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Why Technology Favors Tyranny

120 点作者 winterismute超过 6 年前

15 条评论

oblio超过 6 年前
&gt; Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful.<p>I have a problem with this premise. Anyone that knows history knows that humans were as tame, if not tamer, in the past. Plus uneducated.<p>Most of humanity has never been agile, curious and resourceful. Historically a handful of people were, and they tried to steer everyone around them.<p>I&#x27;d say we are less cow-like than we&#x27;ve ever been. A ton more people have access to education than they ever did. The only thing the new technologies (like the internet) are exposing is the depth of the veneer of education the vast majority of people had, and that depth was very shallow.<p>I&#x27;d say that in some regards this is actually better. Transparency tends to help and now a lot more people can see through the covers. It will just take time to adjust.<p>Nota bene: I still believe that most people, most of the time, are passive. Being active is a lot of work and truly active people will be always the outliers. It&#x27;s just that we can increase the percentage of active people by making it easier for them to be active.
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pjc50超过 6 年前
Recently I saw a comment that the real &quot;hostile AI&quot; threat was not something like Skynet, but more like Youtube algorithmic video recommendations and their fondness for conspiracy and far-right material.<p>The perceived threats of &quot;irrelevance&quot; and &quot;uselessness&quot; get easily diverted against other humans, especially through &quot;othering&quot;. As jobs are taken by automation or offshoring it&#x27;s easy to blame &quot;immigrants&quot;. Keep up the social division for long enough and this can escalate to actual violence.<p>Amartya Sen&#x27;s Nobel-prize-winning work on famine was to demonstrate that it was rarely due to an absolute shortage of food, but a deficiency in &quot;entitlement&quot; to it: both purely economic (not having the cash) and political (not being able to secure famine relief). That&#x27;s the potential worse case of being &quot;irrelevant and useless&quot;: starving to death because you can&#x27;t get food from the &quot;system&quot; somehow.
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msiyer超过 6 年前
If we look closely, we will soon realize that everything favors tyranny. Religious institutions, political institutions, educational institutions...<p>The problem is humanity has a tendency to pick or gravitate to morally weak specimens for leadership. We also have a tendency to &quot;believe&quot; authority which often leads us astray. Would a wolf pack pick a weak leader? Would a wolf pack let a weak leader remain in position once weaknesses are exposed?
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zekevermillion超过 6 年前
I&#x27;m with Kasparov, that the best method of combining human and machine will always beat the best machine or the best human individually. I submit that Google&#x27;s AI progress does not disprove this assertion, because (a) even if Google&#x27;s AI is self-trained in chess or go, a human team is required to select a game and set up the training, as well as to update the algo or meta-algorithm in competition against the guys from IBM and Xinhua, etc; and (b) chess, although a very large and, for most purposes nearly infinite, game, ultimately is not open-ended or infinite in the way that nature life is, or human life decision-space is. Go is perhaps a better contender as a life simulation but I think still falls well short of the complexity of even a simple natural system.<p>One could counter that a meta training algorithm could define rulesets for a alpha-like AI to self-train-upon, and at sufficient generality this would take humans out of the equation. Well, if humans are entirely removed, then the problem is no longer interesting. If humans are involved at any point in the process, we could still view AI through the lens of a human-centered tool.<p>What if AGI does in fact evolve its own goals as primary and decides that humans and&#x2F;or human self-determination are an impediment? Would humans eventually fall down the food chain, or outside of it, say as raccoons living on the city streets? Well, I don&#x27;t view the world that way. But, even if non-human life forms gain supremacy of intellect and capabilities, I would note that even raccoons have a place -- and despite the fervent desires of many a suburban homeowner, the little pests are amazingly resilient to attempts at extermination or control.
macawfish超过 6 年前
The article is much better than the headline suggests
api超过 6 年前
Hammers don&#x27;t favor one kind of architecture over another. Hammers do what the people holding them make them do.<p>The way we use our technology is a reflection of our ideas. Since the 1990s I&#x27;ve watched the <i>ideas</i> that are popular within the culture shift in an increasingly authoritarian direction on both the &quot;right&quot; and &quot;left&quot; of the conventional political spectrum. We are seeing the ascent of strong man rule and other types of authoritarianism around the world for democratic reasons: it&#x27;s what people want, or what people think we need.<p>I think the largest single factor is push-back against globalization. Personally I think globalization in some form and to some degree is both desirable (to prevent war and increase wealth) and inevitable (due to travel and communication), but I also think it&#x27;s been pushed perhaps a little too quickly and in ways that are profoundly insensitive to the needs of the middle classes in the developed world. That&#x27;s created a massive anti-globalization backlash where people are elevating strongmen and demagogues to re-assert national borders and national independence.<p>There are other factors too. I think a similar kind of reaction is occurring against global social liberalization.
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jancsika超过 6 年前
&gt; Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.<p>globalization - by definition effects billions of people<p>genetic engineering - in 2016 GM crops, according to Wikipedia, make up 12% of global cropland<p>blockchain - digital time-stamping service that scales to the unfathomable rate of 7 transactions per second<p>It tells me the author is unable to separate wheat from chaff, as if writing this:<p>&gt; Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, <i>HDMI to VGA adapters</i>, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.
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indigochill超过 6 年前
Perhaps programming needs to become the new &quot;literacy&quot; standard. Writing human languages isn&#x27;t enough any more. By learning to read and write computer code, people can become active users of technology rather than merely consumers bound to the creations of others.
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evrydayhustling超过 6 年前
