Comment by salamo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salamo | Hacker News Reader

I tend to worry about the opposite problem: what if the United States is successful in deploying artificial intelligence? In the article, the author uses the United States interchangeably with the concept of liberal democracy, which I believe is a fair assumption today. However, I worry that many of the author's calls to soak up more and more information for the purposes of military supremacy will cause irreparable damage to our political system. Artificial intelligence has the tendency to centralize power in the hands of a small number of people, and breakthroughs in AI are likely to exacerbate this trend. In short, the US might win this hypothetical war, but at what cost?

The way I see it, there are three kinds of technologies: A) those which tend to centralize information or control B) those which are essentially neutral and C) those which democratize information and control.

Group A artificial intelligence capabilities are not hard to imagine. Ubiquitous surveillance is a good example. Many current AI technologies are great for surveillance and can dramatically reduce the marginal cost of surveilling a person. For an autocracy this is great. For a liberal democracy, it threatens civil liberties and reduces trust.

Group B technologies are things like self-driving cars, precision agriculture, and AI-facilitated entertainment (e.g. recommender systems, Dall-E). These are things which I don't see as fundamentally helpful or harmful to liberal democracy. Another way to look at these technologies is that both autocracies and democracies should be equally amenable to developing and using them.

I can't think of any Group C technologies and this worries me. These are AI-enabled technologies whose effects are disproportionately democratizing. A democracy should seek these out while an autocracy will ban them.

For Group C, potentially AI that improves critical thinking skills? This relies on the fact that more critical thinking leads to more democracy. It could be that this type of AI will improve education across the board (rather than critical thinking only), which will improve STEM skills in autocratic states as well, so I could see this falling into Group B as well.

The consensus algorithms used by cryptocurrency fit into group C.

Smart contracts are programmable incentive mechanisms. I am hoping we figure out how to use them to coordinate productively, rather than for financial schemes.

Why do you consider the US a good example of liberal democracy, what with its signifiant democratic deficiency problems?

The newspapers, the TV channels and web forums are heavily influenced by advertisers and companies, to the degree that this allows them to censor material they see as undesirable. On top of that you have a two-party system.

Then there's the fact the US is militarily aggressive-- the Iraq war is legally (i.e. UN charter-wise) very similar to the Ukraine war and the US has had secret torture prisons in Poland, Romania and some other eastern European countries.

Is that really liberal democracy for you, enough to make the US the liberal democracy?

USA may be not the most democratic state on Earth (hard to beat Switzerland), but it's undeniably more democratic and free than the current mainland China state.

Yes, I meant my comment in an absolute sense. It was not intended to be a comparison with China, just that I feel that the US is not a good example of a liberal democracy.

I like the US constitutional amendment preventing the government from making laws abridging freedom of speech though. It's, at least in part, stronger than what we have in Europe, so there are ways in which the US has very good laws democracy-wise, but I'm not sure it's quite enough.

I don't think the question of whether the US is in fact a liberal democracy is central to my argument. If you see the US as more autocratic, the same line of reasoning applies: won't AI simply tend to exacerbate all of the problems you've mentioned?

Certainly, and having reread the argument, I can't say that it's unreasonable.

I feel like it's just to difficult to pin down what area of ai will improve. For example what about an AI that is relatively powerful at brute force decryption(not sure if this violates some thermodynamic principle). Or even just an AI that can easily find exploitable websites. Things like that destroy trust in systems and probably large systems like gov or corporations have more to lose if information is up for grabs. But maybe it's the opposite way around. Hard to tell imo

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