TrustNoRobot

Category: better capitalism

  • AI is a Road

    AI isn’t a being. It’s a road.

    I have spoken of the confusion about robots and AI before. Because people believe that we are on the cusp of making new beings in the universe, and have compared AI to aliens or a new forms of life, terrible ideas are propogated – like the handwaved Singularity or the even more handwaved “everyone will just train for new jobs” or the amazingly bad idea idea of robot bosses. And I don’t even want to mention this charleton who wants to create an AI God. That idea alone is going to cause immense pain to many vulnerable people.

    You see, we have the metaphor all wrong here. That’s the heart of the confusion, thinking that machine intelligence equates to organic being existence.

    We are thinking that AI is like a human. But it’s more like a conduit of information. A road.

    (And yes, “AI is a Road” is a metaphor, I know it’s not actually a road, my argument here it that there are many similarities to AI and roads, the first of which is that, like a road, it’s a piece of “invisible technology” that nobody thinks of as technology anymore)

    Neural networks, as in our brains, are just reinforced pathways in a collection of interconnected points. In fact, this is what information itself is. Those links between nodes become more or less weighted as the paths are exercised. The connections find signal in the noise.  A dirt path turns into a road, a road turns into a highway, a Starbucks is built, a hipster buys coffee and blogs about cosplay.

    No matter how well you build a road, it’s still a road. The road itself should be based on where people need to go. We don’t build a world designed for roads, we build a road where a path exists already. In the same way, AI research should not be looking for jobs to replace, but rather for ways to improve our work and home lives. Ways to make us even more human.

    We must not let anyone create needs for AI. I propose that doing so is a crime against humanity. In my First Law I state:

    All research into and attempts to tie AI behavior into systems which simulate rewards and punishments shall be deemed a serious safety hazzard. This would be an offense on the felony level, as it could result in widespread, catastrophic damage.

    If AI is a road, then building an AI with needs is like building an unsafe bridge that threatens travelers along the road.

    And who determines if a bridge is unsafe?

    The engineers.

    It is time for engineers to rise and take control of this process. The politicians, with a few folks like Andrew Yang being exceptions, are hobbled and distracted with the games of power and dominance. Computer engineers must work with social engineers – lawyers – to build systems of restraints for public AI.

    I think orgs like the Partnership on AI are moving us in the right direction on this discussion.

    We must make laws for our new roads. Or toes, and worse, will be squashed.

     

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • Automatic for The People

    Exercise: enter a contemplative state.

    Technology is considered to be mature if it stops being considered a technology at all, and becomes part of the fabric of our existence.

    Consider gloves. Amazing tech, arguably what let humans survive the ice ages. Warm fingers are wonderful.

    Good tech becomes an extension of ourselves. The way we view and interact with the world. It becomes invisible as technology.

    Now consider government.

    Bad tech. Inefficient. Messy. Divided. Prone to provide platforms for blowhard know it alls, to Russian influence, etc. It works so poorly few people consider it tech at all.

    And voting? The feedback idea is right, but the frequency of voting is absurdly low for a world moving at the speed we are. Don’t even get me started on six year terms for the Senate, an organization that should not exist in a sane world.

    What would it take for the technology of government, and by that I mean the whole kit and caboodle, to become invisible?

    Well, I think it would look something like income taxes. Hear me out on this one.

    Automatic income tax deductions started in 1943, and we have Milton Friedman to thank for them.

    The 1943 tax withholding system was developed in part by famous economist Milton Friedman, who then worked for the Tax Research Division of the Treasury. Originally a Keynesian economist who supported a large role for government in the economy, he later converted to the classical liberal mode of economic thought that decries government intervention, and he regretted his role in creating the tax withholding system.

    Source

    Of course they were justified in support of the war effort, and from all appearances they keep the cafeteria at the Pentagon well stocked. If you know what I mean.

    The point is, automatic deduction of your taxes from wages is an entrenched process and technical approach to extracting money from the working class. It worked very very well. Before 1943, you paid your taxes at the end of the tax year, and of course people hid the money as best they could. Going to their employers to extract the funds was pretty smart, Milton.

    But my point isn’t that we should rethink taxes. We should, but that’s not my point. My point is when tax collection became automatic, it worked incredibly well in support of the governments finances.

    In a similar way, government could become invisible, automatic.

    And people get will what they need – not what they need as filtered through people in white marble buildings, granfalloon storage facilities.

    We have the computational and communication device already in our hands already. What we need is to rethink what government should actually do.

    For instance, Why should a government represent land? Why not just people, and the way they want to live? And if it’s just people, then we can scale it in a different way.

    Imagine a government that wasn’t run by disinterested oligarchs, or run by some creepy AI, but rather was based only on your Karass, the people you know. So, the people in your meaningful sphere of interactions would be impacted more by you, than people outside your sphere. Government not centralized around location, but around people no matter where they are.

    The idea that we need strong leaders to tell us how to think is an idea from the Stone age. It still works as process, but it’s garbage process. We need technology leaders to start thinking of how we solve the problem of government and finding ways to build better versions of it.

    And my guess is, we will find it. Someone living now will build an app that at first, representatives use to procure better feedback from their constituents, and then that app will evolve to allow finer grain control of how taxes are spent in realtime. How laws are passed. How norms are set. And slowly the job of politicians themselves will be seen as more of a janitorial job maintaining and refining these systems.

    Automatic. For the people.

    One final thought. Could the attention meter be our feedback mechanism for gov 2.0?

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag, title by R.E.M.

  • A Government must Protect its Members

    https://gizmodo.com/so-you-automated-your-coworkers-out-of-a-job-1831584839

    Brian Merchant at Gizmodo has been writing about automation and its human impact. It is, as you would imagine, the story of people losing their jobs because others are asked to automate them away.

