Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Capitalism

http://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/artificial-intelligence-will-kill-capitalism/google-transhumanism-ai-facebook-ibm-apple-cyborg-robot/c7s17977/#.VMY744FHarU

by mark_l_watson • 11 years ago

25 32 11 years ago

worldcrunch.com

mark_l_watson4• 11 years ago

I submitted this story. This is a conversation I have with non-tech friends who don't yet grok just how much society is going to change in the next few decades because of technology.

boon• 11 years ago

And you have a single paragraph explaining anything at all as to why you think that will happen, and it's basically, "too much efficiency will ruin capitalism." I'm going to need more convincing than that.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

Try this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/. Long, but very much worth the time.

mark_l_watson4• 11 years ago

I believe that the accelerating rate of improvement in AI, IoT providing intelligent systems with more fine grained data on what is happening in the physical world, and general improvements like the deep learning neural network hacks will profoundly affect society.

Do I totally buy into the basic premise of the article? No. As another commenter pointed out, who owns the intelligent machines? The rich.

I am an enthusiastic AI practitioner since the 1980s, remain excited by tech advances, but, I believe that it is important to talk about how technology affects society.

warcode• 11 years ago

It will kill capitalism

Who controls/owns the hardware that the AI runs on, and the AI itself? Who are these people giving away augments for free? Why would they not limit the capabilities of low-tier augments to ensure the very few at the top can still remain there?

Clearly you haven't played deus ex.

bottled_poe• 11 years ago

"In our meritocratic societies, the difference in intellectual abilities are, rightly or wrongly, the primary reason for the wage and capital gap"

Which country do you live in? I want to live there...

jgrahamc• 11 years ago

Aynrandistan

lotsofmangos4• 11 years ago

The fact that people use the word meritocracy in complete seriousness always jars with me, as the word was coined in satire as a warning.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

random_pr• 11 years ago

The word is separate from the political beliefs of the person who happened to come up with it (or popularize it) first.

boona• 11 years ago

When the right control most of the media "We will have 20 hour work weeks!". When the left control most of the media "capitalism will destroy us all!".

jqm• 11 years ago

I think capitalism will kill artificial intelligence. Just look in boardrooms and classrooms and senates across the world and see what it's done to the real thing.

cpursley2• 11 years ago

You mean politics.

foolrush• 11 years ago

No. They likely mean capitalism, as capitalism comes with politics and ideology.

Hard to generate an AI when bright young minds have their schooling, medical, public libraries, social welfare systems, to name a few, degraded beyond all repair to shave a few billion off of the balance books.

It is capitalism's endgame, much like a UFC match without a referee.

wisienkas• 11 years ago

Should an AI be able to own its own hardware and have a company by itself?

How will this affect us?

lotsofmangos4• 11 years ago

Should stops being part of the discussion when you are no longer the adult. If it is considerably brighter than us and it wants these things, then it will get them.

hyperbovine• 11 years ago

Oh good, kurzweil is on board. We should be safe for another three centuries or so :-)

twoodfin2• 11 years ago

The trend has been just the opposite: Computers display far more "intelligence" than ever before, if you accept the (admittedly somewhat glib) definition of AI as anything computers still can't do. Logistics, navigation, trading... Yet globally, despite a few shocks, poverty has been falling for decades. Essentially everywhere capitalism is practiced and computers with their existing labor-replacing-intelligence are increasingly integral, the standard of living has been rising steadily. What about more capable computers will reverse this trend?

CmonDev• 11 years ago

..and cancer drugs will cure cancer. Unless they start charging $1000 a pill. Which they did.

placebo• 11 years ago

This probably will not be a popular opinion, but here it is anyway. I'm sure all the famous names mentioned in this article as prophets of the AI impending doom are exceptionally gifted entrepreneurs, technologists and business men (and I should add I hold some in the highest respect in terms of their vision and work), but that does not convince me they have any qualifications to predict where artificial intelligence will take us. To speak about if and when AI will become self-aware is nothing more than a guess. To speak about whether capitalism will end as a result is a guess upon a guess. As far as I'm concerned there's one sure way to tell if someone has the ability to predict the future at these levels: if they are human - they can't.

mojuba2• 11 years ago

I don't think a future with AI is as easy as "robots will produce everything". There are two important factors usually being ignored in these discussions:

- Human labour is not only about producing stuff or advancing sciences, that's a narrow-minded, or even consumerist view of life. We are also creative, we like to appreciate beauty and like to be appreciated for things we create. Even when every thinkable and unthinkable thing will be produced by the machines, we will be able to focus on arts. We will be creating unique things, re-distribute it among ourselves and inevitably some of us will prove to be better at that than the others. Appreciation on one hand and the show-off factor on the other are in our nature, I don't think they will ever become an atavism.

- Scarcity of natural resources: something suggests our fight for (possession of) resources will continue until at least we have a technology that transforms any matter to anything, which has nothing or very little to do with the AI per se. But then there will be a problem of habitable space. We will fight for possessing more than the others, that's also part of our nature. More habitable planets, more powerful machines, more possibilities. Because those who possess less have smaller chances to survive.

So no, inequality and survivalism (in a broader sense) are not going away. And to satisfy our need to be better and to have more we'll have to maintain a socio-economic system that ensures inequality is always in place. It's going to be Capitalism 2.0 rather than Communism.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

I think those factors are being ignored partly because not relevant to the "capitalism vs. technology discussion" and partly because they're not on capitalism's side.

