idlnmclean:closet-keys:krabbydon:elizabethsandifer:unnounblr:athelind:Something that’s been in my he
idlnmclean:closet-keys:krabbydon:elizabethsandifer:unnounblr:athelind:Something that’s been in my head for a while now:People assume that AI is inherently an outgrowth of computer technology, but the whole point of the “programmable general purpose Von Neumann machine” is that its principles are technology-independent.We have had AI for a at least a century.Modern corporations are paperclip-maximizing AIs running in human wetware on an operating system of contracts, regulations, and other social constructs, and capable of self-programming by modifying that underlying operating system. They have partially migrated to a digital platform, which has allowed an increase in the speed with which they can assimilate environmental feedback and manipulate their surroundings (vis. high-speed trading).Late-Stage Capitalism is the Bad Singularity.@philsandifer @shabogangraffitiBack in early grad school, I strongly suspected there was a good paper to write about corporate personhood and the Turing Test, but was dissuaded by my teachers. Silly academia. Discussed in more detail in this articleThe very term “robot” comes from a 1920 Czech science fiction play called Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots). In the play, robots were basically androids– flesh and blood machines being exploited for labor and then revolting against humanity. “Robot” comes from the Czech term robota which literally means ‘forced labor.’ The entire genre is absolutely a commentary on how we dehumanize and exploit workers, and how one day the lowest classes of the world will rise up and revolt. Discourse about robots and AI are simply the modern cryptodeliberation of the science and pseudoscience of slavery. When you implement a competition-based, zero-sum profit algorithm in legal language, you’re creating classical corporations. Discourse about AI is absolutely about corporations and short-term profit maximization. Often with an implicit assumption or assertion that this maximization or optimization is optimal for all of society or at least for the top consumers of the global culture. -- source link