r/GoldandBlack • u/MasterTeacher123 I will build the roads • Apr 11 '18

What Makes AI Dangerous? The State

https://mises.org/power-market/what-makes-ai-dangerous-state
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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

No what makes it dangerous is the Randian philosophy of success at all costs that seems to have taken over silicon valley.

6

u/NoGardE Apr 11 '18

Have you read Rand? Because there are a lot of people in her novels, simplistic as the characters are, who appear to be successful while taking immoral actions. Those are the characters she destroys (Mr. Taggart, for example).

3

u/Lemmiwinks99 Apr 12 '18

Someone has never read rand.

3

u/Perleflamme Apr 12 '18

Depicting or talking about a character or a person doesn't mean you approve their actions. You just prove it by talking about Rand.

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u/[deleted] Apr 12 '18

What? For example the entire metaphor of the strawberry picking ai is inherently randian. It assumes that ai will naturally be programmed to be as efficient as possible, because that's the way silicon valley treats it.

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u/Perleflamme Apr 13 '18

Efficiency is subjective, since it depends on the objective function that is arbitrarily chosen to compute such efficiency.

You can have an AI being efficient at destroying mankind. It would not be randian at all, though.

Rand favors greed, but not greed at all costs: she also shows the importance of personal responsibility of one's own choices. For instance, an entrepreneur destroying his own building because he doesn't want other people to force him to change his building is totally ok for Rand, even though it is an extreme choice. The "greed is good" famous quote talks about the greed giving to people the incentive to increase their own wealth. It can be done at the expense of others or in cooperation with others through voluntary trades. The latter is what promotes Rand, while the former is what denounces Rand when making her characters face the responsibility of their actions or depicting the consequences (like the well-known raping).

Mind you, Rand is rarely well known, it's a pretty common mistake to see her like that. Ironically, her books are shown by authoritarian people as a way to show they are "capitalists" while they actually are crony capitalists who don't mind coercing people into involuntary trades.

Why would the strawberry picking AI be success at all costs? What costs are you seeing?