Artificial Intelligence Artifice

 

The oversized hype.  The poor spelling.  The bizarre dystopia.  Is this the future we're rooting for?

Depending on the week, I see various collective opinions on AI's role in our future.  They usually follow one of four main points:

• The robots will soon gain consciousness and it will be glorious.
• The robots will soon gain consciousness and it will be catastrophic.
• The robots already give us enough rope to hang ourselves amidst our current societal woes.  Focus on guarding against those, rather than dredging up new fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
• Meh.

My feelings are planted somewhere between the last two bullet points.  I do find GenAI to be a productive tool, much like I find a hammer or screwdriver to be a productive tool.  But I won't expect GenAI to do anything novel or creative anytime soon in the same way I won't expect the hammer in my toolkit to walk over to me and ask if I've seen any loose nails (for those of you who want to take this opportunity to create sentienthandtools.ai, go nuts.  I yield all royalties to you).

I'm fairly certain that the tools will improve over the coming years, but I'm not sure that they'll escape the necessary barrier energy of Silicon Valley hype to offer the collective shift that's murmured in the wind every day.  

I'm also at a loss to understand the glee fanboys have in the potential displacement of large parts of our society if their visions come true.  I assume it's because of either (a) money - they're getting in on the ground floor and will be making it rain with hundos every minute on the minute once their ticket is punched or (b) they're rooting for some cyborg-level augmented reality that gives them superpowers.

If it's (a) and there is a singularity type of event or even if the machines can perform sufficiently to cause mass unemployment before people are able to learn those elusive new skills all the AI proponents are raving about, good luck!

Huge societal displacements cause destabilizing influences in global economies.  Something of this magnitude would likely tank all currencies.  If you're thinking - that's no problem, I'm invested in gold or cryptocurrencies, then you don't have a basic grasp of monetary theory.  A currency - crypto, metal, or otherwise - is used in lieu of an exchange of goods and services.  If there's massive societal upheaval, there's nothing to exchange.  Basic needs become the currency of the realm, and people won't wait patiently by to access them.

Gold, as a physical element, is the possible exception.  It has inherent value as a material in manufacturing, but if there's no demand for what you're selling, it's useless.  It has value now simply because we give it value.

This means, in the best-case scenario, you might become some feudal warlord (likely with a regression to the accompanying technology from 1000 years prior unless you can protect the infrastructure that got us to this point) fending off angry, starving masses.  The sociopaths among us would be fine with that, but I don't think that's the utopia most of us envision.

I also read someone theorizing (trolling?) that OpenAI was withholding GPT-5 while in consultation with the government as the new technology had the potential to cause the displacement I mentioned above.  He suggested it was going to be delayed long enough (summer of 2024) for governments to create a universal basic income (UBI) plan to accommodate the disruption.  A few things:

• Someone's really bought into the hype train on this shit (or is a master troll).  There was no evidence prior to the release of what turned out to be GPT-4o that any monumental shift was coming.  Of course, OpenAI is fine with that hype, because it's free publicity, but some critical thinking is useful here.  Even if the claim is baseless, people are hard-wired to pay attention to threats, and it seems irresponsible to cause undue stress.
• No for-profit Silicon Valley company is going to consult with the government about safety precautions preemptively.  If you believe they will, you haven't been following the news for at least the last 20 years.
• A delay of 2-3 months would not be enough for a government to even draft a plan for UBI, much less get it installed.  We're already facing actual existential threats, and we are still unable to formulate coherent policy.  For something that's even more polarizing politically, this would be dead on arrival.
• UBI, when applied to this scenario, would fail in the same scenario as any other distribution of wealth surrounding such a momentous world event [Note: I'm not opposed to the exploration of UBI in other scenarios - say the attempt to re-establish the softening middle class across the world in general, and in the US in particular.  I'm opposed to it as a toss-off suggestion to mitigate the woes the GenAI fanboys use it for, as though they're acting out of altruism or have listened to some enlightened note no one else has yet heard].  If there's no easy exchange of goods and services, then it doesn't matter how much money anyone has.  It's worthless.
• There are fascinating discussions on productivity in relation to economics.  John Maynard Keynes expected us to get to a 4-hour workday as productivity went up.  Alas, this has not yet come to pass.  However, in his scenario, it was a gradual shift with no income reduction among the working class, so the change would be less jarring and, therefore, presumably more accommodating.

When I hear baseless cheerleading like this, I tend to grow even more disenchanted with our billionaire glitterati.  These genius-level captains of industry can't even be bothered to apply basic logic to their own hypotheses (probably because no one is willing to point out their flaws, so their echo chamber convinces them they're demigods).  It's left to - yes, this could cause massive upheaval the likes of which we haven't seen since World War II or even the Black Death, but we'll find a way because we always do.

But, that glosses over the fact that 40 million people died in the former, and up to 1/3 of the world's population died in the latter.  If the point of AI is to improve people's lives, it must do exactly that.  It can't be some confidence man's assurance that the monorail is safe.

As usual, I've spent more time on the first half of my rant than expected, so I'll save the plans for my cyborg army for the upcoming post.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.