    Arguably, this is the story of civilization and work itself. From the moment someone hooked up a plow to a horse, folks have been losing menial jobs. Just because those jobs still exist does not mean most will in a generation.

    There is a real human impact here, but what this article and most others don’t point out, is that the issue isn’t just folks losing their jobs, it is the tragedy of not having social safety nets to catch them when they fall. The expectation that the free market will always provide the jobs, health care, etc that humans need is not reality. Those who argue that it will all sort itself out in the marketplace are either being willfully disingenuous, or advocating for their own fantasy of the way they want the world to work.

    If a government cannot keep its people alive and healthy, it shouldn’t exist.

    What has always confused me is putting external threats in a separate category that deserves special attention. We spend trillions fighting against just a few “terrorists” that mainly don’t provide existential threats, while we let kids go hungry, whole communities fall into cycles of poverty and addictions, and don’t combat clear environmental threats to everyone.

    If I die because I am shot due to social strife and easy access to firearms, how is my death different than if I died from a preventable terrorist attack?

    I am still dead. And my government failed to protect me.

    I would argue that a government that allows, for instance, for the willful pollution of our environment to enrich the few isn’t just useless, it should be replaced. Because if government cannot protect it’s weakest from roving corporate gangs, then it’s time for another type of governance.

    Government cannot protect us from automation, the rise of AI, and the disruptions to come. But they can and should provide necessary services to let people live meaningful lives, eat well, and raise children in peace.

    Because even if we build a new type of digital governance, the most vulnerable will likely not be a part of it. And to have a future where only the lucky and strong survive isn’t just morally uncomfortable. It’s genocide with extra steps.

  • Running the Pattern

    Running the Pattern

    The Singleton Pattern is generated by your entire brain for some other part of your self to consume.

    What consumes these frames is not for this model to answer, so as to respect different and various theories of consciousness and spirit.

    The Singleton Pattern aspires to be an open API model of political self.

    So you lived, at some moment in time, at time t in location l.

    In other words, say you lived in Minnesota when you were thirteen years old. You lived in the basement. Each second of each day you created snapshots of the world that impressed themselves in the clay of your memory.

    This Pattern you created was eventually rebuilt and scrapped and rebuilt again as you decided, as you grew, what aspects of your pattern have a pleasing impact on your reward systems, and which were to be avoided based on your stress systems.

    As you executed the creation of the frames of existence, the impression it created in your neural network was like grooves in a river bed that shaped the flowing river of the generated self.

    Inside each person around you the same complex magic trick was taking place, and when you interfaced with them, real magic happened.

    People make all the difference. They always do. Because we not single entities. We are built, from the ground up by evolution, to interface and work as our own distributed super network.

    We are eusocial. If you do not understand this fundemental fact about yourself, you are lost.

    What if we simplified the equation of self? Instead of I(t,l) what if we just passed in the entire world, which includes the time and location? But we do want keep time also since change over time is crucial to the model’s success.

    And then what if we passed in our special class of Singleton objects the we can deem the other that are the other people in our Dunbar Radius? We would have:

    Chas( world, time, other )

    The other is any thing, person or concept tied to your brain’s reward and stress production.

    When we look at ourselves, we place our own Singleton in the other object.

    We look at ourselves a lot. It’s a human thing to do. But if you don’t look at others as the same kind of object as yourself the model for our greater organization abilities as a species is weakened.

    We must stop fighting to be on the top of everything. We must provide limits to what groups of people can do, based on real, measurable data from their internal states. And not words, and polls, and legislation written by trolls.

    If you treat people as data, which we call the world here, the Singleton Pattern will return garbage.

    If in place of the other for instance you pass in your idea of negative stereotypical behavior of a group you don’t like, that is the way your reward and stress systems reinforce prejudice.

    Replacing the other with advertising, cars, robots, ideology, stereotypes, sports, etc. is how we got here in history as a species. Where we go from here is entirely dependant on what we allow into our other category, and how we alert and monitor attempts to compromise our pattern by outside forces.

  • I, inc.

    Everything is information, organization waves in the structure of the cosmos. But don’t be confused by the buzzing sounds: not all information is of the same value.

    In the same way we can be confused that robots are beings, we can be confused that persons are data. In fact, this is the confusion at the heart of the our current delimma with computers replacing meaningful jobs for real humans.

    Hyper-capitalism has created a condition where the cost of each human to a Company is the primary consideration when choices are made on employment.

    A Company isn’t a Singleton, any more than a robot is. But the difference is, a company is headed by a Singleton.

    And there in lies the potential answer to our dilemma.

    We live in a world where the true power to decide lies within corporate structures. So, we can either try to change those structures which have evolved over the last 100 years to afford the same protection to companies that Singletons have, or…

    We all become Companies.

    In India, there is a concept of one person companies which is somewhat along the lines of what I am considering: https://www.indiafilings.com/one-person-company has some details. (This is not an endorsement of this company or their services), more info here

    The concept of One Person Company in India was introduced through the Companies Act, 2013 to support entrepreneurs who on their own are capable of starting a venture by allowing them to create a single person economic entity. One of the biggest advantages of a One Person Company (OPC) is that there can be only one member in a OPC, while a minimum of two members are required for incorporating and maintaining a Private Limited Company or a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP). Similar to a Company, a One Person Company is a separate legal entity from its promoter, offering limited liability protection to its sole shareholder, while having continuity of business and being easy to incorporate.

    Exercise: enter a contemplative state.

    Imagine that every human, when born, instead of only getting a birth certificate, also got a certificate of incorporation?

    You, LLC.

    What if we had the protection afforded to companies when we engage in capitalism, and the same lack of limits to influence politics and society?

    What would selling shares in yourself look like?

    Why should we never let a computer incorporate, even if they express the desire to do so?