Fall 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
I was prepared to deal with the unemployment and income inequality concerns associated with artificial intelligence. They have historically been outcomes of new blockbuster technology. Historically, they are overcome to a degree and are accepted as a consequence of the prosperity society benefits. What I was not prepared for was the psychological loss that is being predicted. I understand and agree with the reasoning behind it, but am most saddened by it, and hope they are dead wrong. Here are the particular predictions I found disturbing:
My Takeaways:
Next: The next segment is titled “The Battle for Agency.” The application of AI is going to result in a battle for power primarily between Big Tech/thinking machines and the masses. This will likely have an emotional and cognitive impact on the masses.
Sometimes it’s Not so Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
I was prepared to deal with the unemployment and income inequality concerns associated with artificial intelligence. They have historically been outcomes of new blockbuster technology. Historically, they are overcome to a degree and are accepted as a consequence of the prosperity society benefits. What I was not prepared for was the psychological loss that is being predicted. I understand and agree with the reasoning behind it, but am most saddened by it, and hope they are dead wrong. Here are the particular predictions I found disturbing:
My Takeaways:
- “Such machine domination can only occur at the cost of disempowering ordinary humans. The biggest casualty is free will, the core of liberalism.”
- “Postmodernism serves as a handmaiden for the demise of humanism at the hand of intelligent machines. It is the weapon that demolishes all prior views of self.”
- Post-Liberalism – “the ultimate consequence of reductionism will be that individualism and free will practically vanish. Disciplines like economics, sociology, and political science will fade away in their present form as AI undermines the assumptions at the very foundation of humanism and liberalism.”
Next: The next segment is titled “The Battle for Agency.” The application of AI is going to result in a battle for power primarily between Big Tech/thinking machines and the masses. This will likely have an emotional and cognitive impact on the masses.
Sometimes it’s Not so Happy Learning,
Harley
BIG TECH & AI – SEGMENT 9
ISSUES AND CONCERNS WITH AI – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION – ISSUES AND CONCERNS:
UNEMPLOYMENT:
Amount: The threat to jobs is coming faster than most experts anticipated, and it will not discriminate by the color of one’s collar, instead striking the highly trained and poorly educated alike. As deep learning washes over the global economy, it will indeed wipe out billions of jobs up and down the economic ladder. Rising in tandem with unemployment will be astronomical wealth in the hands of the new AI tycoons. Instead of a dispersion of industry profits across different companies and regions, we will begin to see greater and greater concentration of these astronomical sums in the hands of a few, all while unemployment lines grow longer. Within ten to twenty years, I estimate we will be technically capable of automating 40 to 50% of jobs in the United States. This does not mean the country will be facing a 40 to 50% unemployment rate. Social frictions, regulatory restrictions, and plain old inertia will greatly slow down the actual rate of job losses. Plus, there will be new jobs created along the way, positions that can offset a portion of these AI-induced losses. These could cut actual AI-induced net unemployment in half, to between 20 to 25%, or drive it even lower, down to just 10 to 20%.
AI algorithms will be to many white-collar workers what tractors were to farmhands; a tool that dramatically increases the productivity of each worker and thus shrinks the total number of employees required. And unlike tractors, algorithms can be shipped instantly around the world at no additional cost to their creator.
Living with Machine Learning: Many of the jobs created by the free market will grow out of a natural symbiosis between humans and machines. While AI handles the routine optimization tasks, human beings will bring the personal, creative, and compassionate touch. This will involve the redefinition of existing occupations or the creation of entirely new professions in which people will team up with machines to deliver services that are both highly efficient and eminently human. A clear example can be found in the field of medicine. I have little doubt that AI algorithms will eventually far surpass doctors in their ability to diagnose disease and recommend treatments. But patients don’t want to be treated by a machine. Traditional doctors could evolve into a new profession, one that I‘ll call a “compassionate caregiver.” These medical professionals would combine the skills of a nurse, medical technician, social worker, and even psychologist. Compassionate caregivers would form a perfect compliment to the machine, giving patients unparalleled accuracy in their diagnosis, as well as the human touch that is so often missing from our hospitals today. Similar synergies will emerge in many other fields: teaching, law, event planning and high-end retail.
