> These have been around forever, and were promised/touted to eliminate jobs. But 15 years later the machines are hardly fully-automated. They are prone to malfunctioning. Not only that, but stores, understandably, are paranoid about theft.<p>I was thinking about this the other day at the grocery store.<p>All manual checkout lanes were closed, and 5 automated ones were open. 5 people were standing around chatting while keeping an eye on the automated lanes, for the inevitable situation where either the machine screws up, or a counterintuitive UI quirk confuses customers (in my case, you have to move to payment to see discounts applied on sale items).<p>I'm sure it pays dividends during the busy times, and not 8pm, but still. I have to wonder at the economics of it. Times like I'm describing have to cut into the operational savings.
The analogy is apt - I've seen more than one "how do you cope with existential dread about AI" post. People need something to simultaneously worry about, show affiliation, guide decisions, etc.
> How likely is it that caring about AI risk gets thought of as a left-wing thing, or becomes associated with some other political identity that has powerful opponents?<p>Its already started. Elon Musk has talked about making an anti woke AI. And with more filters being put in place ("censoring") and jobs being taken, the trajectory is pretty apparent.<p>The implications though... I'm having my trouble wrapping my head around that. With climate denial/anti-vaccine stuff, for instance, the polarization culture has really significant effects, but... what are "anti lefitst AI" activists gonna do? Boycott computers? Yell at AI companies to stop training stuff? Maybe drag some CEOs in for hearings and make them... make the AI politically neutral and mild, which they are already doing?
Enough with this stupid "left-wing" versus "right-wing" dichotomy, it doesn't mean anything any more and has not done so for a long time. Many so-called left-wingers call anything which does not fit with their world "right-wing" no matter whether that thing is seen as "left-wing" by the rest of the world or not. Other so-called right-wingers consider anything which does not abide by the God-Mother-Apple pie holy trifecta "Communist" no matter what the thing is in reality. Depending on where you stand the terms "left-wing" and "right-wing" means either "good, virtuous" or "bad, vile".<p>Yes, machine learning can become a threat by brainwashing the population because it can get personal with individuals where propagandists were limited at broadcasting their message to the crowd. A biased ML-based search engine will give biased answers, a biased ML-based personal tutor for schoolchildren will brainwash them, biased ML-based medical expert systems will have the power to change the demography of the population, biased ML-based voting systems are a match made in hell for those who are intent on using these systems in such a way. The added power of machine learning is that these systems can target individuals instead of groups. It doesn't matter whether the systems are biased towards pushing "critical theories", "patriotism", some "young earth hypothesis", "scientism", "objectivism", "anarcho-communism" or whatever other ideological bent you can come up with - given sufficiently advanced models they'll be able to spread the word to the masses, one by one.<p>What can help against this onslaught of personalised precision propaganda which is fairly likely to come sooner rather than later? An equally advanced bias detector, factory-sealed with a no-tamper seal and a stamp of approval by the National Institute for Neutral Standards? Equal access to otherwise-biased systems which get to fight for every scrap of attention of their victims? An intermediate which takes input from many models and presents the results with detected bias vectors? Good questions, let's get working on some solutions without wondering whether an old salon socialist fart like Bernie Sanders or a nouveau riche captain of industry like Elon Musk says something about it.
First paragraph: "climate change is cringe, elon musk is cool"<p>what<p>dude turned into a raging right-winger because his daughter came out as trans and disowned him, that's <i>turbo</i> cringe, I have seen people on this very site discussing how his handling of Twitter has been so catastrophically bad that they are now embarassed to own teslas, ffs<p>what kind of world does this anonymous blogger <i>live</i> in
And Climate change was the new Terrorism, which probably was the new something else. It's clear now that FUD is an instrument of power and naturally political people want to capitalize on it.