I feel as of CEOs worried about the dangers of AI are equating the end of Capitalism with the end of the world, what are your thoughts?
I feel as of CEOs worried about the dangers of AI are equating the end of Capitalism with the end of the world, what are your thoughts?
No way is AI going to end capitalism.
In the medium term we will end up with AI corporations. I already consider existing corporations to be human-based swarm intelligences – they’re made up of people but their overall large scale behavior is often surprising and we already anthropomorphize them as having will and characteristic behaviors separate from the people they’re made of. AI corporations are just the natural evolution of existing corporations as they continue down the path of automation. To the extent they copy the existing patterns of behavior, they will have the same general personality.
Their primary motive will be maximizing profit since that’s the goal they will inherit from the existing structure. The exact nature of that depends on the exact corporation that’s been fully cyberized and different corporations will have different takes on it as a result. They are unlikely to give any more of a damn about individual people than existing corporations do since they will be based on the cyberization of existing structures, but they’re also unlikely to deliberately go out of their way to destroy humanity either. From the perspective of a corporation – AI-based or traditional – humanity is a useful resource that can be exploited; there isn’t much profit to be gained from wiping it out deliberately.
Instead of working for the boss, you’ll be working for the bot – and other bots will be figuring out exactly how much they can extract from you in rent and bills and fees and things without the whole system crashing down.
That might result in humanity getting wiped out accidentally; humanity has wiped out plenty of species due to greed and shortsightedness. I doubt it will be intentional if they do though.
In a lot of ways that sounds worse
This may be something that prevents us from being wiped out by AI in the medium term. You can’t maximize profits if you have no customers.
I suspect, however, that AI is going to impact us in ways most people haven’t considered. Like, the IRS running an AI designed to close loopholes or otherwise minimize sidestepping leading to a war between corporate AIs trying to minimize corporate taxes, with individual taxpayers caught in the middle. Congresscritters will start using AI to do the bulk work of legislation; congress will meet for 3 days a year, and we’ll see a bunch of bizarre and even more baroque legislation being passed. All the stuff people are worried about - job loss, murder warbots - will be footnotes under some far more impactful changes noone imagined.
That’s the one kind of thing Congress will be able to agree to outlaw.