AI and Doom

AI and Doom : The Real Fear and Some Hope

Ideas

• Why do we work : society
• The pursuit of art
• Luddites
• Malthusian mindset

Research

• Why be an artist when there is AI?

  • Just because we have cars, should we stop walking?
  • We taught machines how to speak, but now that they have, why should we stop?

• AI and Rumors of Impending Doom

  • Another week, another story about how artificial intelligence (AI) is an existential threat to the human race
  • discouraging to see so many pronouncements of AI’s existential threat to humanity by people who should know better
  • one technology that poses existential risk and whose creation undermined the enlightenment narrative of progress in science and technology improving human life. Global nuclear war
  • A long series of movies produced after the explosions of 1945—beginning with The Day the Earth Stood Still, On the Beach, Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, even Godzilla—entertained us with apocalyptical tales and created a narrative whose theme (humanity is at risk from uncontrolled science) continues to shape thinking in unhelpful ways.
  • loss of faith in the ability of democratic societies to manage themselves.
  • seemingly intractable domestic issues, undercut the belief that change can be managed.
  • The perception of failure does not inspire confidence and undercuts the legitimacy of leaders and institutions.
  • The internet has made discourse chaotic.
  • the internet puts rumor and conspiracy before a giant audience.
  • Competition for attention in an intensely commercial society inclines people to tell horror stories—reflecting the inherent bias in human cognition, where a scary story commands larger audiences than a happy one
  • If predictions of doom were only for entertainment and PR purposes, they would not be a problem, but exaggerated fear can lead to bad policy.
  • fears about AI-created unemployment
  • That automation will cause jobs to disappear is a fear that goes back to the early nineteenth century and the Luddites
  • AI is the latest phase in the automation of human activity that began in the eighteenth century, and automation creates wealth and innovation. Some jobs disappear; more jobs are created. With these new jobs will come increased wealth and leisure.
  • It would be better to reinterpret the challenge of AI as deciding how to allocate increased wealth and leisure, but income distribution has not been a shining success for social policy for the last 30 years.

• AI Dooms Humanity But Not In The Way You Think

  • If you want to get people to read your material there is no better way than to highlight the negativity.
  • I tend to think the basis for this is largely influenced by the well-established “Malthusian” mindset that constantly states we are about to be out of resources and the four horseman are just around the corner. Malthus simply stated that population rises until all resources are consumed creating a boom bust dynamic similar to what we today often see in markets. Too many people equates to too much consumption which results in unavoidable catastrophe.
  • So we should nonetheless worry about climate change and therefore we need to worry about energy use because if “climate change is a thing,” if energy use is not carefully curated, it’s not that we perish because we run out of energy, we all perish because we run out of environment.
  • AI equates to power equates to CO2.
  • If ChatGPT really is the beginning of transhuman intelligence, then that’s it for the decarbonization strategy because any country not prepared to run its energy at full blast to fuel its AI
  • But for even a skeptic like me, ChapGPT writing my bio in the style of the old testament is enough to prove it’s smarter than 95% of people I know, so how long before that the full 100%?

• ChatGPT creator says there’s 50% chance AI ends in ‘doom’ | The Independent

  • Former OpenAI worker Paul Christiano, who now runs AI research non-profit Alignment Research Center, said he believed there was a significant chance that the technology would lead to the destruction of humanity.
  • The main danger, he claimed, will come when AI systems reach and surpass the cognitive capacity of a human. Dr Christiano predicts there is a “50/50 chance of doom” once this moment arrives.
  • The most likely way we die involves – not AI comes out of the blue and kills everyone – but involves we have deployed a lot of AI everywhere… [And] if for some reason, God forbid, all these AI systems were trying to kill us, they would definitely kill us.”
  • godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton quitting Google to sound the alarm about the dangers of AI

• [ LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-ai-prophets-doom-alistair-enser/|(2) One in the AI for the prophets of doom | LinkedIn](2)%20One%20in%20the%20AI%20for%20the%20prophets%20of%20doom%20)

  • When experts like Hinton speak on the subject of AI we should, of course, listen.
  • But I would argue that the fears currently being expressed around AI amount to little more than scaremongering and are consistent with an approach towards technology that has existed for centuries, perhaps longer.
  • The advent of technologies as diverse as the printing press, the steam engine and the computer have all been accompanied by fears over what they might bring
  • Indeed, I wonder whether some of the warnings around AI can be reduced to fears and frustrations about the pace of its development, and the fact that generative AI, based on large language models (LLM), remains firmly the hands of the usual big tech players. How much of this is sour grapes?
  • We are surely right to be concerned about the potential of AI to eradicate jobs. But how many more jobs will be created as workers are redeployed to do the things that AI cannot, and will not, be able to do?
  • Should there be guardrails in place to govern the development of such a powerful technology as AI? Of course. But we place regulations around loads of technologies – such as the installation of electrical wiring, the roadworthiness of cars, or the use and storage of our data.
  • Does anyone seriously suggest switching off every computer around the globe just because ‘bad actors’ can take control of corporate networks and steal money from bank accounts? Of course not.