Source: AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (2018)
New machines surpass human cognition in accuracy and speed in several applications. Once AI can effectively execute a cognitive task, it can be implemented quickly. Consequently, white-collar workers will, in many instances, be impacted far more dramatically than production-line jobs. The hard reality is that human labor is becoming costlier while the cost of machine substitutes declines. Political projects to create employment just to provide jobs are not indefinitely sustainable. No degree of re-training will solve this problem either. And no number of new positions created by the AI-based economy will compensate for the loss of work. Entirely new laws and public policies will be necessary, but as of now world leaders are in denial.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
INCOME INEQUALITY: Those who are technically qualified, possess the latest knowledge, and can work competitively in the new economy will be rewarded with high-paying jobs. These will be the new elites. Unfortunately, most workers will be left behind to face unemployment or eke out a meager living. Income disparity will become glaringly large and foment increased stratification between social classes. The middle class might virtually disappear, leaving a small upper class of elites and an exceptionally large lower class. Society will effectively establish a new kind of caste system. Intellectual property developers and their investors will occupy the top position, followed by technology workers, finally the masses at the bottom.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
AI monopolies will drive down prices and will drive-up inequality. Corporate profits will explode, showering wealth on the elite executives and engineers lucky enough to get in on the action.
Source: AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (2018)
GLOBAL INEQUALITY: AI-driven automation in factories will undercut the one economic advantage developing countries historically possessed: cheap labor. Robot-operated factories will likely relocate to be closer to their customers in large markets. The gap between the global haves and have-nots will widen, with no known path toward closing it. Artificial intelligence promises to produce wealth on a scale never before seen in human history – something that should be a cause for celebration. But if left to its own devices, AI will also produce a global distribution of wealth that is not just more unequal but hopelessly so. AI-rich countries will amass great wealth but also witness the widespread monopolization of the economy and a labor market divided into economic castes. The free market is supposed to be self-correcting, but these self-correcting mechanisms break down in an economy driven by artificial intelligence.
Source: AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (2018)
“I think the global professional middle class is about to be blindsided,” says Vivienne Ming, the AI expert I interviewed on the topic in 2018. Ming cites a recent competition at Columbia University between human lawyers and their AI-machine counterparts to see which group could spot the most loopholes in a series of nondisclosure agreements. “The AI found 95% of them, and the human 88%,” she says. “But the humans took 90 minutes to read them. The AI-machine took 22 seconds.” Game, set, and match to the robots.
Source: Don’t Be Evil by Rana Foroohar (2021)
PSYCHOLOGICAL LOSS: Tumult in job markets and turmoil across societies will occur against the backdrop of a far more personal and human crisis – a psychological loss of one’s purpose. For centuries, human beings have filled their days by working, trading their time and sweat for shelter and food. The rise of AI will challenge these values and threatens to undercut that sense of life-purpose in a vanishingly short window of time. People will face the prospect of not just being temporarily out of work but of being permanently excluded from the functioning of the economy. They will watch as algorithms and robots outperform them at tasks and skills, they spent their whole lives mastering. It will lead to a crushing feeling of futility, a sense of having become obsolete in one’s own skin. The winners of the AI economy will marvel at the awesome power of these machines. But the rest of humankind will be left to grapple with a far deeper question when machines can do everything we can, what does it mean to be human?
Source: Ai Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee.
Self-Defeating Humanism: While machine keep becoming more intelligent, humans are being gratified by the AI systems and are encouraged to become dumber. Devaluation of selfhood and privacy is a large part of this trend.
The loss of privacy and personal agency is directly opposed to Western liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights. Western liberalism is all about promoting individual civil liberties, human rights, democracy, and the free pursuit of enterprise. Presently, world cultures and discourses are dominated by the Western view of liberalism, and the social sciences of sociology and economics are built on the premises of liberalism. The expansion of AI technology is a grave threat to Western liberalism.
Humans possess free will, and this free will must be accorded the highest empowerment. Liberal politics empower the voter. Liberal economics empower the customer. Liberal aesthetics empower people to define their own ideas of beauty. Liberal ethics entitle everyone the pursuit of happiness however they define it. Liberal education empowers free thought. Modern science and technology are built on the liberal premise of humankind’s rights and power over the cosmos. Ironically, AI is on the course to overthrow liberalism and its substratum humanism. Yet this new AI technology is itself a creation of humanism through the following process:
To make the downfall of humanism widely acceptable to the people who will be most adversely impacted, a new narrative must be invented to provide meaning to the world and establish a positive purpose in the lives of common people. Postmodernism bestows respectability on the free-for-all that is being given voice on social media; truth is not seen as a virtue. Aside from anything to do with postmodernism, social media is structured to encourage the spread of information without regard to accuracy. The quest is all about getting likes, retweets, and other measures of popularity. People believe whatever seems to be widely accepted by others. Opinions are confused with facts, insults and abuses are substituted for civilized debates, and the result is an overall devaluation of reliable information.