Articles like this often risk conflating many distinct concerns about tech in a way that makes the whole set feel alarmist rather than actionable. This author does a good job of cataloguing each risk separately. His closing prescription deserves a place in the article&#x27;s tl;dr:<p>&gt; ...if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society—then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing. These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy.
jeandejean超过 6 年前
Yet another post about some frightening scenarios, imagined by people technologically illeterate, that has little chance to happen...
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matt4077超过 6 年前
Among dystopias, this one is remarkably well-argued...<p>It is rather frustrating to see how illiberality and strive have come back. In the nineties, the &quot;End of History&quot; made for a convincing hypothesis: Market economies in functioning democracies had proven that they were capable of providing decent quality of life for everyone. Competition had moved on from natural resources to human ingenuity, rendering the supposed motivation for all the wars of history irrelevant. Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited; instead, they had a standing invite to this future of plenty, and Asia took them up on it.<p>But China&#x27;s economic rise didn&#x27;t effect any democratic change. It seemed that democracy did not, after all, win the cold war. Communism merely lost it. Dictatorships can be as productive as open societies, as long as you don&#x27;t saddle them with too much incompetence or self-defeating ideology.<p>So we are now in this new battle of the systems, and too often, we&#x27;re loosing: China and Russia are obvious. But Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, and Poland are more recent converts to the prosperity gospel of strongman leadership. With Trump, Brexit, and several recent election results in Europe, the hits keep coming closer.<p>Maybe humans never actually liked democracy. They just enjoyed its spoils. Now that there&#x27;s an option to both eat <i>and</i> hate, they&#x27;re overjoyed.
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doombolt超过 6 年前
If you as a society ignore it and let it loose, why won&#x27;t it?<p>See GDPR as a solid example of trend reversal.
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jkingsbery超过 6 年前
This article mentions a lot of things that &quot;might&quot; or &quot;may&quot; happen, without really any convincing arguments for why these predictions will come to fruition. It&#x27;s true that dictators make use of centralized knowledge, but it&#x27;s also true that many of the assumptions of market capitalism assume perfect knowledge and no transaction costs, two assumptions which have never been true in practice but today are much more applicable (knowledge is faster to attain, and transaction costs are smaller today and more directly measurable). So, it seems just as likely to me that markets could be on the verge of being more useful mechanisms than ever.
CM30超过 6 年前
As per the last time this was posted, here are my thoughts on this article and its premise:<p>Firstly, I feel everyone gets something wrong about AI and jobs, and I believe that makes things a little less dire on that front than you may otherwise believe. Namely, people are not purely &#x27;rational&#x27; economic actors, and don&#x27;t purely make decisions on &#x27;quality&#x27; or &#x27;price&#x27;.<p>For instance, art and media isn&#x27;t all about what&#x27;s the &#x27;best&#x27; work out there, but the one with name recognition, sentimental value, an existing fandom, etc. It doesn&#x27;t matter if an AI can create &#x27;art&#x27;, because whether that art sells depends on more than technical competence. Will Mario or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings be threatened by AI and technology? Probably not, the name sells regardless of whether a competitor product&#x2F;brand may be objectively better.<p>So I believe artistic and creative fields may be the thing remaining after AI takes most other jobs, since your creativity can make a market that competitors legally can&#x27;t compete in. If all fails, a personal brand can do much the same way. Sell yourself, not the &#x27;product&#x27;.<p>There&#x27;s also the fact many &#x27;worse&#x27; businesses still do well either through word of mouth, location, advertising, etc. Not everything will be a one horse race ala Uber or Airbnb, and whether AI&#x2F;tech&#x2F;whatever can outperform humans won&#x27;t really matter than much regardless. In that sense, things aren&#x27;t quite as dire as some people would have you believe.<p>Secondly, while technology and AI may help those in power consolidate it further, it also democraticises power too, by making the means of getting it available to more people than ever before.<p>For example, for as much as emotional manipulation and fake news is pointed out as an issue online, the internet has also made it easier to verify anything, to get around government censorship and to make your own mind up about current events and the situation at hand. If the old school media got things wrong (or were told to shut up by those in power), what could you do? How could you disprove their claims?<p>With great difficulty that&#x27;s how. But now we&#x27;ve got a world when anyone can call out anyone, where finding alternative viewpoints on major topics is trivial and where doing research on advanced topics is easier than ever. Narratives have been destroyed, official statements disproved by average Joes taking photos and recording videos, and pseudoscience has been debunked. Is that really worse than a world where publishing information is tightly controlled and regulated?<p>Technology can be used for the purposes of tyranny, but it can also be used to fight against it just as well. And that&#x27;ll only get more true when more aspects of everyday life involve computers and networking.<p>So while technology may &#x27;favour&#x27; tyranny, in some ways it also favours democracy and a more equal society too.
mar77i超过 6 年前
&quot;The growing fear of irrelevance&quot;?<p>Well duh. First of all, get that out of the way. You <i>are</i> irrelevant, the universe at a greater scale indeed doesn&#x27;t even hint a proper damn about you. I&#x27;m more concerned with all those snowflakes out there losing touch with reality insisting that they are who is relevant when in fact any attention you give them whatsoever is a waste of time, and stolen from you and just not worth it.<p>I&#x27;ve about had it with this civilization, and phrasings like that... oh look, technology enables a new kind of totalitarianism. Yeah. Well. If that&#x27;s what you make of it, fine. Of course it doesn&#x27;t need to be that way, but now that you said it out loud, it&#x27;ll become more true among your kin.<p>I&#x27;ll just stay in my little bubble that thinks technology can help increasing the awesomeness in everyone&#x27;s life, at least this 300 foot pole away from your orwellian dystopias - far enough for government work.
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