This is a problem yet to be solved. Another problem is the 30% of overworked, underpaid workers who believe that Farage and Lowe are the solution to the problems they have in their lives. Where are the well paid jobs for a million 18-24 year old NEETS?
Maybe you could take that other problem to another forum where that is actually under discussion, one where they know who Lowe is and what NEETs are. #whataboutism.
Already we have a woman receiving a video call from “her daughter” asking urgently for money. She had the wit to ask “her” what they had for dinner last night, and when “she” fobbed that off, how many brothers and sisters she had, upon which “she” hung up. A check at the school found the actual daughter was safe and not using her phone. The mother was nearly fooled, but it will get more and more convincing, and we need to nip that kind of thing in the bud.
Great AC - all true IRL - I deeply appreciate your insights and will (probably) merely add them to ‘who I am’ ‘quotation self’ IRL. But I will in the meanwhile continue my twice daily routine of 30 minutes ‘not thinking’ (silence of mind and stillness of body) where I simply ‘am’. It is the only way I have found not to be someone else and, (hopefully) in that time I will absorb your insights into my RL.
This is a wonderful post. I had been hoping you’d do more on AI. I hope I get to meet you one day - I think you were teaching at Magdalen, but after I left
Where do we start on the ethics of AI?
I’ve tried to get more knowledgable because
-It is such a turning point in the history of mankind
-I am so alarmed about the ethical implications for jobs, inequality, decision making, literacy and education, the environment and democracy just for starters but also
-One has to try to understand what it is in detail to get any job nowadays. It is everywhere, like a fungal infection, all employers talk about.
So. I’ve done three courses / diplomas. One on AI and Ethics at LSE. The Oxford one at Oltep which also looked at the tech and the law and a law society one which was more practical. In my experience programmers are more worried than lawyers (who mainly see it as convenient tools for drafting more quickly).
Most of the high risk / recruitment provisions in the AI Act have been kicked into the long grass for at least a year- a sign that even the EU is scared of doing too much to unsettle Big Tech. But that’s the most draconian law atm. The law never goes fast enough. Is always behind. I have tried to keep up with the geopolitical perspective, the economic and the tech as much as possible too. My husband is a programmer so can really explain what it does to me. He is very concerned.
I’ve been writing a few articles with my thoughts in.
The issue is also that we are in an AI race. The US v China. Taiwan makes the chips too. I’m surprised it hasn’t yet been attacked. Maybe that is still to come. Then there is the question of the AI bubble and the overvaluation of the companies. Even if that happens, sadly we’ll be left with the big giants who will suck the smaller ones up. It is a David and Goliath problem. I don’t feel confident that many politicians have thought about this problem in all the ways I have described. They are simply assuming it will be a cash cow.
How to solve the problem of AI - which as you say we never really needed or asked for - and how to live in a world where it has been thrust upon you? My provisional solution is to take a blind fold off, work on advising people of the risks. That’s what I’ve tried to do where I can.
It woudl help if Tony Blair could be removed from the soundwaves too. He has financial interests in tech companies. So does his son, who places people in them. He shouldn’t be allowed to be talking about over regulation (which is an error anyway - there is grossly inadequate regulation of it).
The biggest problem isn’t even AI. It is the small number of amoral individuals controlling it. Has there ever been a time when such a small group had so much power to destroy the lives of others? I’m not sure there has. Only in mythology. It makes me think of the Olympian Gods.
The dentist succeeded, finally, in persuading me to buy an electric toothbrush. I researched (second-guessed) the blurb and now in practical use I see the bits of blurb that I thought were blurb being demonstrably FDA-licensed bollocks. Sonic waves, my gingivae.
