by the Han populace. The extremely non-Han parts (Tibet, Xinjiang) are having it imposed on them at gunpoint.

fallingfrog• 8 years ago

One theory I've heard is that democracy, or the age of mass politics, was coincident with the age of mass warfare.

To see how, look at the English longbow. In it's own age it was a superweapon. It was both cheaper, could fire faster, and had better range than the crossbow. But yet, only the English ever used it. The reason why was because it was so cheap to make. But, for a person to develop the muscle mass and skill use it effectively took years of training, and once that training was in place, it could not be taken away. So that made any country that used the longbow vulnerable to peasant rebellions. So to use the longbow, England had to make the tradeoff that they had to make concessions to limited forms of democracy, or risk revolt. If your army uses crossbows, on the other hand, you can just take them away once the fighting is done.

Fast forward to Napoleonic France. Napoleon realized that liberte, egalite, and fraternite could be used as weapons. If your people are convinced that the state belongs to them, then you can arm them all. And that's exactly what France did- they created a people's army and ran roughshod over all the other countries of Europe until they eventually followed suit and also allowed forms of democracy in their own countries. They had to, or be conquered.

The age of mass democracy therefore coincides with the era of total warfare, for better or worse. We are allowed to participate in governance to the extent that our consent is required for the waging of war. But, that age is coming to an end. The development of nuclear weapons meant that there will never again be another war involving masses of infantry- so our consent is no longer required to run the country. The weapons can now be taken away, and so can democracy.

Well, that's one take anyway.

blurbleblurble• 8 years ago

The article is much better than the headline suggests

pjc506• 8 years ago

Recently I saw a comment that the real "hostile AI" threat was not something like Skynet, but more like Youtube algorithmic video recommendations and their fondness for conspiracy and far-right material.

The perceived threats of "irrelevance" and "uselessness" get easily diverted against other humans, especially through "othering". As jobs are taken by automation or offshoring it's easy to blame "immigrants". Keep up the social division for long enough and this can escalate to actual violence.

Amartya Sen's Nobel-prize-winning work on famine was to demonstrate that it was rarely due to an absolute shortage of food, but a deficiency in "entitlement" to it: both purely economic (not having the cash) and political (not being able to secure famine relief). That's the potential worse case of being "irrelevant and useless": starving to death because you can't get food from the "system" somehow.

qudat• 8 years ago

Interesting. The point of the recommendation system is to infer what you like based on a slew of metrics. I think plenty of people would argue the same but favoring left ideology. So where does that leave us?

pjc506• 8 years ago

Pretending that a system is morally neutral when it treats truth and lies as equivalent value? "This person likes lies, I'm going to give them more lies" is a terrible system that ends up with the computer teaching the blood libel to children and raising them as cheerful genocidists.

Note: I'm not saying this is the same as the left/right axis, just that a lot of the horrendously dangerous material is dangerous lies being presented as fact.

(A personal example I was confronted with was watching a game-related video, where the entire sidebar was videos relating to the same game .. plus a livestream of Tommy Robinson. Why was that there? Does that imply there's a crossover between games videos and far-right videos? The system is too opaque to even tell me why it wrongly thought I would like it.)

21• 8 years ago

Be careful not to fall into your own filter bubble.

The other side uses "othering" as well. If the right blames "immigrants" for everything, the left blames "nazis". Which would not be a bad thing, except that today you are a "nazi" if you just carry an american flag, even if you are a true Bernie supporter:

However, as he marched with fellow progressives, he says members of Antifa saw that he was carrying an American Flag and immediately ordered him to drop the flag, calling it a "fascist symbol". When Welch refused to comply, he says they tried to rip the flag from his hands, and then hit him in the back of his head with a club that was hidden in black fabric.

beat6• 8 years ago

I tried to count the logical fallacies here, but failed.

dnomad2• 8 years ago

It is interesting.

The thing that makes Americans so very weird is that they are intensely paranoid. They're the most powerful and wealthiest civilization the world as ever known and yet virtually all of them are profoundly afraid. They're not just afraid of foreigners, either -- they're extremely afraid of each other. It's gotten to a point where "Stand Your Ground" laws encourage armed civilians to shoot each other the moment they feel threatened. It's difficult for outsiders to grasp. (I've even spoken to South Africans about this and even they react with disbelief.)

The paranoid style [1] at work here is well documented but I don't think people appreciate the logical conclusion. As the world grows more and more connected Americans will grow more and more paranoid. You'll quickly reach a point where America has no allies: everybody is a threat, everybody is a competitor, everybody is an enemy conspiring against them. Nobody can be trusted. America becomes supremely hostile -- to new ideas, to trade, to dissent, to change. The result, as Nietzsche explained, is a kind of supreme decadence. People withdraw from the world, they retreat into paranoid fantasy, they embrace all manner of nonsense and conspiracy, they despise knowledge, isolation and delusion feed on each other and become all consuming.

