I realize it might have come across like I was advocating something akin to nihilism, or as you put, "might makes right." It's the opposite. I'm saying that so far, caring about ethics--especially over the past couple decades--hasn't mattered or has been even counterproductive to one's economic station. And relatedly, the people who have cared least about ethics have won, which in turns has made caring about ethics even less economically viable.
Deciding "what is worth doing" requires adjudicating values, and this does not have a mathematical solution.
The development of AI is a bit like giving everyone an atomic weapon, and few people have the ethics to use it responsibly (for some technologies, there does not even exist an ethical use).
The author suggests that the people who can tell "what's worth doing" (roughly, what's right) are the ones who will succeed in the coming era. I actually, unfortunately, think it's the opposite. The people who most ruthlessly steal and deploy AI for their own gains are likely to "succeed," where "succeed" is defined by accruing greater power. Those of us who are worried about doing what is right are likely to move more slowly and carefully and to thus "get left behind."
Right I'm definitely not advocating that one should adhere to the values of the winners of the last 20-40 years.
I'm saying that if you're winning today (as measured in money/power), then by most objective notions of morality, you're probably a crappy, antisocial, person who is greedy and exploitative.
At some level it's almost definitional: if you share the material wealth you have, you'll never become that wealthy. If you don't consume a bunch of resources for the sake of your own consumption or to produce products that others consume, then you're also not going to make a lot of money.
This piece fails to understand that, in general, ethics depends on what side you are on. In hindsight, the winner's notion of right and wrong usually dominates.
If ethics mattered, the colonists wouldn't have taken America or slaves. If pre-existing laws mattered, America would have lost the revolutionary war (America legally belonged to the king). If ethics mattered, anyone who made money in cigarettes would be in prison. If ethics mattered, Zuckerberg and his cronies would be in prison.
If you had been concerned about ethics in the past, you would have failed to create America and failed to create Facebook, etc. In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.
This dude needs to read some actual philosophy and then ponder it and write it himself, rather than using AI.
We've got AI, but I'm still waiting on exponential technological gains. So far I've mostly gotten exponential enshittification of my google experience. Is AI going to unlock the detonation engine and bring down the cost of my plane ticket?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/11/23/181486/exploding...
If as a primary school student you had needed to reverify every fact /experiment that was presented in your textbooks, you would not have gotten very far.
I reviewed for ACL (big NLP conf) and another similar conference recently. Lots of crap (though there always has been). One superficially well-written paper was likely AI-plagiarized (i.e. the AI sampled an idea from prior work and rewrote it) and got desk rejected for it.
Reviewers were also totally unengaged. Of 20 reviews I read (from my reviewers or from reviewers on the same papers), maybe 2 were mediocre, and the rest were crap (though likely not AI).
The notion that science will somehow benefit from this is about as stupid an idea as you can have. Science relies on skepticism. AIs are not skeptical, and many folks are submitting papers because they stand to gain something, not because they are motivated to do good research or develop new understanding. Fields are being inundated with garbage that is maximally indistinguishable from real work (that's the training objective for LLMs). This in turn maximizes the cost of identifying bad work.
This is the same enshittification process that we see everywhere else. You get spam phone calls because there is no reason for a spammer not to call you. "Researchers" are submitting spam papers because there is no cost to doing so with some possible gain. Absent intervention, this eventually drives the community value of the network to zero (or potentially negative, if friction costs to switching are high).
Has anyone here actually looked at the Shai Ben David (SBD) result? I did a final grad project on it recently for a class on incompleteness. In my view it's not really that interesting. For learnability to be undecidable, the cardinality of the continuum (size of the reals) must exceed \aleph_k for all finite k. ZFC does not bear upon this (CH is independent of ZFC), so this is a possible setting of the world, and therefore learnability can be undecidable.
But say the size of the continuum is, e.g., \aleph_3, (in this case CH is false, but it's not "horribly false"), then SBD shows how to build a compression scheme, and thus their EMX -- estimating the maximum problem -- is "learnable". But the compression scheme whose existence they show (it's just a function whose existence they prove) can't actually be encoded, since it requires identifying a maximal element by invoking the well-ordering theorem. So there's no algorithm that enables solving the problem (though a function solving the problem exists).
This result, without further work, does not immediately say anything about the sorts of problems for which abstractions can be learned. And abstraction is at the heart of understanding and problem solving.
You’re right and wrong: today’s economy is often negative sum from total utility perspective. It hurts society and the person but it helps Mark Suckerberg and Scam Altman and the private equity firms.
It’s positive sum from a wealth-weighted utility calculation though. And that’s why it happens.
Following the overturning of Roe v Wade, it is clear that the US needs privacy enshrined in the Constitution. For example, it is absurd to imagine a state government trying to distinguish between an abortion and a miscarriage in order to potentially prosecute; this distinction is something that no one beyond the woman should have any right to know.
It's my view that the Founders did not think to directly mention privacy since they had no capacity to imagine technology as powerful as that which enables today's surveillance capitalists. But the sort of law that would establish a general right to privacy (or the kind of values that would lead us to establish one) would likely also hinder companies from aggregating user data for any purpose other than directly serving users. (And it would also hinder the government from surveilling its citizens.)
If such an amendment were considered, we'd all fast find that most techies aren't actually liberals. Oh wait, we saw that when they all turned to support Trump. Surprise, surprise.
I promise you that when consumer and enterprise funds dry up, every one of these AI companies will be placing ads and selling surveillance and drone tech to the government. Anthropic already dropped the part of its constitution that forbid collaboration of any kind with the military. The pressure to profitability is immense.
Today, purported morality is mostly (temporary) sophistry. Most folks will work for Zsuck or Palantir if the money is good enough.
> How can technology be used to make our society freer and more equal, and to augment human agency rather than diminish it?
The past 20 years of surveillance capitalism and the general deployment of technology against consumers should make everyone question whether this could ever be possible.
This is absurd. You're just asking for reasonable control over data that ostensibly belongs to you. Moreover, this minimum functionality was resolved years ago with RSS. That you'd be willing to pay so much reflects how well every tech company is doing at using tech against its own users.