To put it a different way, everyone is afraid of the paperclip maximizing machine doing something horrible in its monomaniacal pursuit of its goal. But the profit-maximizing machine is no better.
see, this analogy worries me b/c i feel that the passive voice obfuscates the fact that the structure "being shaped" by real people who are so far removed from the consequences of their actions that they can dehumanize populations of the world without retribution.
that said, from the paragraph below it, idk any CEOs who are worried about being displaced by AI, so I'm sorry if my thoughts are tangential to the actual conversation happening. i just worry that people get very comfortable personifying corporations and not punishing the upholders of the structure
This is the Necessity-Contingency paradigm. CEO's/execs who run a firm operate under necessity, they have no agency, therfore no responsibility and associated ethical commitments. Private individuals however, are told their life is completely contingent and failure/success is ethnically bound.
This is intentionally constructed so the system reproduces the conditions that exist. firms and public agencies elide their ethical commitments by claiming they are bound to the 'laws' of the market.
Yeah, well said. I do believe it is important to dissect the nature of the layered social constructs, and your last sentence is imperative to understanding who perpetuates these imbalanced systems.
Yeah, it's very sci fi to think of corporations like hive minds, but fundamentally they do exist and operate solely for the benefit - and at the direction - of their shareholders. Framing them as autonomous entities seems unhelpful
If this is true, then it allows for a potential solution: AI only cares about Number Go Up. It doesn't care about the meaning of that number, or even its actual value.
So we should get more active in government, let the AI replace upper management, and even actual workers, while simultaneously providing for workers' needs, setting up workers' cooperatives not run by AI or a managerial elite, etc. This cuts off the bleeding.
At the same time, we transfer from dollars to a similar but different medium of material exchange. The dollar becomes meaningless, but the AI doesn't care, it doesn't truly understand. Then we have the government constantly increase the numbers in meaningless deals.
Essentially, pay them to do nothing. Again, the AI doesn't care about anything other than number go up, and we've made the number meaningless and valueless, and taken away all of the things that could make number go down.
And they are admittedly a lot harder to deal with than an AI, because they recognize the number must mean something. But, said parties generally are far more anti-AI than pro-number-go-up.
i think it's useful to recognize that it's not a coincidence
we didn't get rid of our kings, our hereditary dynasties ruling over empires full of serfs; they just traded their crowns for nice suits and fawning interviews on CNBC
divine right of kings turned wholesale into divine right of coin
naturally the capitalists want us worried about wildly hypothetical AI destroying the world to make paperclips instead of real corporations destroying the world to make money 👀
But I think that passage imputes more reason and logic to corporate rapaciousness than we often witness. A lot of corporations are run to win attention and praise for their top executive, without serious regard being given to the company's actual success (let alone the workers or customers).