In the end it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The paranoiac develops paranoid technologies. Technologies designed to exclude, filter, hide, deceive, surveil, punish and divide (or "decentralize"). Technologies that are all-consuming, like his own delusions, they must provide rapid and never-ending alerts about new threats and plots, the more the better. Technologies that induce paralysis by leading people deeper and deeper into simulations of reality. Technologies that primarily walls or weapons, ideally both, to protect against the greatest threat of all -- other people.

[1] https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...

AstralStorm4• 8 years ago

Good thing the USA represents less than 10% of humanity.

crazynick42• 8 years ago

Have you ever met an American? We're not as wealthy as you might think. Income is offset by cost of living, we're not exactly bathing in gold-plated rose petals. Quality of life for the average citizen is not that different from any other civilized country.

Xenophobia (which is not shared by the entire population) is not specific to the states either. Do you watch European news? What's happening in China with the Uighurs? In fact, I would argue that most countries are more xenophobic if anything, they just don't have to deal with as many foreigners who want to move there and people here are actually more used to immigrants than in other places where everyone is 'the same'. In Latin America, xenophobia is gaining ground as well with the Venezuelan crisis and this is an instance where the immigrants are people of the same race/culture.

as Nietzsche explained..

Are you sure he wasn't talking about himself?

jeandejean• 8 years ago

Yet another post about some frightening scenarios, imagined by people technologically illeterate, that has little chance to happen...

crazynick42• 8 years ago

That are already happening

msiyer2• 8 years ago

If we look closely, we will soon realize that everything favors tyranny. Religious institutions, political institutions, educational institutions...

The problem is humanity has a tendency to pick or gravitate to morally weak specimens for leadership. We also have a tendency to "believe" authority which often leads us astray. Would a wolf pack pick a weak leader? Would a wolf pack let a weak leader remain in position once weaknesses are exposed?

MisterTea• 8 years ago

You have to define weak first.

msiyer2• 8 years ago

Look at "leaders" all around the world. Past and present. And look at condition of the world around you.

It is people's fault that they become our "leaders". It is a crime that we let them remain in position.

mercurysmessage• 8 years ago

There is no such thing as an alpha wolf, btw. That study was actually showing parents leading wolf pups.

Angostura2• 8 years ago

political institutions, educational institutions...

So democracy and schooling favors tyranny? I'd like to see your working.

zzzcpan• 8 years ago

They do. In fact schooling is a form of tyranny, being mandated by state and all.

indigochill3• 8 years ago

Perhaps programming needs to become the new "literacy" standard. Writing human languages isn't enough any more. By learning to read and write computer code, people can become active users of technology rather than merely consumers bound to the creations of others.

chosenbreed• 8 years ago

Basic understanding of programming might be useful. But perhaps critical thinking/reasoning would be even more so. Not sure how this could be developed. Maybe subjects such as philosophy, history, logic, classical literature, etc...

indigochill3• 8 years ago

I'd agree that would be sufficient if we didn't see stories like this one about people overwhelmingly feeling left behind by technological progress. As it is, there's something missing between where education is and where it needs to be. Maybe it's just that the general quality of education is poor so people don't know how to use what they've learned. Or maybe there are new topics that need to be introduced to keep people functionally literate in the modern world. Or both.

apocalypstyx• 8 years ago

Over the decades, every time I have heard some variant on 'everyone needs to learn to code' there is always a subtle unsettling feeling that arises in the back of my mind around the notion of linguistic imperialism, and that the promulgator instinctively believes or realizes, whether it actually exists or not, that the framing of any given, non-generalized technology inherently carries a ideological supposition that, as with all suppositions, the bearers want to spread to totality.

indigochill3• 8 years ago

How about a comparison to modern education? Back before public education gave everyone the knowledge necessary to write for themselves, would it have been imperialist to advocate for that goal? If so, does it matter?

jancsika• 8 years ago

Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.

globalization - by definition effects billions of people

genetic engineering - in 2016 GM crops, according to Wikipedia, make up 12% of global cropland

blockchain - digital time-stamping service that scales to the unfathomable rate of 7 transactions per second

It tells me the author is unable to separate wheat from chaff, as if writing this:

Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, HDMI to VGA adapters, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.

CuriouslyC• 8 years ago

Except that you don't have meetups where people get all excited about the HDMI-enabled future. I completely agree with you about the current state of blockchain, but it has captured people's imaginations.

AstralStorm4• 8 years ago

So it would make for some fun dated art in 30 or so years?

(since it hasn't captured much anything else)

api• 8 years ago

Hammers don't favor one kind of architecture over another. Hammers do what the people holding them make them do.

