Evgeny Morozov, the author of “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism,” has an opinion piece at The NY Times that warns we may be approaching the risks of Artificial Intelligence from the wrong direction.
...The mounting anxiety about A.I. isn’t because of the boring but reliable technologies that autocomplete our text messages or direct robot vacuums to dodge obstacles in our living rooms. It is the rise of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., that worries the experts.
A.G.I. doesn’t exist yet, but some believe that the rapidly growing capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT suggest its emergence is near. Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, has described it as “systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Building such systems remains a daunting — some say impossible — task. But the benefits appear truly tantalizing...
The problem is, who defines those benefits — and who profits from them.
...But this ideology — call it A.G.I.-ism — is mistaken. The real risks of A.G.I. are political and won’t be fixed by taming rebellious robots. The safest of A.G.I.s would not deliver the progressive panacea promised by its lobby. And in presenting its emergence as all but inevitable, A.G.I.-ism distracts from finding better ways to augment intelligence.
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Morozov points to things that aren’t getting discussed. (The link to the article allows full access, so I’ll just hit some of the highlights — read the whole thing.)
Unbeknown to its proponents, A.G.I.-ism is just a bastard child of a much grander ideology, one preaching that, as Margaret Thatcher memorably put it, there is no alternative, not to the market.
Rather than breaking capitalism, as Mr. Altman has hinted it could do, A.G.I. — or at least the rush to build it — is more likely to create a powerful (and much hipper) ally for capitalism’s most destructive creed: neoliberalism.
Fascinated with privatization, competition and free trade, the architects of neoliberalism wanted to dynamize and transform a stagnant and labor-friendly economy through markets and deregulation.
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Neoliberalism as Morozov puts it, has a bias against government and regulation, based on the belief that markets always come up with the better solutions than government and should be allowed free rein. The idea is that the drive to create profits will always produce better solutions and greater efficiencies. But in practice it’s all about making money.
Remember how Uber was going to take advantage of self-driving cars to deliver cheap transportation, and human drivers were just a stop gap? Funny how that worked out, along with their plans to kill off competing public transit systems to end up with a de facto monopoly.
At the end of the day, the Koch Brothers and Uber are much like Coke and Pepsi. They may have clashing styles, but their product is largely the same: lower corporate taxes, deregulation, lower wages, and private control over public goods like mass transit.
As Morozov puts it:
...After so many Uber- and Theranos-like traumas, we already know what to expect of an A.G.I. rollout. It will consist of two phases. First, the charm offensive of heavily subsidized services. Then the ugly retrenchment, with the overdependent users and agencies shouldering the costs of making them profitable.
As always, Silicon Valley mavens play down the market’s role. In a recent essay titled “Why A.I. Will Save the World,” Marc Andreessen, a prominent tech investor, even proclaims that A.I. “is owned by people and controlled by people, like any other technology.”
Only a venture capitalist can traffic in such exquisite euphemisms. Most modern technologies are owned by corporations. And it will be them — not the mythical “people” — who will monetize saving the world.
And are they really saving it? The record, so far, is poor. Companies like Airbnb and TaskRabbit were welcomed as saviors for the beleaguered middle class; Tesla’s electric cars were seen as a remedy to a warming planet. Soylent, the meal-replacement shake, embarked on a mission to “solve” global hunger, while Facebook vowed to “solve” connectivity issues in the Global South. None of these companies saved the world.
A decade ago, I called this solutionism, but “digital neoliberalism” would be just as fitting. This worldview reframes social problems in light of for-profit technological solutions. As a result, concerns that belong in the public domain are reimagined as entrepreneurial opportunities in the marketplace.
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Morozov goes on to speculate on the ways A.G.I. will further enable problems caused by neoliberalism — the conviction that markets are more efficient than government undermines civic virtue, the idea that the public sector matters. The technology will be used to influence human behavior, getting people to adjust to things like crappy infrastructure rather than investing in solutions that actually fix them.
The solutionist feast is only getting started: Whether it’s fighting the next pandemic, the loneliness epidemic or inflation, A.I. is already pitched as an all-purpose hammer for many real and imaginary nails. However, the decade lost to the solutionist folly reveals the limits of such technological fixes.
To be sure, Silicon Valley’s many apps — to monitor our spending, calories and workout regimes — are occasionally helpful. But they mostly ignore the underlying causes of poverty or obesity. And without tackling the causes, we remain stuck in the realm of adaptation, not transformation.
Further,
Margaret Thatcher’s other famous neoliberal dictum was that “there is no such thing as society.”
The A.G.I. lobby unwittingly shares this grim view. For them, the kind of intelligence worth replicating is a function of what happens in individuals’ heads rather than in society at large.
But human intelligence is as much a product of policies and institutions as it is of genes and individual aptitudes. It’s easier to be smart on a fellowship in the Library of Congress than while working several jobs in a place without a bookstore or even decent Wi-Fi.
It doesn’t seem all that controversial to suggest that more scholarships and public libraries will do wonders for boosting human intelligence. But for the solutionist crowd in Silicon Valley, augmenting intelligence is primarily a technological problem — hence the excitement about A.G.I.
Perhaps another way to understand the risks of A.G.I. is to reflect on the consequences of another huge technological change: the private automobile.
Following World War II, America went all-in on rebuilding the country around the car. Mixed-used neighborhoods were replaced by commuter culture. Instead of cities built around people and all the things they needed to make life possible in an urban neighborhood, we got urban sprawl and people fleeing to suburbs.
The convenience of on-demand personal transportation came with a high cost: hours lost driving back and forth, streets surrendered to cars over people and building codes that mandated parking spaces, entire neighborhoods destroyed to make way for expressways, fossil fuel dependence, air pollution, the destruction of public transit like trolleys and interurbans....
(And when gasoline contained lead, we were also being exposed to a potent neurotoxin.)
The obvious benefits of cars became bound up with all those who stood to profit from their use — whereas a less profit-centered perspective might have ameliorated their impact.
The fears of intelligent machines running amuck has been a staple of science fiction for decades; some would say even longer. The late Isaac Asimov is famous for his stories about robots (and a lot of other things.) Asimov’s great contribution to robotics is his three laws:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
While this seems straightforward enough, Asimov was able to explore how the way they were prioritized and interacted provided no end of plot twists and conflicts — not least because humans lack a comparable set of internalized constraints, unlike Asimov’s robots. Some people are trying to figure out how to incorporate them into A.I. development efforts. Imagine what it would be like if Capitalism had an equivalent. If there’s one thing we know, leaving it up to people whose credo is “move fast and break things” is probably not a good idea.
While he was still writing at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum made robots a recurring topic. His speculations are worth another look as some of what he was predicting, including problems, are moving closer to reality. (The illustrations alone are worth a look.) In chronological order:
Drum has continued writing on robots at his blog Jabberwocking. A web search on Kevin Drum, Jabberwocking, and robotics will find a number of articles. Here’s a sample of recent offerings:
Here’s one from 2023 that may or may not be reassuring: Here’s a list of jobs that are safe from the ChatGPT revolution
If you only want to read one article from Drum, I suggest start with the first one listed. It adds a great deal of perspective to the concerns Morozov is raising. Like it or not, the computing power and software available for A.I. development is only going to get more powerful and Drum expects that is going to mean the challenges — and promises — from A.G.I. are not going to be held back.
If you’d like a slightly more optimistic/humorous take on where A.I. is headed, Jeph Jacques long-running webcomic Questionable Content (and yes the name can be descriptive at times) has incorporated a mix of A.I. characters alongside humans for some time now. He takes a (mostly) whimsical approach to human-A.I. interaction. This particular installment seems rather relevant.