"AI" is just a tool. The actual question is ask is "Can the people who stand to profit or otherwise benefit from it be trusted to use it responsibly?"
The answer to that question is a resounding, unequivocal "No."
Absent any sort of moderating influence, the profit motive necessarily compels people to act as unscrupulously as possible. Basic human avarice is a know quantity that should make us all perpetually aware of this basic fact. Morality cannot be part of the equation in capitalism. Only ever-growing profits. While hurting people may not be the goal of capitalism, its ruthless drive for profit inevitably leads it to do harmful things because doing the right thing is rarely profitable in and of itself. History is replete with examples of horrible things done in the name of profit, from human rights abuses (see where the phrase "banana republic" originated) to ignoring all sorts of negative externalities (see the harms caused by fossil fuels, tobacco, lead compounds used in paint & gasoline, ozone-depleting chemicals, automobiles, overly-sugary or ultra-processed foods, various industrial processes, etc.) to any of countless other forms of abuse and negligence. And at every turn they fought any sort of regulation that might reign them in, because it was more profitable to abuse, exploit, and pollute.
Again, it's not that they're actively malicious, like some mustache-twirling comic book villain, but rather they simply don't care. They can't care, because if they do, someone more ruthless and cutthroat will do whatever it takes to undercut them and corner the market. These aren't bugs in the capitalist mode of production. They're features. The logic of the profit motive demands they act in ways that maximize and grow profits. "All other considerations are secondary. Crew expendable." They will always seek to externalize costs and internalize profits.
If corporations couldn't be trusted to responsibly handle so many other aspects of our economy, if they used their economic power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else when it came to everything from energy to food to medicine to transportation to anything else we can think of, what makes anyone think they can responsibly handle the power of these machine-learning algorithms?
When it comes to the impact of so-called "AI" on the labor market, it's worth pointing out that the capitalist class sees every single worker as a drain on the bottom line. Labor-saving devices in the 19th & 20th centuries did displace jobs, a lot of it very labor-intensive and often highly-dangerous work, work that most people would probably rather not do. The industrial age also created entirely new types of jobs. But at the end of the day, the people who owned the means of production needed human beings to do the work.
Perhaps not anymore. This new wave of automation and "AI" aren't just labor-saving devices. They're labor-destroying devices. Every single for-profit corporation would, if they could, replace every single worker with a machine. Machines aren't sentient. They don't need to be paid wages or given benefits. They'll never show up late. They'll never need bathroom or meal breaks. They'll never unionize. They'll never need days off for personal reasons. They won't question orders. They won't get pissed off. They won't get happy, they won't get sad, they won't laugh at your jokes. They just run programs.
Not too long ago, we thought greater automation could free us up from even more drudgery, allowing us to do jobs we actually want to do as opposed to ones we need to do merely in order to survive. But the tech bros decided to demonstrate that the very first type of jobs they plan on eradicating are a large class of jobs people actually do want to do, starting with creative works and performing arts. They're trying to show that art, music, film acting, voice acting, animation, and so on can be done by a machine. Of course, how do these machine-learning algorithms learn? More often that not, through outright theft/plagiarism, at least with the stuff we're familiar with that crops up online. The only thing accurate about the term "AI art" is "artificial." It's just tracing with extra steps, but since those extra steps are done by a computer, it's also ten times lazier than regular tracing. Even if a data set is procured legally, it still has the same effect. Existing IPs owned by a studio/publisher can just feed what they already have the rights to into a computer, and bingo, entire scripts, songs, etc., spat out by a program, a farcical simulacrum. Or they could just scan someone's likeness and/or record a sample of their voice. That someone then ceases to be of any further use to the publisher, who uses the machines to create digital "performers" that speak the lines and sing the lyrics "created" by the same program.
Book publishers, film studios, video game publishers, record labels, and so on are slavering at the prospect of being able to eliminate as many jobs as they can. They are absolutely betting on being able to just have a machine produce entire movies, games, songs, books, etc., with the absolute minimum of human input. And they are absolutely banking on the general public not caring if all those jobs go away. Hell, there's already plenty of people in the general public who are just so full of pure spite that they would absolutely love to see a great many people in the performing arts lose their jobs.
If even jobs based on human creativity aren't safe, then which ones are? What new types of jobs are going to be created in the wake of this "AI" revolution? What if there aren't any? What if we, all of us, become obsolete? What then? How would capitalism even survive if there were no workers to earn wages so they could buy goods & services? Has anyone pushing for this stuff really thought that far ahead? Insert Ian Malcolm's speech from Jurassic Park here, because honestly it applies to any (ab)use of the awesome technological power we have for the pursuit of short-term profit without any regard for the potential or actual consequences.
This video by CGP Grey is still relevant nine whole years after it was released:
This technology isn't going away. The genie is out of the bottle. Our only choice as a society, as a species, is to decide what we're going to do with it. The tech must be made to serve the people as a whole, not just a small cadre of wealthy plutocrats looking to cut overhead by axing as many jobs as they think they can get away with.
Honestly, I think this goes far beyond just questions regarding the potential or actual misuse of technology. We are at the point where we really need to start fundamentally rethinking what an economy is and should be. We are still using 18th/19th century economic systems built for the realities of their day and that were conceived of by people who had no idea of the technological might we'd come to possess in later centuries. Soviet-style central planning failed. Capitalism is failing us. Nothing we've tried to date in any remotely "advanced" economy really, truly works for everyone. Even the nations that have tried their best to make things work for everyone have fallen drastically short of that goal, managing not much more than "capitalism, but with a better safety net than the U.S."
In the meantime, as "AI" pertains to the entertainment industry, at least, we seriously need a massive overhaul of our IP laws to stop the worst uses of this new technology. Any sort of AI-generated content cannot be allowed to be copyrighted. The terms of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA regarding this tech must be agreed to. Even beyond AI-generated content, there are other issues. Copyright terms in general need to be greatly reduced, and a "use it or lose it" provision needs to be implemented. Copyright was never meant to be a perpetual money-making racket. Workers and consumers both need to be protected.
TL;DR: If we're going to continue to have these large for-profit businesses dominating the economic landscape, they need to be kept on a short leash. They cannot be trusted to use these new developments in machine learning in a way that doesn't harm and exploit people. Every regulation we have exists for a good reason, because in the absence of regulation, businessmen abused their freedom at the expense of others. We absolutely need a legal framework to prevent those and other abuses.
This post was a lot longer than I initially planned, but I'm in an especially rant-y mood today, and a critique of our economic systems is most certainly relevant to this topic.
Chicho said:
In the 1400’s Netherlands textile mills were undergoing some changes. Factories were starting to mechanize certain elements of textile looms. Workers in these factories feared that the factories were going to become so dependent on machines that the security of their jobs was in the balance. Workers in the Netherlands at the time wore a traditional wooden shoe call a “sabot” and consequently the gears of the textile looms were constructed of wood. In order to prevent machines from essentially taking over their jobs the workers threw their sabots into the wooden gears of the textile looms to break them- hence was born the term “sabotage”. |
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