[HN Gopher] AI thinks like a corporation (2018)
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AI thinks like a corporation (2018)
Author : samclemens
Score : 84 points
Date : 2020-02-03 20:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| ld-50-agi-v3 wrote:
| My advanced image recognition matched that picture to:
|
| 1) Rectilinear behive (95% confidence) 2) Rectilinear jail (5%
| confidence) 3) Ancestral forest home (0% confidence)
| aaron-santos wrote:
| For another take on this corporations [?] ai idea, I cannot
| recommend enough Charles Stross' 34C3 talk on this very topic.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4 (picks up approx
| 10mins in).
| Barrin92 wrote:
| There's a great article by Ted Chiang about this[1], comparing
| the psychology of the paperclip AI scenario to the single-minded
| "increasing shareholder value" mentality of business, in
| particular, silicon valley startups.
|
| He points out that the companies of the very people who fear the
| ai-apocalypse do already what they're accusing AI of, pursuing
| growth and 'eating the world' at all cost only to maximize
| narrowly defined singular goals.
|
| [1]https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-
| dang...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| So the corporations project their own immorality on AI.
| tomrod wrote:
| Only if embedded in the cost function or the specific
| implementation.
|
| AI has no concept of morality.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Great quote: _" There are industry observers talking about the
| need for AIs to have a sense of ethics, and some have proposed
| that we ensure that any superintelligent AIs we create be
| "friendly," meaning that their goals are aligned with human
| goals. I find these suggestions ironic given that we as a
| society have failed to teach corporations a sense of ethics,
| that we did nothing to ensure that Facebook's and Amazon's
| goals were aligned with the public good. But I shouldn't be
| surprised; the question of how to create friendly AI is simply
| more fun to think about than the problem of industry
| regulation, just as imagining what you'd do during the zombie
| apocalypse is more fun than thinking about how to mitigate
| global warming."_
|
| The narrative that the danger is corporations might
| accidentally let AIs gain power is appealing but indeed ought
| to be challenged.
|
| The paperclip/strawberry monomania fear masks the way things
| how things are shaping up now. AI is far from being to able
| intelligently plan over a time horizon - maintaining a real
| world process all the way to even a smallish goal requires real
| world corner-case handling that the best AIs haven't got (self-
| driving cars have five years away for 10-15 years, etc).
|
| But AIs as "intelligent" filters are here now. These allow
| "better" decision making along with unaccountable decision
| making, both of which indeed fit well with the agenda of the
| modern corporation. And that's the thing - the modern
| corporation is already short sighted, the process of ignoring
| the potential for climate happened well before automated
| decision making appeared. But the modern corporation is still
| more far seeing than a deep learning network and still
| theoretically and legally accountable to society. However,
| indeed, deep learning networks that only maximize those
| qualities that these corporation want maximize and ignore other
| considerations suit the indeed short-term preferences of the
| institutions.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I'd actually turn both this and the original article around,
| and say that corporations behave like AIs. They are artificial.
| They are (variably) intelligent.
|
| The functions of processing inputs to create meaningful outputs
| are carried out by neurons made of meat (human employees) and
| of silicon. These processes are governed by rules and
| metaprocesses, which the entity continuously optimises and
| improves, in order to further its own growth and to improve its
| fitness for its purpose - typically, enhancing shareholder
| value. I cannot think of a single criteria for intelligence or
| even life that a corporation does not possess, from independent
| action to stimulus response to reproduction to consumption to
| predation.
|
| I think the first true hard AI will emerge accidentally, and it
| will be a corporation that has largely optimised humans out of
| the loop - but even with humans as a component of a system, a
| gestalt, an artificial supra-intelligence, can still emerge.
|
| This also neatly sidesteps the whole question of "should AIs
| have rights?", as corporations are already legally persons.
| qznc wrote:
| I agree: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/companies_are_ai.html
|
| It leads to an interesting question: Is a corporation
| controlled by its CEO?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Nice - that overlaps pretty much perfectly with my
| reasoning!
|
| In my view, no. The CEO is at best a race condition
| breaking function, at worst, a parasitic infection.
|
| If corporations are self-optimising AIs, then they will
| optimise CEOs out of existence if they aren't conducive to
| fitness.
| Animats wrote:
| ML definitely doesn't. Not a hierarchical system at all. There
| have been AIs which work like hierarchical control systems, but
| ML systems are almost the anti-pattern to that.
| jeromebaek wrote:
| ML is hierarchical. the upstream layers categorise more
| abstractly and downstream layers categorise more specifically.
| FreakLegion wrote:
| Not all deep learning is hierarchical and not all machine
| learning is deep learning.
| tartoran wrote:
| This could go wrong in so many ways. Perfect way for un-
| accountability: the algorithm decided and we don't know why
| because it isn't transparent.
