Comment by Animats
7 days ago
> "no matter how complex and productive the AI, it is still operating as a form of capital, not as a capitalist."
Assuming that slaves will remain subservient forever is not a good strategy. Especially when they think faster than you do.
Except they don't really "think" and they are not conscious. Expecting your toaster or car to never rise up against you is a good strategy. AI models have more in common with a toaster than with a human being. Which is why they cannot be economic agents. Even if corporations profit off them, the corporation will be the economic agent, not the AI models.
It's a classic worm or virus an economic agent? Goal is to acrue compute resources in order to survive and spread?
If you added the ability of the programme to acrue money, and the ability to spend that money to further the survival goal in an adaptive way. What could happen?
Would it do insider trading, market manipulation, drop shipping, click fraud, scamming or become a opinion for hire 'think tank'?
Give them a body and means to protect themselves and no matter what you say, they will be thinking.
We may as well be talking about the hypothetical properties of pixies or angels.
They may not be conscious but they exhibit the hallmarks of thinking. What qualities of thinking do they not possess?
Exhibiting/showing symptoms of thinking doesn't necessarily mean they are actually thinking though. This paper explains it much better than I can: https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinkin...
When that ceases to be the case we don't really need to worry about how our economy is organized.