Rainy Day Thoughts on AI

A week ago I posted this here, on Mastodon, and on LinkedIn:

In his essay on Salvador Dali, Orwell argued that because Dali was a repulsive human being, the right wouldn’t admit that he was a great artist; conversely, because he was a great artist, the left wouldn’t admit he was a repulsive human being. I’m seeing the same thing with AI: because it’s unethical, one side won’t acknowledge that it’s useful, but because it’s useful, the other side won’t acknowledge that it’s unethical.

The responses have depressed me a bit, though to be fair, I’ve felt that way pretty much since I was laid off last October. Comments have gone like this:

AI isn’t really intelligence.

Yes, thank you, we know.

AI isn’t useful.

Thoughtful, intelligent people like Simon Willison, Jon Udell, Stefan Arentz, Sue Smith, and Sadie Lewis believe it lets them to do things in hours that would otherwise take days, or that they wouldn’t be able to do at all. I don’t think they’re easily fooled or lying to me.

How can you call something “useful” if it is (accelerating the climate crisis, causing cognitive decline, destroying jobs, etc.)?

Something can be useful and harmful; the question is whether the benefits outweigh the harms, and for whom. We decided “no” for DDT and CFCs but “yes” for long-haul flights, except that’s not exactly true: what actually happened was that by the time we realized how harmful jet emissions are to the climate, people were hooked.

“Arguing that AI is unethical is a fringe belief at this point, analogous to believing (in reverse chronological order) that social media, the internet, computers, mass media, industrialization, or electricity are unethical.”

Someone left that comment on my LinkedIn post. Setting aside the question of whether anyone ever actually claimed that using electricity was unethical, I don’t know how anyone can believe that actually existing AI isn’t. It is built on theft, dramatically accelerates the spread of disinformation and bias, further concentrates power in the hands of super-rich sociopaths, and, well, look at the list in the previous heading.

We’ll adapt just like we did to [name of previous industrial revolution].

Would you swap places with a Victorian factory worker circa 1850? Would you want your children to swap places with theirs? Didn’t think so. And if you really believe AI is going to usher in an era of prosperity so far-reaching that people won’t have to work unless they want to, put your money where your mouth is right now and implement UBI.

One person choosing not to use AI won’t make any difference.

Yes, and one raindrop won’t wear away a mountain. As Rieder argues in Catastrophe Ethics, you don’t have to do everything all the time, but that’s no excuse for choosing to do nothing.

It’s too big/too late to stop.

Bullshit. We got rid of lead in gasoline, asbestos in our walls, and a host of carcinogenic food additives I grew up with despite fierce opposition from people who were profiting from them. Society has reined in the powerful many times in the past; it has never been easy or perfect, but it can be done, and arguing otherwise only helps those who want to avoid accountability.

So what should I do here and now?

Refuse to use AI and tell others not to either.

I don’t believe people are going to stop using AI any more than I believe they’re suddenly going to stop smoking. Choosing this path therefore feels like choosing to be righteous but ineffective; I’ve been down that road before, and it has always proven sterile.

Wait for the bubble to burst and people to come to their senses.

I’ve been waiting for this for 18 months. I still believe it’s coming, but that doesn’t tell me what to do while I wait or when it does. It also doesn’t distinguish between the (repugnant) people and companies currently playing a trillion-dollar shell game and the technology that will be left behind when they implode.

Try to find ethical variants of the technology and encourage others to use them.

I always thought I’d get back into teaching when I retired, but I honestly don’t know what to say to a young programmer today about how to build software or how to get started in their career. Books like Miles’ The Sovereign Engineer offer answers, but aren’t evidence-based and ignore the ethical questions entirely. How to Not Be Wrong About AI is an attempt to address the former issue, but so far nobody’s been interested. (As one person said to me, everyone currently falls into one of three camps: “I know it works so I don’t need proof”, “I know it doesn’t work so I don’t need proof”, and “My CEO has mandated it so I don’t want proof”.)

Campaign to make AI companies legally accountable for the harm they do.

I believe that cognitive pollution is the best model to use for regulating social media and AI, and courts in the US may finally be starting to hold big tech companies liable for the damage their deliberately-addictive products do. I’d love to see more of this; I just don’t know what I can contribute, or how.

The truth is, the double whammy of being laid off just a few weeks after my daughter moved out for university has left me floundering at a time when both the tech industry and society as a whole seem to be doing the same. I could focus on the organizational change and project closure workshops, but working on them makes me feel like I’m avoiding the biggest thing to happen in tech in my lifetime. I could try sneaking into random labs in Toronto in the middle of the night and fixing their software for them, but the beneficiaries would probably just assume some rogue AI had done it.

Time for another cup of tea. If you came in peace, be welcome.