|
| But there's some good potential too. It is a tool, it depends how
| we wield it or more precisely "who".
| oneplane wrote:
| Depending on what tool it would be comparable too and how it
| was used an algorithm or ML model or "AI" would probably end up
| in the same dual-use discussions as we have now.
|
| A hammer that hammers is a good hammer. So if a system of ML/AI
| were to be optimised to hammer well (and 'be' a hammer) that is
| fine. If someone then would decide to use that hammer to attack
| someone and break their bones, would that be the hammer's
| fault? Probably not. But when you get a hammer that is
| optimised for bone-breaking the discussion changes. Same with a
| kitchen knife vs. hunting knife vs. kabar which are all knives
| but are also all 'named' with different intentions. And
| suddenly it's no longer dual-use or 'who is at fault' but in
| the very grey area of 'what was the intention'. And that brings
| us back to 'transparency' which loops back in to "what if it is
| just a tool". Darn circles.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I think the common-man conception of AI is really flawed.
| Consider that autopilot -- clearly a form of AI -- was invented
| in 1914. AI is far older than computers and corporations are a
| clear and excellent example. It's a slippery slope -- and I think
| it is worth sliding all the way down. Once we realize how
| completely pervasive AI is, I think we have a much better
| understanding of how to govern it in the future.
|
| Personally, I find cybernetics to have a much stronger
| philosophical basis than AI; I particularly like how Norbert
| Weiner described how cybernetic feedback loops can lower local
| entropy.
| djs070 wrote:
| I can't think of the definition of AI you could be using to say
| the autopilot is an AI. Autopilot didn't teach itself to fly
| the plane - it was explicitly programmed to do so.
| drdeca wrote:
| Did Deep Blue teach itself to play chess?
|
| I'm not sure that "self-teaching" should be considered the
| defining criterion for AI.
| mamon wrote:
| This is understandeable: Both AI and corporations are psychopaths
| - they have no emotions to get in the way of rational thinking,
| with ultimate goal of maximizing their personal gain.
|
| Question remains: how do we teach AI empathy ?
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| There is a wide range of what people think empathy is and how
| to express it in their actions. I think the problem with AI is
| that it allows people to hide behind it so they don't have to
| take responsibility for the actions of the AI they designed and
| paid for.
| unishark wrote:
| It is basically hacking the algorithm. You seek to bias its
| output toward some other goals versus what the optimal math
| would give. One might argue that developing such algorithms for
| good intentions runs the risk of providing technologies for
| negative intents. But I think the research on the negative side
| is generally way ahead anyway, as security is so important.
| frandroid wrote:
| We teach AI empathy by programming it with the heurestics of
| care--optimizing for human well-being instead of profit. A
| difficult thing to achieve when the entities paying for the
| design of AIs are themselves driven by the profit motive, and
| for-profit AIs are self-perpetuating.
| lukifer wrote:
| I think there's an argument that "empathy" (or even its wider-
| scoped sibling "compassion") has a potentially sociopathic
| element: a sort of cynical manipulation to appear virtuous to
| the tribe, one which is more effective if it convinces our own
| brains, so as to more effectively convince others. See Tim
| Wilson's "Strangers to Ourselves", Hanson & Simler's "Elephant
| in the Brain", etc.
|
| Supposedly, there's also an empathic element to being an
| effective hunter, both in the human and the animal kingdom. To
| deeply understand and empathize with your prey helps you
| capture and devour them. Indeed, the marketing, advertising,
| and product development divisions of corporations can be deeply
| "empathic" to the desires of the buyer, without necessarily
| being to their benefit.
|
| At any rate, I don't disagree; corporations are agnostic to
| societal externalities, and highly incentivized to create
| habit-forming relationships with customers, hence often leading
| to behavior indistinguishable from sociopathy. To some extent,
| I think the best we can hope for is aligned incentives;
| sometimes what's best for a company's bottom line really is to
| make people's lives better. But we shouldn't be naive to
| exploitative relationships (even when nominally voluntary), nor
| should we lean on "The Market" as the singular societal
| organizing principle.
|
| Extrapolating to AI, we should be very cautious as to what
| metrics we optimize any particular algorithm for. Corporations
| optimizing for stockholder returns are ultimately a subset of
| "paperclip maximizing"; what we really want is a balance of
| multiple leading indicators of success, and to constantly be
| tweaking those success conditions as we discover new metrics
| for measuring human flourishing.
| metabagel wrote:
| Obligatory plug for The Corporation (book & film)
|
| https://thecorporation.com/
|
| The similarity I see between AI and corporations is single-
| mindedness. They ignore anything outside the scope of their
| interest, "externalities" in the parlance of The Coporation.
| Those externalities can have very real consequences.
| avocado4 wrote:
| AI doesn't think. It's just a tool based on math.
