31 votes

AI belongs to the capitalists now

13 comments

  1. [2]
    Sodliddesu
    Link
    I don't like the article's end saying "the utopians are in the driver's seat now," which implies they believe in a utopian future - implied obviously for everyone and not just the already rich...

    I don't like the article's end saying "the utopians are in the driver's seat now," which implies they believe in a utopian future - implied obviously for everyone and not just the already rich board - instead of the title's call out that, yeah, just another thing captured by Big Business™ and subject to an already neutered and aged government which doesn't seem to care.

    Hell maybe that does make them the utopians because it sure feels dystopian to me.

    24 votes
    1. tealblue
      Link Parent
      Arguably the utopian is worse than profit-driven capitalist. The true utopian will find a moral justification for their actions that will likely push them further than the capitalist.

      Arguably the utopian is worse than profit-driven capitalist. The true utopian will find a moral justification for their actions that will likely push them further than the capitalist.

      19 votes
  2. [5]
    unkz
    Link
    I guess this could be seen as a negative, but I think of it more in terms of inevitability and who is going to get there first. I would rather the first AGI happen in a western democracy that may...

    I guess this could be seen as a negative, but I think of it more in terms of inevitability and who is going to get there first. I would rather the first AGI happen in a western democracy that may have some oversight and comparatively “good” ethics than in the hands of an oppressive autocracy.

    12 votes
    1. [4]
      tealblue
      Link Parent
      The question is, is it good that it's happening in the US rather than say the UK or France? Genuine question

      The question is, is it good that it's happening in the US rather than say the UK or France? Genuine question

      9 votes
      1. Greg
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        Apologies if this is what you were alluding to, but Deepmind is London based, Mistral (who raised record-breaking funding in July) are in Paris, and one of the largest fully open LLMs (BLOOM) came...

        Apologies if this is what you were alluding to, but Deepmind is London based, Mistral (who raised record-breaking funding in July) are in Paris, and one of the largest fully open LLMs (BLOOM) came out of a supercomputing lab funded by the French government.

        I can't claim anything close to the geopolitical knowledge to make a meaningful call on every facet of what defines good vs bad here, and it'd be foolish to ignore the fact that most of the money in the field is concentrated in the US and China, with an absolute ton of the academic research I see coming from the latter - but I think it's also fair to say that the UK and France particularly are still punching well above their weight when accounting for population and economy, to the extent that I wouldn't gamble too much on where the next major breakthrough will come from.

        9 votes
      2. [2]
        unkz
        Link Parent
        I mean it’s kind of happening all over, and sort of in the public. There are papers being published and the 700ish multinational employees of OpenAI are free to go to different companies (albeit...

        I mean it’s kind of happening all over, and sort of in the public. There are papers being published and the 700ish multinational employees of OpenAI are free to go to different companies (albeit with NDAs), without risk of being put in prison for treason if they leak. And the people involved, while possibly being excessively idealistic about the upsides of AI vs the downsides, are fairly aligned with my personal values — I don’t expect any of them to be silent if the technology gets utilized for the kind of purposes I might expect from other competing forms of government, eg morality enforcement (Iran, Saudi, other Islamic fundamentalists), propaganda and fake news (Russia), straight up genocide (China vs Uighurs), or cyberterrorism and theft (North Korea). So in a sense, I don’t know that I see a huge difference between which liberal democracy happens to hold the headquarters.

        5 votes
        1. tealblue
          Link Parent
          I suppose different liberal democracies could have different attitudes toward AI safety, and I would imagine that the country who's ahead would have outsized influence over leading regulatory...

          I suppose different liberal democracies could have different attitudes toward AI safety, and I would imagine that the country who's ahead would have outsized influence over leading regulatory efforts (no individual country wants to get left behind, so the onus is especially on the leader to reign things in). There may be limits of what can be done in reigning research (though I do think there's some meaningful ability to slow things down on that front), but the aspect of scaling AI that's significantly dependent on physical resources can surely be regulated.

          1 vote
  3. [5]
    Jordan117
    Link
    The apparent ease with which an emerging corporate juggernaut sloughed off nominal control by an idealistic non-profit board after they flipped their kill-switch is much more interesting when you...

    The apparent ease with which an emerging corporate juggernaut sloughed off nominal control by an idealistic non-profit board after they flipped their kill-switch is much more interesting when you view it according to the theory that corporations are a form of AI.

    8 votes
    1. [4]
      myrrh
      Link Parent
      ...i think "AI" ascribes more agency to corporations than they're warranted as entities: they grow and evolve to capture resources and propagate throughout social-ecosystems, but that's more...

      corporations are a form of AI.

      ...i think "AI" ascribes more agency to corporations than they're warranted as entities: they grow and evolve to capture resources and propagate throughout social-ecosystems, but that's more analogous to unthinking life than sentient intelligence...

      ...in truth, once an organisation cedes control to public capital, nobody is in charge; i'd point at cube as a metaphor for that golem...

      5 votes
      1. [3]
        wowbagger
        Link Parent
        I don't get the reference, could you explain what "cube" means in this context?

        ...in truth, once an organisation cedes control to public capital, nobody is in charge; i'd point at cube as a metaphor for that golem...

        I don't get the reference, could you explain what "cube" means in this context?

        3 votes
        1. PelagiusSeptim
          Link Parent
          I believe they are referring to the movie Cube, where part of the premise is that the giant cube that people are being tortured in has no real purpose, with many people having worked on parts of...

          I believe they are referring to the movie Cube, where part of the premise is that the giant cube that people are being tortured in has no real purpose, with many people having worked on parts of it but no one understanding the whole, just sort of a deterministic result of bureaucracy

          7 votes
  4. Sycamore
    Link
    The inevitability of capitalistic interests taking priority is increasingly worrisome. Especially in this context of A.I.

    The inevitability of capitalistic interests taking priority is increasingly worrisome. Especially in this context of A.I.

    6 votes