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On unintended consequences
Life is unintended consequences. Evolution is unintended consequences.
On (the unintended consequences of) AI.
For a crash course--as in smash into your head course--about the dangers of AI watch slaughter bots below. It’s a short film that explains the militarization of AI killer swarming drones. I recommend watching the film if you haven’t seen it or heard about with one caveat. Don’t watch it with children around.
So I had this in my head too during my walk AI, the dangers of AI.
I spun it around a bit and came to this. The dangers of AI is unintended consequences and this can be understood by looking at the unintended consequences of capitalism as AI and capitalism are both ideas that came from the human mind that live outside of human control.
Paper money and the ideas behind it i.e. capitalism are smart. A way to conceptualize value of the thing in something other than the thing that allows the value to be transported without having to transport the thing. It solved a lot of problems with trade and spurred innovation and invention that benefited society.
Yet despite the quality of the idea and the intentions with which it came into the world, it is the unintended consequences of capitalism that is ruining world.
It is capitalism that is melting the polar ice caps.
It is capitalism that is putting giant mile long straws into the Earth and extracting oil and gas and refining it and burning it recklessly raising the temperature of the Earth.
It is capitalism that has built billions of cars. It is capitalism that wants every human being to own a car and drive every time they go anywhere. It is capitalism that excavates, paves and destroys habitats for profit.
It is the unintended consequences of capitalism that has wiped out indegenious cultures,indigenous architecture and is homogenizing the world.
It is capitalism that has turned humans into economic units of consumption.
While governments have the ability to regulate, the notion of changing or ending capitalism seems less practical than capitalism itself changing.
A simplistic understanding of AI is that it’s a set of computer instructions to learn how to do something. The instructions, the ideas, the code are the same thing. Because the code originally comes from humans (even if AI modifies it) it is connected to biology and natural systems, but because it lives outside of natural systems there is nothing to stop its replication, propagation behavior, outcomes. Thus like capitalism unintended consequences are inevitable. Specifically it can behave like a biology without the forces of nature to regulate it.
But wait there is more. AI is created under a capitalist system which guarantees bad outcomes from unintended consequences. In the film Slaughter Bots the slaughter bots are made for profit. The technology of fire, in this case the militarization of AI is done for profit. The company that developes the technology of fire---lets call it the venom, will also develop the technology of fire to nullify its own technology--lets call it the anti-venom. When the underlying system allows one to profit from making the venom and the anti-venom there can be certainty about uncertainty i.e unintended consequences. There will not be swarms of AI bots made to identify plants in the jungle, or to look for new insect species because there is no money in it.