AI - Careful What You Wish For Pt.2
clemmylebusque

AI - Careful What You Wish For Pt.2

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” - Marshall McLuhan

Hello Human

I promised in March that I’d be back in April with Part 2 of this thread.

In Part 1 I left you to think about these questions that Simon Longstaff from The Ethics Centre posed in an article he published in February:

Can we imagine such a future in which the economy is driven by the most efficient deployment of capital and machines – rather than by productive humans?

Can we imagine a society in which our meaning and worth is not related to having a job?

You can read the full Longstaff article here: https://shorturl.at/fxZ28

You can read Part 1 of my muse here: https://shorturl.at/bdoGV

I declared in Part 1 that I am a little uncomfortable in this ‘AI’ - Artificial Intelligence aka ‘AGI’ - Artificial General Intelligence, space - “comfortably uncomfortable - but uncomfortable nonetheless”.

And nothing I have read (pre or) post Part 1 has made me any less uncomfortable. If anything, my discomfort has increased.

Ponder, if you will, the ethical questions and issues associated with the AI / AGI search engines that amass information from sources without any regard for attribution to the original creator or author, or to ‘copyright’.

And wonder, always, about whose version of ‘the truth’ is the search result feeding you?

Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote, in the 1960s:

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

What’s the ‘shape of us’ in years to come?

And, I just can’t resolve the big question - Whose ends is AI / AGI serving?

Are you a Neo-luddite Mark - resisting change and looking to smash the latest tech?

Good question. The answer is “no”.

But given you asked, let’s delve, briefly, into the Luddites, and see what we find.

The early Luddites - English textile workers who, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, resisted the introduction of new machinery. They’d sneak into factories in the dead of night and destroy the power-looms they believed were threatening their jobs.

Here’s the thing though, the Luddites weren’t anti-machinery; many of them were machine experts and welcomed the introduction of new equipment that made their work easier.

What they opposed was debasing their art and depressing their wages, and changing the very nature of what it meant to work.

‘Changing the very nature of what it meant to work’.

Right now, this is where my critique and concern about AI / AGI lies. No Luddite in sight.

I am all but certain that someone somewhere a whole lot smarter than me is working on a thesis on the parallels between the industrial revolution and the AI / AGI revolution. Changes in power relationships; lower-skilled - lower waged workers; mass-production of cheap replicas (aka knowledge and information), increased profits, and more.

To ‘roll up’ my aim in musing on AI / AGI - Parts 1 and 2:

Keep a watchful and careful eye out for ‘the truth’ - the real insight and understanding about AI / AGI - not the shiny spin that accompanies it. Here’s a tip though, maybe don’t ask an AI / AGI search engine for ‘the truth’ about AI / AGI. I reckon it’ll be distorted.

It feels right to finish here with old mate Marshall McLuhan, again from the 1960s:

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

Imagine being able to see the future like McLuhan clearly could.

Go well Human


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