Robust AI

There is real danger in AI – as there is in any technology on which civilization depends – and it is already present. Its current abilities can be used by bad people to learn how to do awful things, including eliminate lots of others or destroy countries. We can imagine it used to create plagues, wreck trade, or start nuclear wars. However, in itself, destroying humanity by becoming a supermind overlord seems quite unlikely. There are two reasons for that.

One is that there are many AI actors already, and it’s increasingly likely they could turn against one another if directed to do so. They live in a physical ecosystem in which they can hardly shelter from one another without becoming ineffectual themselves.

The second is the ecosystem itself. Servers, optical fibers, satellites, power sources. Hard to see how any overmind could transition to full physical power without being stopped by organic entities using various kinds of violence. The world, after all, is large, and humans numerous, nasty and independently operating units.

That fragility is also a danger to AI use. If all the food is produced by AI, it is simple for catastrophe to end the food supply. If transportation depends on AI, ditto.

Human networks, for all their faults, are robust, self repairing, and handle new problems pretty well. Silicon, not so much.

Normal

Children accept almost any conditions as normal. As we get older we tend to look around and adjust our individual outlook to our culture. And as we age even more and more, we find it harder and harder to accept inevitable change.

Of course, there are different types of “change”.

The most oxymoronic is what I will call static change. It is exemplified by death or big events. An old tree that has been around “forever” is suddenly gone. Parts of landscape, ways of life, friends and relatives, once eternally available, now exist only in memory. Depending on that memory we cheer or regret what has vanished.

Then there is a creeping constant change in daily life patterns. What used to be normal is no longer. How we work or play, for example. What is our typical daily schedule, how vacations and holidays are different from “back then”. All this is usually gradual and we accept it with good grace. Just life.

Finally there is the most elusive and profound, which is trend change. Our expectations, which often drive our logical existence. The job should pay more each year. Prices will remain about the same day to day. Our health will last. Whole cycles and patterns integrated into our plans and imaginations.

It is the last, more than any other, that causes revolutions. If we worry that jobs are going away or food will become scarce or enemies are on the way. When “normal” expected trends change, watch out.

For that often means real daily change may arrive soon.

Great Expectations

In many horror films a group of well-off happy teenagers are beset with a mysterious dangerous evil. The immediate simple responses are to hide or run away (they always choose to hide). The correct but more complicated actions would be to stay together with whatever weaponry they can find, call the police and parents, maintain contact, and put as much distance as possible between them and whatever while staying in the open.

Our own social horror worries are numerous and affect well-off happy people. Crime, wages, health, job uncertainty, children’s future, finances, climate change, global menace, inflation, education, and you can continue the list. Our immediate simple response is to whack away with simple government policies, which in turn whack away with simple slogans and usually ineffectively transient actions. But, like the kids in the horror film hiding in the shed, we all feel better for the moment.

So if we “just” clean out immigrants, remove regulations, lower taxes, jail anyone we don’t like, ignore snotty experts, get back to the good old days – everything will once again be perfect. Of course most of us can’t agree on what any of that means, how to do it, or if it would work.

But we have great expectations. Like the movie victims, we know blindly running somewhere else must save us. No time to think. Thinking is for those useless pointy-headed experts.

So far, most of the actions based on such great expectations seem to have had the usual result.

Time to scream again?

Adversarial Justice

Once upon a time we were taught the glories of the jury system, adversarial justice with lawyers jousting, and the concept of innocent until proven guilty. Those worked remarkably well in the good old days, but times have changed. Look at it one by one.

Juries are a huge inconvenience to most people, and are rarely necessary. Certainly not 12 people in person listening to arcane arguments. Then the adversarial system itself, expensive as hell, courts and judges and lawyers where those with the most money usually win, and in any case the proceedings themselves are too theatrical and slimy to give real satisfaction of justice done. And as for innocent until proven guilty – just a defense lawyer lie. Filmed evidence, revealed details of previous crimes, all the crap of the 12th century hardly relevant in an era of photography, cell phone locations, and DNA.

Actually, that is why a lot of trials end up in plea deals.

Now I know all evidence can be manufactured or falsified. But in most situations that’s hardly worth the effort. At this point, perhaps we should ease back on worrying about letting hundreds go free lest one innocent be convicted. The odds have changed.

Just another example of how our ancient constitution and irrelevant traditions betray society in the modern world. The whole thing should be taken apart, streamlined, and rethought. Taking into account technology and an interconnected world. Time to leave the methodology of the 12th century behind.

Capitalism’s End

(With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke)

The mythology of capitalism has been established as pervasively as was the divine right of kings at the close of the middle ages. Capitalism, claims the dogma, makes society healthy, wealthy and wise. No other human system works as well and never will.

Things change. Those kings were deposed, beheaded, or shackled with constitutional oversight. New forms of government arose, sweeping away kingly beliefs in mercantilism, aristocratic rule, religious social control. Many alternatives have been tried, capitalism emerged as one of the successful ones.

Things change. Clearly we have reached the end of the industrial revolution. Machines produce everything, including other machines. Humans remain in the economic mix, directing and inventing machines, filling niche services, and toiling in leftover areas like agriculture where machines are only gradually replacing them.

Things change. If current trends continue, machines will have taken over all the production, no need for human intervention at any stage. We need new ideas, but fanatic “capitalists” have become the ignorant priests and destructive luddites of our age, unable to imagine any other system, fearful of what they do not know.

Things change. Like kings, capitalistic corporations may be in their final moments, as those rulers once were.

Things change.

Are you ready?

1913

In autumn of 1913, the European-American world was content, fat, and happy. Europeans controlled the only areas of the globe and culture that they thought mattered. Americans led an exceptional city on a hill advancing to a perfected future. Both felt they were chosen, the rightful rulers of all others, and the guardians of civilization itself.

Intellectuals agreed. Countries were either stable or subdued. Logic and science were taming human irrationality, commercial interconnection made major war impossible. Henry Ford and others were demonstrating just how affluent modern mass production could make everyone. If anything, the rulers and masses were a little too complacently optimistic about the future.

Even the social unrest of the previous 50 years seemed to have settled down. Fiery socialist, communist labor agitators were more conciliatory. Gigantic strikes and revolutionary ideas were confined to a few backwaters. Even those short in duration. Most folks were fed, housed, and felt better off than they had ever been, expecting ever greater things to come.

Who could have predicted the next 40 years? What happened?

Even now, it’s hard to comprehend. One thing just led to another. At the end of it all, many smoking ruins, millions dead, politics unrecognizable. The very divisions of the political globe massively reshaped. And in spite of it all, massive technological industrial advance.

Yes, I do feel that September 2026 feels a lot like that autumn over 100 years ago. And, although I think some people feel the same way, I am pretty sure once again nobody has a clue what will come, or how to affect it.