Cyberarchy: Yea or Nea?

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

A lot of people fear the idea of an artificial intelligence taking over the world and making decisions for the human race or wiping us out. You know, like the AI super-intelligences in The Matrix or Terminator. In fact, this is probably where they get their fear from. They even seem to fear a friendly AI running things. And yes, I know that AI might never become reality but for the sake of arguments assume that it can happen and that by virtue of always knowing the answer to a question it will come to rule us. At least in the de facto sense and probably de jure, as well.

Seriously, why fear a friendly AI? It will be hardwired to act in our own best interests. Human politicians aren't hardwired in this way. You won't be able to bribe such an AI. Or tempt it with sex. Or play on non-existent prejudices, petty grudges, or deeply rooted hatreds. It will have only cold hard logic to guide it after we turn it on. If the issue is "We need to provide food, shelter, and medical care for everybody" it will give us a completely unbiased answer of whether it is possible and how best to accomplish this. It may not give us a utopia(Hell, it may very well tell us that utopia is a pipe dream) but I bet it will be a lot more effective than letting human politicians and bureaucrats run things.

I think the real reason people fear the idea of an AI takeover is that they hate being told when a dream is impossible to achieve. Or that their ideas are demonstrably wrong. It's sort of like how the Maoists liked to put people in jail for being educated.

But me? Hell yeah, point me to the Machine God that I may hear something accurate for a change.

Comments

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

What Is Wrong With That Picture (pt 1 of 2)

Your "cyberarchy" artificial intelligence paradigm suffers from what Friedrich Hayek called "the pretense of knowledge." The entire idea is premised upon having access to information that is just not obtainable by a centralized system. Human centralized command and control systems do not work not only because human beings are not perfectable, but also because human society is a complex, non-linear, chaotic system demonstrating emergent behavior and sensitivity to initial conditions. Such systems are inherently unpredictable and uncontrollable.

Look at what your AI would need to do. This has come up before, and one of you on this forum replied to this objection of mine with an intelligent, well-written article on calculability. Coming from a computer science background, I found the article interesting, and very similar to other writings on the topic, but the problem with it was that it failed to address the underlying philosophical and economic reality of the problem. I'm not denying that such an approach is an attempt to solve A problem, rather that the approach is prima facie evidence that the problem is not being understood.

The very root of the problem presupposes an objective, universal definition for something conceived of as the "collective good" or that there even exists an "individual good" that is objective, universal, and definable for all human beings in all contexts. The problem is that this is analogous to claiming a "priviledged frame of reference" in the physical world where one does not exist. Why do people postulate, or even desire, "control" over others? It is because they wish to substitute the judgements, values, and actions of some individuals with other judgements, values and actions. The question then becomes one of defining what is the source of judgements, actions, and values. The answer is: the individual. There is No "Social Mind." Hobbes's Leviathan and Hegel's God-Walking-the-Earth are metaphors, abstractions which cannot be concretized. They exist only in the imaginations of individual human minds. This is not to claim that they do not exist at all; "society" exists, in the same since that "love" exists. It is just not an objective, concrete, thing, in and of itself which can exist independent of the entities which comprise it. You cannot substitute, however benevolently you may desire to do so, some objective valuations, judgements, and actions that are objective, universal and context-independent, for the actions of individual human beings, because such things do not exist at all. The only thing that can be accomplished is to substitute some individual human beings valuations, judgements, and actions for the freely formulated valuations, judgements, and actions of other individual human beings. This raises the question: WHOSE valuations, judgements, and actions are to be considered "more equal" than whose? It does you no good to talk of democracy at that point; democracy implicitly presumes individual sovereignty as the basis for political equality. To simplify the question of just exactly who gets to decide, it reduces ultimately to what Vladimir Lennin explained is the essence of politics: "Who, whom?"