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recent bookmarks from jmSilicon Valley tech companies are the real paperclip maximizers2023-02-13T22:48:52+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway?s=03
jmElon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” [...]
This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies.
Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.
]]>superintelligence ted-chiang silicon-valley capitalism ai future civilization paperclip-maximisershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:061f792e267d/The Real Danger To Civilization Isn’t AI. It’s Runaway Capitalism2017-12-18T16:58:27+00:00
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway#.gcwzgrYDG
jmThe idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.
[....] I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations. Corporations don’t operate autonomously, of course, and the humans in charge of them are presumably capable of insight, but capitalism doesn’t reward them for using it. On the contrary, capitalism actively erodes this capacity in people by demanding that they replace their own judgment of what “good” means with “whatever the market decides.”
]]>capitalism silicon-valley ai superintelligence future ted-chiang sfhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7751c12c8067/