Comment by martin-t
20 days ago
> how you think it’ll be our doom
There's 2 main possibilities:
1) Self aware AI with its own agency / free will / goals. This is much harder to predict and is IMO less likely with the current approaches so i'll skip it.
2) A"I" / ML tools will become a force multiplier and the powerful will be even more so. Powerful people and organizations (including governments) already have access to much more data about individuals than ordinary citizens. But currently you usually need loyal people to sift through data and to act on it.
With advanced ML tools, you can analyze every person's entire personality, beliefs, social status, etc. And if they align with your goals, you can promote them, if not, you can disadvantage them.
2a) This works if you're a rich person deciding whose medical bills you will pay (and one such person was recently killed for abusing this power).
2b) This works if you're a rich person owning a social network by deciding who's opinions will be more or less visible to others. You can shape entire public discourse and make entire opinions and topics invisible to those who have not already been exposed to them. For example one such censored topic in western discourse is when the use of violence is justified and moral. The west, at least for now, is willing to celebrate moral acts of violence in the past (French revolution, American civil war, assassination of Reinhard Heydrich) but discussion of situations where violence should be used in recent times is taboo and "banned" on many centrally moderated platforms.
2c) And obviously nation states have insane amount of info on both their own citizens and those from other nation states. They already leads to selective enforcement (everybody is guilty of something) and it can get even worse when the government becomes more totalitarian. Can you imagine current China ever having a revolution and reinstating democracy? I can't because any dissent will be stopped before it reaches critical mass.
So states which are currently totalitarian are very unlikely to restore democracy and states which are currently democracies are prone to increasingly totalitarian rule by manipulation from rich individuals - see point 2b.
I’m expecting more of a cyberpunk reality where governments continue to lose power to massive corporations run by oligarchs. You could argue that the aristocracy never really left, but it’s certainly been consolidating power since 2000. Part of the aristocracy still believes in the lessons which lead to the enlightenment, and I suspect many other families will re-learn them in the coming decades. It’s not exactly fun to be an oligarch in a totalitarian country after all, and throughout history the most successful have always gravitated toward more “free” societies if they could. Because it’s better to live in the Netherlands than to have the king of Spain seize your riches. I’m not too worried AI will give us social points the way they do in China. I am European so that helps, and the US would frankly have a hard time making it worse for the lower class citizens anyway. If anything the increased access to knowledge might even help educate many people on just how bad they have it.
I’m sure you’ll see bad actors who use AI to indoctrinate people, but at least as long as there is so much competition it’ll be harder to do that than what is happening in more totalitarian states where LLM answers are propaganda.