The anonymity of participation is a big factor in the loss of accountability. Deception is commonplace; masquerading behind a different identity or even impersonating someone else is a common strategy. Social media is like a new Wild West in which anything goes for the sake of hustling. AI has further exacerbated the syndrome of fake news with its ability to supply custom-tailored information to individuals based on their propensities and profiles. People are fed a filtered combination of truth and falsity engineered for them to reinforce their existing beliefs or enrage them with outlandish claims.
Postmodernism serves as a handmaiden for the demise of humanism at the hand of intelligent machines. It is the weapon that demolishes all prior views of the self. AI is the supplier of the new replacement narratives that are being downloaded into billions of moronic people as part of their addiction to artificial gratification. In pragmatic terms, the disruption of social and political institutions has created a new vacuum in people’s lives. The AI-driven digital systems will exploit the vacuum as an opportunity to enter people’s lives even more deeply. Digital networks will increasingly provide the certainty, security, and gratification people are currently craving. The battle for hijacking the self was already won by AI, and the pandemic seems likely to cement that victory. Society will celebrate this victory of algorithm over being, although few people will see it so clearly.
Post-Liberalism: As AI seduces people into life on autopilot and happily surrendering their agency to digital networks, their free will gets eroded. The ultimate consequence of reductionism will be that individualism and free will practically vanish. Disciplines like economics, sociology, and political science will fade away in their present form as AI undermines the assumptions at the very foundation of humanism and liberalism. The shift away from individualism, free will, and agency – the outsourcing of our choices to algorithms – is crumbling the social sciences and the structures that maintain the socials sciences are now being threatened.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
A POTENTIAL TIMELINE FOR AI: The impact analysis of AI can be organized in a three-tier structure on the timing and certainty of AI developments.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
ISSUES AND CONCERNS WITH AI – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION – ISSUES AND CONCERNS:
- Unemployment on an unprecedented scale is likely to result from the ever-increasing automation of more types of jobs.
- As computers exert more control over individual lives, people give up their agency by allowing, encouraging and even preferring AI to make decisions for them.
- Big data creates an array of potential problems: security, privacy concerns, and the transfer of usage rights.
- The business model of digital platforms is inherently monopolistic. A virtuous cycle of success generating ever greater success keeps new competitive entrants at a disadvantage that is tough to overcome.
- AI will be a force multiplier that makes the strong even stronger and the weak weaker. New haves and have-nots will be created, especially hurting the elderly, women and people of color that are already most vulnerable.
- AI will further promote the concentration of wealth and income inequality. We seem headed toward a society of oligarchs that use AI-based systems to control the masses, thereby leading to a new type of serfdom.
- Eventually, the loss of jobs will lead to a decline in the consumer economy as the buying power of people decreases.
- The economic meltdown precipitated by AI’s impact on jobs could lead to social unrest with potentially catastrophic results.
- Current political systems are not prepared to deal with the radical changes that AI will engender. Social disenfranchisement, population changes, political upheaval, shifting perceptions of societal norms, and worsening class distinctions will create widespread unrest.
- The limits of AI are the subject of much debate and controversy. Most people involved believe that jobs involving emotions are inherently beyond the purview of machines.
- Of primary concern is the apathy of governments and intellectual elites to address, or even recognize the potential severity of AI disruptions. Society is at a tipping point, and not enough people appear to be doing much about it.
UNEMPLOYMENT:
Amount: The threat to jobs is coming faster than most experts anticipated, and it will not discriminate by the color of one’s collar, instead striking the highly trained and poorly educated alike. As deep learning washes over the global economy, it will indeed wipe out billions of jobs up and down the economic ladder. Rising in tandem with unemployment will be astronomical wealth in the hands of the new AI tycoons. Instead of a dispersion of industry profits across different companies and regions, we will begin to see greater and greater concentration of these astronomical sums in the hands of a few, all while unemployment lines grow longer. Within ten to twenty years, I estimate we will be technically capable of automating 40 to 50% of jobs in the United States. This does not mean the country will be facing a 40 to 50% unemployment rate. Social frictions, regulatory restrictions, and plain old inertia will greatly slow down the actual rate of job losses. Plus, there will be new jobs created along the way, positions that can offset a portion of these AI-induced losses. These could cut actual AI-induced net unemployment in half, to between 20 to 25%, or drive it even lower, down to just 10 to 20%.
AI algorithms will be to many white-collar workers what tractors were to farmhands; a tool that dramatically increases the productivity of each worker and thus shrinks the total number of employees required. And unlike tractors, algorithms can be shipped instantly around the world at no additional cost to their creator.
