This would imply that evolution, which is also an arms race that disrupts and obsoletes the status quo, is due to some “weakness”.
AI doesn’t actually come from the outside.
The fact it’s economics have high winner-take-a-lot aspects, doesn’t mean you can eliminate the current winners and end up anywhere different, because it’s actually a natural decentralized progression of improving efficiency.
So that framing makes no sense.
However, the thesis for the potential for violence is sound. I don’t see a way out of that, given unending disruption, with no coordinated responsible response.
I do not think is this essay is hype.
This moment requires great leadership and competence, but that is not what is getting elected.
The last two decades patience with massive businesses scaling up profitable conflicts of interest, and centralizing gatekeeper and dependency powers, that offer no recourse to any individuals they mistreat, strongly suggest we are incapable of dealing with AI fallout. Which will only accelerate and add to those trends.
> I think that's why individual contributors in big teams aren't seeing massive benefits from AI where a small team or solo developer may be seeing greater leverage.
This rings true. It is the best time ever for small teams. A big team is potentially several smaller teams, so this can be a force multiplier for them too.
Another force multiplier for reorganizing larger teams, be willing to consider smaller teams starting with single contributors.
I am baffled that anyone thinks implication-of-action ambiguity and hidden security states without obvious controls, are acceptable security practices.
Individual-level ethics and respect are being dispensed with en masse. The excuse being that these companies operate "at scale".
But last time I checked, they are taking money from individuals. Or otherwise encouraging individuals to use their services.
So this lack of respect for individuals by specific large companies, is predicated on their encouraging users to trust them, and depend on them, without taking on any of the implied responsibility to not capriciously ruin someone's day or year. And then hard or soft stone wall them.
As someone who nearly lost everything due to the automated bureaucracy of a financial firm, I cannot stress: We are not safe. And we will not be safe until these companies are legally required to treat customer investment and dependency on their services, as valuable and necessarily recoverable, via prompt recourse and response, in cases where the automated bureaucratic systems fail.
Otherwise, this is going to keep getting worse.
When I hear how Microsoft helps someone who got attention, what I hear is that it takes extraordinary circumstances for Microsoft to care about the significant harm that there systems are causing many other people, today, who did not have the luck of this person.
And that they are very very aware of this.
I think we need to start using the word evil for this. Because it is. It is gross irresponsibility. Gross abuse of a power situation, of a strong dependency, that the company quite knowingly creates.
Software distribution is largely controlled by 3 companies; Microsoft, Google, and Apple. We used to have the web and web apps as an escape hatch, but, surprise, all 3 of those companies use a shared “safe” browsing blacklist that can be used to wipe your domain / website out of existence. Mozilla participates by using the same list which is a shame.
Big tech shouldn’t be allowed to control the platforms and the ability to distribute / blacklist software and sites. That needs to be legislated against and those companies need to be broken into a thousand pieces each.
The strong gatekeeping, the encouragement of vital dependency (i.e. treating user/customer data, email, content as if it were the company's, even to the point of cutting access without recourse), the dark pattern upsells, unpermissioned or dark permissioned surveillance, manipulation, the hosting of pervasive scam ads (even Apple News is full of scam ads), ...
None of this should be acceptable. All these ethical violations degrade the lives of countless individuals in the name of "freedom" for corporations.
Conflicts of interest and anticompetitiveness should not be "free" in either sense of the word.
>I think we need to start using the word evil for this. Because it is. It is gross irresponsibility. Gross abuse of a power situation, of a strong dependency, that the company quite knowingly creates.
Oh wow, good morning.
The parties which taught you the notion of "individual" (by defining you as such, and coercive-conditioning all other models out of you), all happen to be collectives: your family, your society, the institutions, the businesses' communication departments. They have the power of definition. An individual (by definition) does not.
It only gets worse from there.
For what purpose are you made "individual"? Collectives define you as "individual", in order to make you defenseless. Individuals have the useful property of being trapped within an infinite recursion of false "selves"; collectives, on the other hand, are neatly self-reifying. They do not have the organ of inhibition (pre-frontal cortex).
In the eyes of the state, corporations are something like artificial people, right? Alright, model them as legally constructed psychopaths out to get you - how to perform extralegal direct intervention upon 'em, same way they can do to us? It's only fair... wait no you can't! You'd only be hurting their constituent individuals. And you can't hurt them nearly as bad as whatever made them join the collective in the first place; it would not only be pointless but also cruel.
This notion of "individual" which lies at the center of Western individualism (and the related schools of thought which implicitly form your day-to-day behaviors in society, no reflection necessary) is an extremely fraught concept: look at it a little too intently and it begins to fall apart at the seams.
Making you see yourself as this thing called "individual", which is extensively studied with most rigorous methods, and somehow remains fundamentally inscrutable (hard problem of consciousness goes wheee!)... that's not very unlike a proprietary API or OS, is it? "Individual identity" is a useful (to whom?) abstraction over the incontrovertible, but by itself meaningless, physical being of a human organism. Unlike a collective, a body cannot be divided into constituent parts and remain itself; but Western civilization is nominally a world of minds over bodies, and minds are made out of ideas, and ideas can be taken apart and shared around just fine, within one body or among entire crowds.
So what we are observing is not evil; "evil" has meaning in the plane of independent individuals operating in mutually comprehensible moral framing. And that's always been a huge and harmful oversimplifiction.
It's much easier to view the behavior of transnational corporations as a whole as the AGI takeoff. But then one might want to consider when exactly it started - was it the LLMs that precipitated it (as many here seem to think), or is the concept of "artificial intelligence" itself a marketing smokescreen, and the NN/ML/LLM tech is just an inevitable performance optimization once the AGI has embedded itself deeply enough into human industry to direct resources towards the mass production of GPUs and other highly specialized accelerator cells.
I thought for sure this article was going to be political commentary!
(I would pay a lot for some fat 1500 page, leather-bound tome of wisdom and anecdotes about historical foot guns, by Carl von Clausewitz, titled "1D Chess". And it's inevitable multi-authored, Harvard-published much thicker contemporary-world sequel.)
AI doesn’t actually come from the outside.
The fact it’s economics have high winner-take-a-lot aspects, doesn’t mean you can eliminate the current winners and end up anywhere different, because it’s actually a natural decentralized progression of improving efficiency.
So that framing makes no sense.
However, the thesis for the potential for violence is sound. I don’t see a way out of that, given unending disruption, with no coordinated responsible response.
I do not think is this essay is hype.
This moment requires great leadership and competence, but that is not what is getting elected.
The last two decades patience with massive businesses scaling up profitable conflicts of interest, and centralizing gatekeeper and dependency powers, that offer no recourse to any individuals they mistreat, strongly suggest we are incapable of dealing with AI fallout. Which will only accelerate and add to those trends.
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