It helps to understand what the elites with control over AI (artificial intelligence) are thinking. Two clashing visions are at war right now, but the war helps clarify the mindsets. The war broke out into the open last Friday. The NYT reports:
What Just Happened in the World of Artificial Intelligence?
The abrupt ouster of Sam Altman as chief executive of OpenAI on Friday has upended the industry, with investors, executives and others getting to grips with a head-spinning series of twists that reshuffled the major players at the forefront of one the hottest areas in technology.
In the end, after OpenAI rejected appeals to restore Mr. Altman to the top job, Microsoft, the company’s biggest investor, announced on Sunday it would hire him to run a new advanced research lab.More broadly, the weekend’s turmoil highlighted an unresolved debate in the A.I. community over artificial intelligence, which many see as the most important new technology since web browsers but also poses potential dangers if misused.
Details of his departure are still emerging but a dispute with a colleague at OpenAI appears to have played a role. Ilya Sutskever, a board member who founded OpenAI with Mr. Altman and several other people, was said to be growing increasingly alarmed that the company’s technology could pose a significant risk, and that Mr. Altman was not paying close enough attention to the potential harms. Mr. Sutskever also objected to what he perceived as his own diminished role inside the company.
The A.I. industry is split among so-called doomers who say the technology is moving too quickly, risking disastrous results as machines learn to do more things; and others who say it can make life-saving enhancements for humanity.
More than 1,000 tech leaders signed on to a letter in March calling for a pause in the development of A.I.’s most advanced systems, saying the tools have “profound risks to society and humanity.”
Mr. Altman, who did not sign that letter, has urged responsible management of A.I. while also promoting the technology, and in recent months pitched ideas to investors and others.
Note the implied false dilemma logic fallacy here by the brass knuckles capitalists: taking time for safety will eliminate most or all of the good that can come from the use of AI in commerce. That is false. We can get the benefits and safety by being reasonably careful and cautious.
In my opinion, this is a very important bit to be aware of. One mindset among the AI elites (probably mostly multi-millionaires (> ~$25 million) and billionaires) can be called the brass knuckles capitalist mentality. It's sacred moral value is free markets running free (unregulated) and butt naked wild (no social conscience, little or no accountability for harm) in pursuit of the sacred God called Profit. The other mindset can be called reasonably regulated capitalism operating in service to the public interest or general welfare.
When framed like this, one can instantly see the clash of morals, i.e., profit vs the public interest. This issue isn't that AI is useless, because that's false. The issue is safety and respect for the public and the environment. Brass knuckles capitalists could not care less about anything that gets in the way of profit. That includes safety and respect for the public and the environment.
At present, Microsoft and probably Google are in the brass knuckles capitalist army. I suspect that most other big business entities are too, even if they deny it in the PR (propaganda) messaging. So, while Altman urged "responsible management" of AI, that is PR. His comment clearly means he is on the side of brass knuckles capitalism.
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The brass knuckles capitalist war on privacy: NYT columnist Zeynep Tufecki (professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University) wrote an interesting opinion about huge corporations watching us and what it is worth to them:
A report in The Guardian in August that lawyers who had had business before the Supreme Court gave money to an aide to Justice Clarence Thomas for a Christmas party was surprising [IMO, bribe money laundering]. Just as surprising was the way the publication learned about it: from the aide’s public Venmo records. Brian X. Chen, the consumer technology writer for The Times, wrote that even he was surprised that such records of money transfers could be public.
A few years ago it became known that Alexa, Amazon’s voice device, recorded and sent private conversations to third parties, that Amazon staff members listened to recordings and kept an extensive archive of recordings by default.Both companies responded to these startling violations of privacy by suggesting that the burden to keep this information from going public was on users, who could, they said, opt out of devices’ default settings to ensure privacy. This [in other words, f*ck off] is often the standard industry response.
Even if you’re aware of these problems, how easy is it to protect your privacy? Chen helpfully shared instructions for opting out of Venmo’s public disclosures.
“Inside the app, click on the Me tab, tap the settings icon and select Privacy. Under default privacy settings, select Private,” he explained. “Then, under the ‘More’ section in Privacy, click ‘Past Transactions’ and make sure to set that to ‘Change All to Private.’”
Got all that? I did, and changed my settings, too, as I had also been in the dark.
On more than one occasion I discovered that my privacy settings had changed from what I thought they were. Help forums are full of similarly befuddled users. Sometimes it’s a bug. Other times, when I dug into it, I realized that another change I had made had surreptitiously switched me back into tracking. Sometimes I learned that there was yet another setting somewhere else that also needed to be changed.The bigger problem is not the sometimes ridiculous difficulty of opting out, it’s that consumers often aren’t even aware of what their settings allow, or what it all means. If they were truly informed and actively choosing among the available options, the default setting would matter little, and be of little to no value.
But companies expect users to accept what they’re given, not know their options or not have the constant vigilance required to keep track of the available options, however limited they may be. Since the power in the industry is concentrated among few gatekeepers, and the technology is opaque and its consequences hard to foresee, default settings are some of the most important ways for companies to keep collecting and using data as they want.
Tufecki went on to explain that default settings that automatically track people are worth billions to big tech corps. Apple changed the default settings on iPhones and other devices so that users could not be tracked automatically via a unique identifier assigned to their Apple device in 2021. Apple apps had to ask for and receive explicit permission before they could have access to that identifier. In that same year, Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were estimated to have lost about $10 billion in total because of the change. Similarly, in 2022, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it alone stood to lose $10 billion.
Tufecki comments on how ridiculous this heavily rigged asymmetric war of information really is:
I’m not a tech novice: I started programming in middle school, worked as a developer and study these systems academically. If professionals can be tripped up, I’d argue that an industry rife with information asymmetries and powerful, complicated technologies needs to be reined in. .... Regulators can require companies to have defaults that favor privacy and autonomy, and make it easy to remain in control of them.
Yeah, they need to be reined in . . . . . bwahahahaha!! Make it easy? Bwahahahaha!!
The brass knuckles capitalism wing of the authoritarian radical right Republican Party (i.e., the entire GOP leadership) will make damn sure that the playing field will be tipped in tech company’s favor as much as possible or even legal. After all The Profit God is sacred and infallible.
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Here's a quick quiz that evaluates your work habits to see if you’re a Boomer, Gen X, Millennial or Gen Z. I'm 29%/29%/24%/17% (B/X/Mil/Z), so some of all four generations, but mostly older fart rather than younger fart. We should all be aware of what we are because . . . . . not sure why. It’s important to know our fartiness anyway for future reference. Maybe.
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