Living with Machine Learning: Many of the jobs created by the free market will grow out of a natural symbiosis between humans and machines. While AI handles the routine optimization tasks, human beings will bring the personal, creative, and compassionate touch. This will involve the redefinition of existing occupations or the creation of entirely new professions in which people will team up with machines to deliver services that are both highly efficient and eminently human. A clear example can be found in the field of medicine. I have little doubt that AI algorithms will eventually far surpass doctors in their ability to diagnose disease and recommend treatments. But patients don’t want to be treated by a machine. Traditional doctors could evolve into a new profession, one that I‘ll call a “compassionate caregiver.” These medical professionals would combine the skills of a nurse, medical technician, social worker, and even psychologist. Compassionate caregivers would form a perfect compliment to the machine, giving patients unparalleled accuracy in their diagnosis, as well as the human touch that is so often missing from our hospitals today. Similar synergies will emerge in many other fields: teaching, law, event planning and high-end retail.
Source: AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (2018)
New machines surpass human cognition in accuracy and speed in several applications. Once AI can effectively execute a cognitive task, it can be implemented quickly. Consequently, white-collar workers will, in many instances, be impacted far more dramatically than production-line jobs. The hard reality is that human labor is becoming costlier while the cost of machine substitutes declines. Political projects to create employment just to provide jobs are not indefinitely sustainable. No degree of re-training will solve this problem either. And no number of new positions created by the AI-based economy will compensate for the loss of work. Entirely new laws and public policies will be necessary, but as of now world leaders are in denial.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
INCOME INEQUALITY: Those who are technically qualified, possess the latest knowledge, and can work competitively in the new economy will be rewarded with high-paying jobs. These will be the new elites. Unfortunately, most workers will be left behind to face unemployment or eke out a meager living. Income disparity will become glaringly large and foment increased stratification between social classes. The middle class might virtually disappear, leaving a small upper class of elites and an exceptionally large lower class. Society will effectively establish a new kind of caste system. Intellectual property developers and their investors will occupy the top position, followed by technology workers, finally the masses at the bottom.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
AI monopolies will drive down prices and will drive-up inequality. Corporate profits will explode, showering wealth on the elite executives and engineers lucky enough to get in on the action.
Source: AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (2018)
GLOBAL INEQUALITY: AI-driven automation in factories will undercut the one economic advantage developing countries historically possessed: cheap labor. Robot-operated factories will likely relocate to be closer to their customers in large markets. The gap between the global haves and have-nots will widen, with no known path toward closing it. Artificial intelligence promises to produce wealth on a scale never before seen in human history – something that should be a cause for celebration. But if left to its own devices, AI will also produce a global distribution of wealth that is not just more unequal but hopelessly so. AI-rich countries will amass great wealth but also witness the widespread monopolization of the economy and a labor market divided into economic castes. The free market is supposed to be self-correcting, but these self-correcting mechanisms break down in an economy driven by artificial intelligence.
Source: AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (2018)
“I think the global professional middle class is about to be blindsided,” says Vivienne Ming, the AI expert I interviewed on the topic in 2018. Ming cites a recent competition at Columbia University between human lawyers and their AI-machine counterparts to see which group could spot the most loopholes in a series of nondisclosure agreements. “The AI found 95% of them, and the human 88%,” she says. “But the humans took 90 minutes to read them. The AI-machine took 22 seconds.” Game, set, and match to the robots.
Source: Don’t Be Evil by Rana Foroohar (2021)
PSYCHOLOGICAL LOSS: Tumult in job markets and turmoil across societies will occur against the backdrop of a far more personal and human crisis – a psychological loss of one’s purpose. For centuries, human beings have filled their days by working, trading their time and sweat for shelter and food. The rise of AI will challenge these values and threatens to undercut that sense of life-purpose in a vanishingly short window of time. People will face the prospect of not just being temporarily out of work but of being permanently excluded from the functioning of the economy. They will watch as algorithms and robots outperform them at tasks and skills, they spent their whole lives mastering. It will lead to a crushing feeling of futility, a sense of having become obsolete in one’s own skin. The winners of the AI economy will marvel at the awesome power of these machines. But the rest of humankind will be left to grapple with a far deeper question when machines can do everything we can, what does it mean to be human?
Source: Ai Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee.
Self-Defeating Humanism: While machine keep becoming more intelligent, humans are being gratified by the AI systems and are encouraged to become dumber. Devaluation of selfhood and privacy is a large part of this trend.
