Why Technology Favors a Singleton over a Tyranny
Is democracy loosing its credibility, will it cede to dictatorship? Will AI out-compete us in all areas of economic usefulness – making us the future useless class?
It’s difficult to get around the bottlenecks of networking and coordination in distributed democracies. In the past quite naturally distributed systems being scattered are more redundant wer in many ways fault tolerant and adaptive – though these payoffs for most of us may dwindle if humans become less and less able to compete with Ex Machina. If the relative efficiency of democracies to dictatorships tips towards the latter nudging a transition to centralized dictatorships, while solving some distribution & coordination problems, the concentration of resource allocation may be exaggerated beyond historical examples of tyranny. Where the ‘once was proletariat’ now new ‘useless class’ have little to no utility to the concentration of power – the top 0.001% – the would be tyrants will likely give up on ruling and tyrannizing – and instead find it easier to cull the resource hungry and rights demanding horde – more efficient that way. Ethics is fundamental to fair progress – ethics is philosophy with a deadline creeping closer – what can we do to increase the odds of a future where the value of life is evaluated beyond it’s economic usefulness?I found ‘Why Technology Favors Tyranny by Yuval Noah Harari‘ was a good read – I enjoy his writing, and it provokes me to think. About 5 years ago I did the ‘A Brief History of Humankind’ course via coursera – urging my friends to join me. Since then Yuval has taken the world by storm.
The biggest and most frightening impact of the AI revolution might be on the relative efficiency of democracies and dictatorships. […] We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given 20th-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all available information fast enough and make the right decisions. […]<span class="su-quote-cite"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/" target="_blank">Why Technology Favors Tyranny</a></span>
I assume AI superintelligence is highly probable if we don’t go extinct first. For the same reason that the proletariat’s become useless I think ultimately the AI-Human combination will likely become useless too, and cede to Superintelligent AI – so all humans becomes useless. The bourgeoisie elite may initially feel safe in the idea that they don’t need to be useful, they just need to maintain control of power. Though the sliding relative dumbness of bourgeoisie to superintelligence will worry them.. perhaps not long after wiping out the useless class, the elite bourgeoisie will then see the importance of the AI control problem, and that their days are numbered too – at which point will they see ethics and the value of life beyond economic usefulness as important?
However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more information to analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you’ll wind up with much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. An authoritarian government that orders all its citizens to have their DNA sequenced and to share their medical data with some central authority would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data are strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.<span class="su-quote-cite"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/" target="_blank">Why Technology Favors Tyranny</a></span>
Yuval Noah Harari believes that we could be heading for a technologically enabled tyranny as AI automates all jobs away – and we become the useless class. Though if superintellignece is likely, then human’s will likely to be a bottleneck in any AI/Human hybrid use case – if tyranny happens, it won’t last for long – what use is a useless class to the elite?
Technology without ethics favors singleton utility monsters – not a tyranny – what use is it to tyrannize over a useless class?