The way we use our technology is a reflection of our ideas. Since the 1990s I've watched the ideas that are popular within the culture shift in an increasingly authoritarian direction on both the "right" and "left" of the conventional political spectrum. We are seeing the ascent of strong man rule and other types of authoritarianism around the world for democratic reasons: it's what people want, or what people think we need.

I think the largest single factor is push-back against globalization. Personally I think globalization in some form and to some degree is both desirable (to prevent war and increase wealth) and inevitable (due to travel and communication), but I also think it's been pushed perhaps a little too quickly and in ways that are profoundly insensitive to the needs of the middle classes in the developed world. That's created a massive anti-globalization backlash where people are elevating strongmen and demagogues to re-assert national borders and national independence.

There are other factors too. I think a similar kind of reaction is occurring against global social liberalization.

marcosdumay• 8 years ago

Hammers favors the kinds of architectures that one can create with nails.

Every technology have some inherent biases. Electricity favored decentralization about as much as steam power favored concentration.

jkingsbery• 8 years ago

This article mentions a lot of things that "might" or "may" happen, without really any convincing arguments for why these predictions will come to fruition. It's true that dictators make use of centralized knowledge, but it's also true that many of the assumptions of market capitalism assume perfect knowledge and no transaction costs, two assumptions which have never been true in practice but today are much more applicable (knowledge is faster to attain, and transaction costs are smaller today and more directly measurable). So, it seems just as likely to me that markets could be on the verge of being more useful mechanisms than ever.

zekevermillion• 8 years ago

I'm with Kasparov, that the best method of combining human and machine will always beat the best machine or the best human individually. I submit that Google's AI progress does not disprove this assertion, because (a) even if Google's AI is self-trained in chess or go, a human team is required to select a game and set up the training, as well as to update the algo or meta-algorithm in competition against the guys from IBM and Xinhua, etc; and (b) chess, although a very large and, for most purposes nearly infinite, game, ultimately is not open-ended or infinite in the way that nature life is, or human life decision-space is. Go is perhaps a better contender as a life simulation but I think still falls well short of the complexity of even a simple natural system.

One could counter that a meta training algorithm could define rulesets for a alpha-like AI to self-train-upon, and at sufficient generality this would take humans out of the equation. Well, if humans are entirely removed, then the problem is no longer interesting. If humans are involved at any point in the process, we could still view AI through the lens of a human-centered tool.

What if AGI does in fact evolve its own goals as primary and decides that humans and/or human self-determination are an impediment? Would humans eventually fall down the food chain, or outside of it, say as raccoons living on the city streets? Well, I don't view the world that way. But, even if non-human life forms gain supremacy of intellect and capabilities, I would note that even raccoons have a place -- and despite the fervent desires of many a suburban homeowner, the little pests are amazingly resilient to attempts at extermination or control.

CM30• 8 years ago

As per the last time this was posted, here are my thoughts on this article and its premise:

Firstly, I feel everyone gets something wrong about AI and jobs, and I believe that makes things a little less dire on that front than you may otherwise believe. Namely, people are not purely 'rational' economic actors, and don't purely make decisions on 'quality' or 'price'.

For instance, art and media isn't all about what's the 'best' work out there, but the one with name recognition, sentimental value, an existing fandom, etc. It doesn't matter if an AI can create 'art', because whether that art sells depends on more than technical competence. Will Mario or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings be threatened by AI and technology? Probably not, the name sells regardless of whether a competitor product/brand may be objectively better.

So I believe artistic and creative fields may be the thing remaining after AI takes most other jobs, since your creativity can make a market that competitors legally can't compete in. If all fails, a personal brand can do much the same way. Sell yourself, not the 'product'.

There's also the fact many 'worse' businesses still do well either through word of mouth, location, advertising, etc. Not everything will be a one horse race ala Uber or Airbnb, and whether AI/tech/whatever can outperform humans won't really matter than much regardless. In that sense, things aren't quite as dire as some people would have you believe.

Secondly, while technology and AI may help those in power consolidate it further, it also democraticises power too, by making the means of getting it available to more people than ever before.

For example, for as much as emotional manipulation and fake news is pointed out as an issue online, the internet has also made it easier to verify anything, to get around government censorship and to make your own mind up about current events and the situation at hand. If the old school media got things wrong (or were told to shut up by those in power), what could you do? How could you disprove their claims?

With great difficulty that's how. But now we've got a world when anyone can call out anyone, where finding alternative viewpoints on major topics is trivial and where doing research on advanced topics is easier than ever. Narratives have been destroyed, official statements disproved by average Joes taking photos and recording videos, and pseudoscience has been debunked. Is that really worse than a world where publishing information is tightly controlled and regulated?

Technology can be used for the purposes of tyranny, but it can also be used to fight against it just as well. And that'll only get more true when more aspects of everyday life involve computers and networking.

So while technology may 'favour' tyranny, in some ways it also favours democracy and a more equal society too.

Why Technology Favors Tyranny

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