Basic Info
Title Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? Author By Ted Chiang Original Link https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fscience%2Fannals-of-artificial-intelligence%2Fwill-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey Date Last Highlighted 2023-05-06 Date Published 2023-05-05 Type articles Source reader Generated Summary When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar.
Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims Not yet Related Lenses Processing ”ai" "capitalism” Related Questions Not yet Output Not yet
Highlights
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Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic
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Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.
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Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice.
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A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.
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It will always be possible to build A.I. that pursues shareholder value above all else, and most companies will prefer to use that A.I. instead of one constrained by your principles
✏️ The solution is not to say you’ll build AI with pro social guidelines in mind.
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When I refer to capitalism, I’m talking about a specific relationship between capital and labor, in which private individuals who have money are able to profit off the effort of others.
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Accelerationism says that it’s futile to try to oppose or reform capitalism; instead, we have to exacerbate capitalism’s worst tendencies until the entire system breaks down. The only way to move beyond capitalism is to stomp on the gas pedal of neoliberalism until the engine explodes.
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By building A.I. to do jobs previously performed by people, A.I. researchers are increasing the concentration of wealth to such extreme levels that the only way to avoid societal collapse is for the government to step in. Intentionally or not, this is very similar to voting for Trump with the goal of bringing about a better world
✏️ What accelerationists think.
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the rise of Trump illustrates the risks of pursuing accelerationism as a strategy: things can get very bad, and stay very bad for a long time, before they get better. In fact, you have no idea of how long it will take for things to get better; all you can be sure of is that there will be significant pain and suffering in the short and medium term.
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Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.
✏️ Exactly! When we predict AI will break bad and prevent us from turning it off, we’re really talking about capitalism.
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People who criticize new technologies are sometimes called Luddites, but it’s helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry. The Luddites did not indiscriminately destroy machines; if a machine’s owner paid his workers well, they left it alone. The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice. They destroyed machinery as a way to get factory owners’ attention
✏️ The smearing of luddites and hiding what they truly were able.. All a very effective propaganda campaign by capitalism
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what does progress even mean, if it doesn’t include better lives for people who work? What is the point of greater efficiency, if the money being saved isn’t going anywhere except into shareholders’ bank accounts?
✏️ What is progress? Yes, we have streaming and smart phones and social media, but no one can afford homes, college or medical costs without direct government intervention. The top percentile are making billions, while the middle class has eroded to nothing.
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In the United States, per-capita G.D.P. has almost doubled since 1980, while the median household income has lagged far behind. That period covers the information-technology revolution. This means that the economic value created by the personal computer and the Internet has mostly served to increase the wealth of the top one per cent of the top one per cent, instead of raising the standard of living for U.S. citizens as a whole.
✏️ Criticizing the argument that new tech leads to long term greater standard of living
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the claim that better technology will necessarily improve people’s standard of living is no longer credible.
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The only way that technology can boost the standard of living is if there are economic policies in place to distribute the benefits of technology appropriately.
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In a utopia where there’s a machine that converts toxic waste into food, generating toxic waste wouldn’t be a problem, but, in the here and now, no one could claim that generating toxic waste is harmless. Accelerationists might argue that generating more toxic waste will motivate the invention of a waste-to-food converter, but how convincing is that?
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we can’t evaluate A.I. by imagining how helpful it will be in a world with U.B.I.; we have to evaluate it in light of the existing imbalance between capital and labor, and, in that context, A.I. is a threat because of the way it assists capital
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No one enjoys thinking about their complicity in the injustices of the world, but it is imperative that the people who are building world-shaking technologies engage in this kind of critical self-examination. It’s their willingness to look unflinchingly at their own role in the system that will determine whether A.I. leads to a better world or a worse one.