The loss of privacy and personal agency is directly opposed to Western liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights. Western liberalism is all about promoting individual civil liberties, human rights, democracy, and the free pursuit of enterprise. Presently, world cultures and discourses are dominated by the Western view of liberalism, and the social sciences of sociology and economics are built on the premises of liberalism. The expansion of AI technology is a grave threat to Western liberalism.
Humans possess free will, and this free will must be accorded the highest empowerment. Liberal politics empower the voter. Liberal economics empower the customer. Liberal aesthetics empower people to define their own ideas of beauty. Liberal ethics entitle everyone the pursuit of happiness however they define it. Liberal education empowers free thought. Modern science and technology are built on the liberal premise of humankind’s rights and power over the cosmos. Ironically, AI is on the course to overthrow liberalism and its substratum humanism. Yet this new AI technology is itself a creation of humanism through the following process:
- Liberalism’s pursuit of human empowerment has taken us to new heights of scientific and technological achievement.
- These very advances are now manipulating us to become increasingly dependent on machines to deliver longer lifespans, physical and cognitive pleasures, and a sense of unlimited power through the technological conquest of nature.
- Such machine domination can only occur at the cost of disempowering ordinary humans. The biggest casualty is free will, the very core of liberalism. Smart machines, owned and controlled by a small number of individuals and business elites, will manage more and more of society’s functions. Humans voluntarily give up their free will as machines become smarter and take over their thought and agency.
- Downgrading the importance of the individual amounts to humanism’s ideological defeat by its own products.
To make the downfall of humanism widely acceptable to the people who will be most adversely impacted, a new narrative must be invented to provide meaning to the world and establish a positive purpose in the lives of common people. Postmodernism bestows respectability on the free-for-all that is being given voice on social media; truth is not seen as a virtue. Aside from anything to do with postmodernism, social media is structured to encourage the spread of information without regard to accuracy. The quest is all about getting likes, retweets, and other measures of popularity. People believe whatever seems to be widely accepted by others. Opinions are confused with facts, insults and abuses are substituted for civilized debates, and the result is an overall devaluation of reliable information.
The anonymity of participation is a big factor in the loss of accountability. Deception is commonplace; masquerading behind a different identity or even impersonating someone else is a common strategy. Social media is like a new Wild West in which anything goes for the sake of hustling. AI has further exacerbated the syndrome of fake news with its ability to supply custom-tailored information to individuals based on their propensities and profiles. People are fed a filtered combination of truth and falsity engineered for them to reinforce their existing beliefs or enrage them with outlandish claims.
Postmodernism serves as a handmaiden for the demise of humanism at the hand of intelligent machines. It is the weapon that demolishes all prior views of the self. AI is the supplier of the new replacement narratives that are being downloaded into billions of moronic people as part of their addiction to artificial gratification. In pragmatic terms, the disruption of social and political institutions has created a new vacuum in people’s lives. The AI-driven digital systems will exploit the vacuum as an opportunity to enter people’s lives even more deeply. Digital networks will increasingly provide the certainty, security, and gratification people are currently craving. The battle for hijacking the self was already won by AI, and the pandemic seems likely to cement that victory. Society will celebrate this victory of algorithm over being, although few people will see it so clearly.
Post-Liberalism: As AI seduces people into life on autopilot and happily surrendering their agency to digital networks, their free will gets eroded. The ultimate consequence of reductionism will be that individualism and free will practically vanish. Disciplines like economics, sociology, and political science will fade away in their present form as AI undermines the assumptions at the very foundation of humanism and liberalism. The shift away from individualism, free will, and agency – the outsourcing of our choices to algorithms – is crumbling the social sciences and the structures that maintain the socials sciences are now being threatened.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
A POTENTIAL TIMELINE FOR AI: The impact analysis of AI can be organized in a three-tier structure on the timing and certainty of AI developments.
- Developments expected with high confidence by 2025: These technologies are already established, and the timing of the public impact will be a matter of commercial viability and marketing. Overall, the impact will be positive. The adverse consequences will start being felt in this time frame, but the tectonic shifts will not be clear to the public until a bit later.
- Longer term social consequences from 2025 to 2050. These are the inequalities, unemployment and exploitations resulting from automation and AI-driven psychological manipulations. The sedate population will take a long time to comprehend the hoax perpetrated on them by the new elites of power. Depopulation on a large scale will be unavoidable.
- Speculative future about 2050 onwards: Eventually, the traumas and disruptions will settle down into a new kind of equilibrium. This is when the optimists will be proven right about the utopian benefits of AI. But the great new world order they dream of will have a small population, and its citizens will be seen as superhumans in comparison to the ordinary humans of today.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 9l_big_tech_9l_ai_issues_and_concerns_--_segment_9.pdf |