- RE creation. It's true that people like to create and be created, but as sad as it is, being "human-made" is hardly a quality you can run entire economics on. Say, I create a new work of art. How can I exchange it for food? I could sell it for a bunch of credits to someone who appreciates my work, and then use those credits to buy food made by machines. But machines don't need that money, they just make food and run on machine-controlled power generation, etc. They're not participating in the economy; paying for that food becomes just a weird kind of tax, at which point we'd be better off just giving the food away - eliminating the unneccessary theatre.

Being able to focus on creating beautiful and interesting things is the promise of automated future. I don't think anyone in their right mind could think that there will be no economy of anything at all - as long as you have people exchanging things, there's always one. It doesn't really matter much what kind of economy it is (though you could get a good guess by observing content creation and sharing dynamics on the Internet when no one is trying to monetize it) - what matters is that it won't be the same system you use for getting your basic needs (food, shelter) fulfilled.

- RE scarcity. I see two problems with it. One that in western societies there's almost no visible scarcity at all. You look around and see shops overflowing with all sorts of dirt-cheap products. We're isolated from the actual scarcity by many layers of abstraction, and it isn't even reflected in the prices - otherwise gas or meat wouldn't be so cheap as they are right now.

Humans do have a drive for achieving more (or more than others), but our economic system is built completely around the concept of growth - to the point that we use up resources in an exponentially increasing rate and have to invent artificial scarcities just to keep the whole machine from falling apart on the edges (see the thread about jewlery currently on HN). Not to mention increasing numbers of bullshit jobs. That system needs to go, it's unsustainable.

Inequality and survivalism are not going away. Nor should they, really - what history showed us is that people don't react well when forced to be equal. The drive to get more will always be there, but it doesn't preclude us from raising the low point from "starving to death" to "comfortable, if minimalist, life". Basics can totally be Communism 2.0 and let sulprus be whatever develops, only moderated so that it doesn't go exponential.

mojuba2• 11 years ago

But there will always be scarcity of something: materials, energy, land. Things will always have a price, because they at least require energy and space for production. It will be unbelievably cheap, but never absolute zero.

And then someone will own the land (along with what's underneath) and the machines themselves, unless of course we dump private property altogether. I don't see how this is substantially different from what we have now. It's just the machines will get better, living standards will be higher, there will be more bullshit jobs, and more time for creativity.

So essentially the discussion comes down to whether there will be private property rights in the future. As someone who grew up in the USSR, where nominally there was no private property per se, I can only say the humanity will need a very, very good reason to abandon it for good. It's almost like saying prohibit sex in all of its forms and purposes, i.e. going against the nature.

asgard1024• 11 years ago

Good riddance! Better start working on it.. :-)

Seriously, we have problems with distribution of capital already. There are two mainstream theories of value:

First pretty much argues that value is subjective, so the distribution of capital, whatever it is, is never a problem. It's more of a cop-out than an attempt to describe the world.

The second is the (Marxist) labor theory of value, which argues that all the value comes from human work. However, it is unfortunately logically inconsistent.

In the reality probably lots of value already comes from machines (and biological systems), and we have lots of social conventions and pretending (calling it "meritocracy" etc.) around it concerning how to distribute this added value to humans. In reality I don't believe there are many people (maybe some homeless ones) in the western society who deserve their current living standard, for the labor they do.

I don't think that this sort of social construction is going to be eliminated by artificial intelligence. We will just see more of it, if anything.

pella• 11 years ago

edge.org "2015 : WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?"

http://edge.org/responses/what-do-you-think-about-machines-t...

known• 11 years ago

But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_%28film%29 differs

filoeleven• 11 years ago

There's a short story, Manna [1] by Marshall Brain, which illustrates two potential outcomes of an AI revolution.

In one scenario, the people who are out of work (i.e., most of them) are housed in prison-like welfare dorms. Most jobs are done by robots, so ending up in the dorms is basically a life sentence. They are "strongly discouraged" from even going too far from the dorm buildings. This scenario plays out in the United States.

In the other scenario, taking place in Australia, the AI/machines handle all of the infrastructure of the society, and due to the efficiency with which they do so, the human members live a leisurely existence. It's essentially a post-scarcity society in which energy is the only limiting factor, so everyone gets a certain amount of disposable credits per month with which they can do what they choose--be it create art, buy custom clothing, participate in entertainment, perform research, or donate it to someone whose work they enjoy or find to be worthwhile. It reminds me of the outcome hoped for by proponents of Basic Income, which is that letting everyone do what they are most interested in doing will result in a richer existence for all of humankind.

The author also explores interesting interpersonal and technological aspects whose degree of plausibility will depend on how much you buy into the Singularity, but my main point in posting this, besides hopefully introducing someone to a good read, is to say that AI does not represent some inevitable force that is bound to change the course of human existence in one particular way. AI itself and the environment in which it exists are things that are continually shaped by human actions both individual and collective. If an AI revolution is brewing, it is in its very early stages. I have no doubt that powerful interests are interested in remaining powerful, so those of us who pay attention to developments in the field should also pay attention to the uses they are put to, and to do all we can to guide them towards humanitarian ends instead of pure profitability.

[1] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Capitalism

Related Stories