• Will Life Be Worth Living in a World Without Work? Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life - Science and Engineering Ethics

  • Simple Subjectivist Theories
  • life is meaningful to the extent that the individual living it experiences certain subjective states, typically conscious well-being and desire satisfaction
  • Simple Objective Theories
  • individual living it brings about certain objectively good or valuable states of affairs
  • Aim-Achievement Theories
  • combination of subjective and objective states are needed in order to make life meaningful
  • Fitting-Fulfillment Theories
  • combination of subjective and objective states are needed in order to make life meaningful
  • under a simple subjectivist theory, there is reason to think that technological unemployment could enhance the overall level of meaning in our lives, but only if we make use of the right kinds of technological advances
  • reason to think that technological unemployment could undermine the overall level of meaning in our lives, but this impact could lessened with the right kind of technological developments
  • The Subjective Satisfaction of Non-work
  • The idea is that compulsory work takes us away from the things that we are really passionate about and that would confer upon us the most subjective satisfaction
  • I cannot do these things because the productivist ethos of modern academia demands that I produce more peer-reviewed publications to pad out my CV.
  • This argument assumes that if we control our own time we will spend it in a way that induces the right subjective states.
  • Dan Gilbert’s work on mis-wanting, for example, suggests that we often don’t really know what makes us truly happy and often stumble upon happiness (Gilbert ref-CR29 “Gilbert, D. (2005. Stumbling on happiness. Vintage.”); Gilbert et al. ref-CR31 “Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. (1998. Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
  • 75, 617–638.”), ref-CR30 “Gilbert, D. T., Lieberman, M. D., Morewedge, C. K., & Wilson, T. D. (2004. The peculiar longevity of things not so bad. Psychological Science,
  • 15, 14–19.”)).
  • Findings like this can be exploited by critics of automation and technological unemployment. A recent example of this is Carr (ref-CR12 “Carr, N. (2015. The glass cage: Where automation is taking us. London: The Bodley Head.”)). Carr contends that without the pressures and incentives of work we may live a life of listless and unsatisfied boredom.
  • Cskikszentmihalyi (ref-CR16 “Cskikszentmihalyi, M. (1990. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row.”), ref-CR17 “Cskikszentmihalyi, M. (1997. Finding flow: The psychology of engagement with everyday life. New York: Basic Books.”), ref-CR18 “Cskikszentmihalyi, M. (2007. Experience sampling method: Measuring the quality of everyday life (p. 2007). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Inc.”))
  • studies reveal that people are generally more focused, happier and more satisfied at work than at play
  • Indeed, they often report feeling anxious and bored outside of work when they are presumably free to engage in their preferred activities.
  • ‘paradox of work
  • Cskikszentmihalyi’s theory holds that entering into a flow state is a function of how difficult the task is and how much pressure is associated with it.
  • Work is often an excellent way to provide the right kind of pressure and difficulty.
  • There is a limited utility to studies, such as Cskikszentmihalyi’s, which compare work and leisure in a world that is dominated by work.
  • When I come home from a busy day at the office, I’m usually drained and lethargic. I’m often not physically able to engage in the kinds of activity I would prefer. I’m conscious of the fact that I need to recover before going back to the office again. In an era of rampant technological unemployment, in which the shadow of work is removed, things could be very different.
  • It is paternalistic to assume that people will lack sufficient self-motivation if they are unemployed.
  • This paternalism is behind much of the traditional ideological glorification of the work ethic.
  • the argument ignores the ways in which modern technology can greatly assist in providing these alternative sources of pressure.
  • although technology could be leveraged in ways that make us more likely to achieve flow states through our activities, there are also ways in which we could use technology to trick ourselves into such subjectively pleasurable states without any associated activity
  • if we are to think seriously about meaning and personal fulfillment in an age of technological unemployment, we probably need to take into consideration the link between our actions and the objective world, and how technology might mediate the relationship between our actions and the objective world.
  • antiwork positions
  • it is too dismissive of the potential for the market to direct human activity towards objectively valuable outcomes.
  • production of art and intellectual discovery, both of which are subject to significant market forces in the modern world
  • If automating technology renders human contribution to such market-based activities unnecessary, then we may be robbed of something that is conducive to the good life.
  • the antiwork camp will simply respond by saying that nonwork is better at allowing us to do these things.
  • It assumes that the kinds of technological advance that make widespread technological unemployment possible will occur in a vacuum—that the impact of automating technologies will be felt solely in our economic lives.
  • If this trend continues, and we rely on those technologies in these other domains, we could sever the necessary causal and mental link between our actions and the outcomes that are said to be constitutive of meaning.
  • Science is increasingly a ‘big data’ enterprise, reliant on algorithmic, and other forms of automated assistance, to process large datasets and make useful inferences from those datasets. Humans are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the process of discovery.
  • The machines start doing much of the work themselves; the logic of their decision-making becomes more and more opaque to those who interact with them
  • Thus, once again, the rise of automation reduces the space in which humans can engage in meaningful and fulfilling moral activities.
  • Now, you might dispute this characterisation. You might argue that there is still room for human input in all of these automated systems. For one thing, such systems would seem to require human designers, programmers and overseers; for another, humans would still have to contribute to the smooth functioning of such systems, e.g. by becoming kidney donors or by providing crucial data
  • not everyone is going to be equipped or trained to design or program such systems
  • advances in technology may be such that human designers, programmers and overseers will become less needed over time
  • even if humans will always participate in such systems, the participation in question has to be of the right type in order to facilitate meaningfulness in the objective or hybridist sense.
  • even if machines are better at achieving certain objective outcomes there is nothing to stop humans from achieving them too
  • why would you waste time and risk lives if the machines are better
  • it assumes that if machines get better and better at doing things they will take away from the fixed lump of potentially meaningful activities that are open to human beings.
  • But why couldn’t more and more objectively meaningful activities open up

• https://www.history.com/news/who-were-the-luddites

  • “Luddite” is now a blanket term used to describe people who dislike new technology, but its origins date back to an early 19th-century labor movement that railed against the ways that mechanized manufacturers and their unskilled laborers undermined the skilled craftsmen of the day
  • Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood
  • cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines
  • Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases, they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers
  • It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”