That's clearer. I can see how that can be a problem, but destruction of humanity? I think of this as a fun change in circumstance at best and a challenge at worst, rather than a disaster.
Asymmetry of power creates rulers and the ruled. Widespread availability of firearms helped to partly balance out one aspect (monopoly on violence) and the wide availability of personal computers plus the Internet balanced out another (monopoly on information). Only part left is the control of resources (food, housing, etc.).
AI is destabilizing the current balance of knowledge/information which creates the high potential for violence.
Consider a society where everyone has a different reality about something shared normally.
Societies are built upon unspoken but shared truths and information (i.e. the social contract). Dissolve this information, dissolve or fragment the society.
This, coupled with profiling and targeting will enable fragmentation of the societies, consolidation of power and many other shenanigans.
This also enables continuous profiling, opening the door for "preemptive policing" (Minority Report style) and other dystopian things.
Think about Cambridge Analytica or election manipulation, but on steroids.
This. Power and Control is only viable at scale when the aforementioned tacts are wielded with precision by "invisible hands" ..
History has proved that keeping society stupid and disenfranchised is essential to control.
Did you know that in the 1600s the King of England banned coffee?
Simple.. fear of evolving propagating better ideas and more intense social fraternity.
"Patrons read and debated the news of the day in coffeehouses, fueled by caffeine; the coffeehouse became a core engine of the new scientific and philosophical thought that characterized the era. Soon there were hundreds of establishments selling coffee."
(the late 1600s was something of a fraught time for England and especially for Charles II, who had spent some time in exile due to the monarchist loss of the English Civil War)
But the impact of AI is going to be even worse than that.
For virtually all of human history, there weren't anywhere near so many of us as there are now, and the success and continuation of any one group of humans wasn't particularly dependent on the rest. Sure, there were large-scale trade flows, but there were no direct dependencies between farmers in Europe, farmers in China, farmers in India, etc. If one society collapsed, others kept going.
The worst historical collapses I'm familiar with - the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the fall of the Roman Empire - were directly tied to larger-scope trade, and were still localized beyond comparison with our modern world.
Until very recently, total human population at any given point in history has been between 100 and 400 million. We're now past 8 billion. And those 8 billion people depend on an interconnected global supply chain for food. A supply chain that, in turn, was built with a complex shared consensus on a great many things.
AI, via its ability to cheaply produce convincing BS at scale, even if it also does other things is a direct and imminent threat to the system of global trade that keeps 8 billion human beings fed (and that sustains the technology base which allows for AI, along with many other things).
I don't want to invalidate your viewpoint: I'll just share mine.
The shared truth that holds us together, that you mentioned, in my eyes is love of humanity, as cliche as that might sound. Sure it wavers, we have our ups and downs, but at the end, every generation is kinder and smarter than the previous. I see an upward spiral.
Yes, there are those of us who might feel inclined to subdue and deceive, out of feelings of powerlessness, no doubt. But, then there are many of us who don't care for anything less than kindness. And, every act of oppression inches us toward speaking and acting up. It's a self-balancing system: even if one falls asleep at the wheel, that only makes the next wake-up call more intense.
As to the more specific point about fragmented information spaces: we always had that. At all points in history we had varying ways to mess with how information, ideas and beliefs flowed: for better and for worse. The new landscape of information flow, brought about by LLMs, is a reflection of our increasing power, just as a teenager is more powerful than a pre-teen, and that brings its own "increased" challenges. That's part of the human experience. It doesn't mean that we have to ride the bad possibilities to the complete extreme, and we won't, I believe.
Thanks for your kind reply. I wanted to put some time aside to reply the way your comment deserves.
My personal foundations are not very different than yours. I don't care about many people cares. Being a human being and having your heart at the right place is a good starting point for me, too.
On the other hand, we need to make a distinction between people who live (ordinary citizens) and people who lead (people inside government and managers of influential corporations). There's the saying "power corrupts", now this saying has scientific basis: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-c...
So, the "ruling class", for the lack of better term, doesn't think like us. I strive to be kinder every day. They don't (or can't) care. They just want more power, nothing else.
For the fragmented spaces, the challenge is different than the past. We, humans, are social animals and were always in social groups (tribes, settlements, towns, cities, countries, etc.), we felt belong. As the system got complex, we evolved as a result. But the change was slow, so we were able to adapt in a couple of generations. In 80s to 00s, it was faster, but we managed it somehow. Now it's exponentially faster, and more primitive parts of our brains can't handle it as gracefully. Our societies, ideas and systems are strained.
Another problem is, unfortunately, not all societies or the parts of the same society evolve at the same pace to the same kinder, more compassionate human beings. Radicalism is on the rise. It doesn't have to be violent, but some parts of the world is becoming less tolerant. We can't ignore these. See world politics. It's... complicated.
So, while I share your optimism and light, I also want to underline that we need to stay vigilant. Because humans are complicated. Some are naive, some are defenseless and some just want to watch the world burn.
Instead of believing that everything's gonna be alright eventually, we need to do our part to nudge our planet in that direction. We need to feed the wolf which we want to win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Wolves
Argh, I lost my reply due to a hiccup with my distraction-blocking browser extension. I'll try and summarize what I wanted to say. I'll probably be more terse than I originally would have been.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I too think that our viewpoints are very similar.
I think you hit the nail on the head about how it's important that positivity doesn't become an excuse for inaction or ignorance. What I want is a positivity that's a rally, not a withdrawal.
Instead of thinking of power as something that imposes itself on people (and corrupts them), I like to think that people tend to exhibit their inner-demons when they're in positions of power (or, conversely, in positions of no-power). It's not that the position does something to them, but it's that they prefer to express their preexisting disbalance (inner conflict) in certain ways when they're in those circumstances. When in power, the inner disbalance manifests as a villain; when out-of-power, it manifests as a victim.
I think it's important to say "we", rather than "us and them". I don't see multiple factions with fundamentally incompatible needs. Basically, I think that conflict is always a miscommunication. But, in no way do I mean that one should cede to tyranny or injustice. It's just that I want to keep in mind, that whenever there's fighting, it's always in-fighting. Same for oppression: it's not them hurting us, but us hurting us: an orchestration between villains and victims. I know it's triggering for people when you humanize villains and depassify victims, but in my eyes we're all human and all powerful, except we pretend that the 1% is super powerful, while the 99% are super powerless.
I had a few more points I wanted to share, but I have to run. Thanks for the conversation.
Google gave us direct access to much of the world's knowledge base, then snatched it away capriciously and put a facsimile of it behind a algorithmic paywall that they control at the whims of their leadership, engineering, or benefactors.
The despair any rational person will feel upon realizing that they lobotomized the overmind that drove Information Age society might just be traumatic enough, in aggregate, to set off a collapse.
So, yes. Destruction of humanity (at least, as we know it) incoming. That's without the super AI.