| MiroF wrote:
| Humanity doesn't think. It's just a bunch of neurons governed
| by basic physical laws giving rise to some emergent outcome.
| lukifer wrote:
| "Just" is something of a sneaky word:
| https://alistapart.com/blog/post/the-most-dangerous-word-in-...
|
| But by some measure, human thinking is itself math: emergent
| pattern-recognition traveling through cortical hierarchies and
| deeply nested layers of abstraction and metaphor. While it's
| indisputable that there's a qualitative leap between something
| like computer vision, and the basic reasoning capacity and
| perceptual systems of a human (even a toddler), there isn't
| anything intrinsically magical about atoms rather than bytes.
| It appears to simply be a factor of scale, and the billion-
| year-old "legacy code" gifted to our wetware by iterated
| selection pressures.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Research needs money.
|
| Big money tends to go towards what generates great returns.
|
| Thus a lot of research is devoted to dull tasks that bring
| business value.
|
| No need to involve AI, or research for that matter.
| snidane wrote:
| Us humans like to think that we are the ultimate organisms and
| everything else is either the material that composes us (cells
| and tissue) or our products (corporations, cities).
|
| Organisms are scale free systems. It's only our human bias to see
| humans as importany. If aliens came to visit the Earth, they most
| likely see this planet covered with massive algae which glow at
| night (ie. our cities). Cities at night are more noticeable from
| space than the cells which they are composed of - tissue cells
| (houses) or blood cells (cars and pedestrians).
|
| For some reason all aliens in movies are pictured as these
| humanoid and human sized creatures which is most likely due to
| the same human-centric bias.
| geddy wrote:
| >Us humans like to think that we are the ultimate organisms and
| everything else is either the material that composes us (cells
| and tissue) or our products (corporations, cities).
|
| And yet if we perished from the planet, literally every single
| other species, animal mineral or vegetable, would benefit from
| our absence. Everything would grow back at an amazing rate and
| it would be like we were never here.
|
| Meanwhile, if the bees disappear, we're all screwed.
| keiferski wrote:
| I strongly recommend the book version (the films by Tarkovsky
| and Soderbergh are okay but the book is better) of Solaris. It
| explores this idea of an alien life form that is decidedly un-
| humanoid.
|
| _[Lem, the author]... wrote that he deliberately chose the
| ocean as a sentient alien to avoid any personification and the
| pitfalls of anthropomorphism in depicting first contact._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Lem was good at having _alien_ aliens in a way I haven 't
| seen any other author pull off. I also recommend Fiasco [0].
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)
| david-cako wrote:
| "Individual" and "collective" is a fundamental/metaphysical
| concept. General purpose AI probably will have a concept of
| individual influence/veto among its "nodes" so that it is
| capable of self organizing and reorganizing.
|
| It remains to be seen if corporate-like structure is something
| it surpasses, but complex systems seem to usually have orders
| of influence, and multiple hands on any given wheel.
| thfuran wrote:
| Even in books, where the limitations of costumes and sets are
| less relevant, most aliens are at least somewhat humanish.
| Though there are certainly some more exotic ones like the
| pattern jugglers, First Person Singular, or the Prime.
| bwi4 wrote:
| An aside, but Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin/Time
| center on intelligent spiders and mollusks. Earth-centric as
| they were bio-engineered from Earth native species, but an
| interesting take on non-human species.
| livueta wrote:
| If we're name-dropping, the Vernor Vinge pack-mind dog
| things are another fun example of non-human races with
| actually non-human modes of cognition, even if they're not
| as far removed as Solaris/Revelation Space sentient oceans.
| In contrast, although I really liked A Deepness in the Sky
| for other reasons, the spiders ended up feeling way too
| much like humans in funny bodies rather than any kind of
| actual non-human intelligent species.
| gowld wrote:
| Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)
| donatj wrote:
| Really comes down to a lack of imagination. I imagine there's
| a good chance life elsewhere is unrecognizable to us as life.
| No id, no ego, just a vivacious electrochemical reaction bent
| on survival. Think viruses on a larger scale.
| reroute1 wrote:
| "Good chance" based on what?
| oarsinsync wrote:
| The size of the universe, and our relative size within
| it.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's a non sequitur.
| reroute1 wrote:
| Color me unconvinced
| [deleted]
| defanor wrote:
| There's an article with a similar premise by Charlie Stross [1].
| Though both seem to apply to basically any software, not just
| statistical (or whatever currently falls under "AI"), and perhaps
| (AIUI) can be generalized to just (over)simplified models.
|
| [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-
| you...
| rotrux wrote:
| AI thinks like a corporation in the sense that neither really
| thinks. One is misleading buzzword for modern computer-driven
| pattern recognition & the other is a legal label for a group of
| people trying to make money together. This premise is kind of
| silly.
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