Typically, when acquiring anything novel, I’m aware of phases: Initially, awe with attendant reverence (we were a poor family so anything new’s to be handled like a gift from the heavens), which morphs discernibly into acquaintance (or acceptance), which morphs gradually into mastery (or nonchalance). It’s the same be it a toothbrush, kettle, car, phone…
After growing up working (or mucking about) with all things electro-mechanical from ages five or six, peaking twenty years later with single-handedly honing my car engine, I’ve only just last week yielded to the charms of an electric drill-screwdriver. Same pattern, same process – currently commencing stage two.
The latent danger with so-called AI is that those using it have never become self-delimiting “masters” through experiencing themselves interacting (and catastrophically failing: among other results I cut the end off an index digit, aged sixteen) with the physical world. So, they’re unable to move beyond stage one.
A fact remains proscribed in plain sight. The greater proportion of certainly the UK’s and USA’s populations are little ‘smarter’ than cattle (and the rest of the resemblance swells from there). But coalesced they have lots of low-hanging wealth. Fools and their money: That’s all that is happening right now. No beguiling ogre from the fearful future unleashed.
Arguably, it’s been happening for decades, thanks to American marketers. (Tati started satirising it in the late fifties, so perhaps that’s the de facto epoch of gullible enshittification – notably also a period of procreating “progressivism”.) And were it not for the arterial accessibility afforded to its offspring by the www, it’d continue its (socially and legally) manageable meander into domesticity like furry fungi.
AI shall forever remain a tool. A gizmo to be mastered (with a degree of contempt) or marshalled by marketers to pull off the oligarchical heist of the century by exploiting what’s been evolving for generations: stupid people having litters of more stupid people who remain stupid because they have the “freedom” to do so and no one else cares much anyway. (In the UK, of course, it’s the defining culture, and one is squirted with opprobrium for speaking its name.)
When self-appointing “progressives” accept that life is necessarily harsh and (developmental) growth must be stimulated, and self-aggrandising neoliberals learn that if they don’t value ubiquitous exemplary education they’re defaecating in their own larders, then I shall gallop like a goat.
Maybe it's just me as a senior man who has read widely, but AI fills me with unease.
You are not alone.
+1
This is a problem yet to be solved. Another problem is the 30% of overworked, underpaid workers who believe that Farage and Lowe are the solution to the problems they have in their lives. Where are the well paid jobs for a million 18-24 year old NEETS?
Maybe you could take that other problem to another forum where that is actually under discussion, one where they know who Lowe is and what NEETs are. #whataboutism.
Already we have a woman receiving a video call from “her daughter” asking urgently for money. She had the wit to ask “her” what they had for dinner last night, and when “she” fobbed that off, how many brothers and sisters she had, upon which “she” hung up. A check at the school found the actual daughter was safe and not using her phone. The mother was nearly fooled, but it will get more and more convincing, and we need to nip that kind of thing in the bud.
Great AC - all true IRL - I deeply appreciate your insights and will (probably) merely add them to ‘who I am’ ‘quotation self’ IRL. But I will in the meanwhile continue my twice daily routine of 30 minutes ‘not thinking’ (silence of mind and stillness of body) where I simply ‘am’. It is the only way I have found not to be someone else and, (hopefully) in that time I will absorb your insights into my RL.
This is a wonderful post. I had been hoping you’d do more on AI. I hope I get to meet you one day - I think you were teaching at Magdalen, but after I left
Where do we start on the ethics of AI?
I’ve tried to get more knowledgable because
-It is such a turning point in the history of mankind
-I am so alarmed about the ethical implications for jobs, inequality, decision making, literacy and education, the environment and democracy just for starters but also
-One has to try to understand what it is in detail to get any job nowadays. It is everywhere, like a fungal infection, all employers talk about.
So. I’ve done three courses / diplomas. One on AI and Ethics at LSE. The Oxford one at Oltep which also looked at the tech and the law and a law society one which was more practical. In my experience programmers are more worried than lawyers (who mainly see it as convenient tools for drafting more quickly).
