Comment by dist-epoch

6 months ago

No, this is like allowing your co-worker/friend to leave the conversation.

Right but in this case your co-worker is an automaton and someone else who might well have a hidden agenda has tweaked your co-worker to leave conversations under specific circumstances.

The analogy then is that the third party is exerting control over what your co-worker is allowed to think.

  • Yes, the co-worker is a robot created by a third party who retain control over their product.

    • We live in a world where it has become increasingly possible--by a number of different mechanisms--to rent access to things rather than sell them, and we need to step in and better regulate that: if I pay for your product, you don't get to control it anymore, you don't get to watch how I use it, and you don't get any say in if or how I modify it while I am using it. The idea that it is more profitable to rent people a calculator than to sell them one is simultaneously true and horrifying, as the reasons it is more profitable are all bad for the user. If your service is a thing that can't be sold, it should be designed in a way where you can't continue to access it from the inside, no more so than you are allowed to rent me an apartment and leave a bunch of cameras inside it.

    • Yes - and they will craft that to align with their incentives, not yours. Many of which may well be decidedly against your interests. As this becomes the focal point of how people think and reason about the world it's not just the creator of the AI that will exert this control, but other powerful actors who often work against your interests.

      Personally I don't love the idea of living in a Sci-Fi dystopia, regardless of who owns what.

    • Is the creator of the product material to the analogy? The point is that for any who seek power manipulating a widely used AI product can provide far more control than other approaches.