Most of the high risk / recruitment provisions in the AI Act have been kicked into the long grass for at least a year- a sign that even the EU is scared of doing too much to unsettle Big Tech. But that’s the most draconian law atm. The law never goes fast enough. Is always behind. I have tried to keep up with the geopolitical perspective, the economic and the tech as much as possible too. My husband is a programmer so can really explain what it does to me. He is very concerned.
I’ve been writing a few articles with my thoughts in.
The issue is also that we are in an AI race. The US v China. Taiwan makes the chips too. I’m surprised it hasn’t yet been attacked. Maybe that is still to come. Then there is the question of the AI bubble and the overvaluation of the companies. Even if that happens, sadly we’ll be left with the big giants who will suck the smaller ones up. It is a David and Goliath problem. I don’t feel confident that many politicians have thought about this problem in all the ways I have described. They are simply assuming it will be a cash cow.
How to solve the problem of AI - which as you say we never really needed or asked for - and how to live in a world where it has been thrust upon you? My provisional solution is to take a blind fold off, work on advising people of the risks. That’s what I’ve tried to do where I can.
It woudl help if Tony Blair could be removed from the soundwaves too. He has financial interests in tech companies. So does his son, who places people in them. He shouldn’t be allowed to be talking about over regulation (which is an error anyway - there is grossly inadequate regulation of it).
The biggest problem isn’t even AI. It is the small number of amoral individuals controlling it. Has there ever been a time when such a small group had so much power to destroy the lives of others? I’m not sure there has. Only in mythology. It makes me think of the Olympian Gods.
Very perceptive comment, Joanna.
Thank you 🙏
The dentist succeeded, finally, in persuading me to buy an electric toothbrush. I researched (second-guessed) the blurb and now in practical use I see the bits of blurb that I thought were blurb being demonstrably FDA-licensed bollocks. Sonic waves, my gingivae.
Typically, when acquiring anything novel, I’m aware of phases: Initially, awe with attendant reverence (we were a poor family so anything new’s to be handled like a gift from the heavens), which morphs discernibly into acquaintance (or acceptance), which morphs gradually into mastery (or nonchalance). It’s the same be it a toothbrush, kettle, car, phone…
After growing up working (or mucking about) with all things electro-mechanical from ages five or six, peaking twenty years later with single-handedly honing my car engine, I’ve only just last week yielded to the charms of an electric drill-screwdriver. Same pattern, same process – currently commencing stage two.
The latent danger with so-called AI is that those using it have never become self-delimiting “masters” through experiencing themselves interacting (and catastrophically failing: among other results I cut the end off an index digit, aged sixteen) with the physical world. So, they’re unable to move beyond stage one.
A fact remains proscribed in plain sight. The greater proportion of certainly the UK’s and USA’s populations are little ‘smarter’ than cattle (and the rest of the resemblance swells from there). But coalesced they have lots of low-hanging wealth. Fools and their money: That’s all that is happening right now. No beguiling ogre from the fearful future unleashed.
Arguably, it’s been happening for decades, thanks to American marketers. (Tati started satirising it in the late fifties, so perhaps that’s the de facto epoch of gullible enshittification – notably also a period of procreating “progressivism”.) And were it not for the arterial accessibility afforded to its offspring by the www, it’d continue its (socially and legally) manageable meander into domesticity like furry fungi.
AI shall forever remain a tool. A gizmo to be mastered (with a degree of contempt) or marshalled by marketers to pull off the oligarchical heist of the century by exploiting what’s been evolving for generations: stupid people having litters of more stupid people who remain stupid because they have the “freedom” to do so and no one else cares much anyway. (In the UK, of course, it’s the defining culture, and one is squirted with opprobrium for speaking its name.)
When self-appointing “progressives” accept that life is necessarily harsh and (developmental) growth must be stimulated, and self-aggrandising neoliberals learn that if they don’t value ubiquitous exemplary education they’re defaecating in their own larders, then I shall gallop like a goat.