AI Won't Make our System Better

I riff off some of my thoughts on Artifical Intelligence and what I think the path ahead will be with it's development and implications in the world.

Transcript

Russell: Alright, and we're back. Russell here with the Canadian Conservative, thecanadianconservative Substac.com, and you can also find me on Twitter, the only social media platform I use at thecanadiancon. And today I want to talk a little bit about artificial intelligence and why I think that artificial intelligence is actually not going to be that good for us now. Back in the early 80s or so, when computing really started to take off, we were told that computers were going to make our lives easier, we were going to be able to have more time to hang around with family, to create things, and that computers would take care of some of the more difficult aspects. And I'm sure in some occupations computers have been amazing, but the reality is with computers, people have never, in my opinion, been more miserable than before. You only have to look at social media and see the social engineering and the manufacturing of consent that goes on on social media to see where things have gone wrong with the use of computers and interconnectedness. While we struggle to find community in our actual physical communities, we find our communities online. And it's even evolved away from online forums and really into hyperpartisan, hyper political social media spaces. Until recently, with Twitter and Getter and a couple of other parlor and a couple of other platforms, social media has become very tightly controlled and so certain narratives can be talked about. Certain things can be spread on social media, and other things are not allowed to be talked about or so heavily censored that you don't even need to ban them. Just no one ever sees the content. The liberal government recently with Bill C Eleven where they enabled user generated content to be regulated. And I highly anticipate with the failures of the CRTC to actually do anything for Canadian consumers in the marketplace. Not that they should, the free market should reign above all else. I highly anticipate that when they fail to rein in any of the big social media giants, that they'll start going after user generated content as a low hanging fruit. I have no faith whatsoever in the CRTC to actually help Canadian content creators push their content out if it actually ends up happening. And who knows, maybe they'll be forced to push my content out more and then maybe I'll have a different opinion. Most likely though, I'm going to be pessimistic. I am pessimistic by nature and say that it's not going to happen anyways. We have entered into this paradigm now with computers where your boss can reach out to you at any time and get a hold of you, to talk to you family members you might not want to talk to all the time. They can just text you anytime and it's become this accepted invasion of our privacy. I think why people don't like answering the phone and prefer text messages now is because they don't want to be forced to interact with people. I don't think it's become a fear of talking to people on the phone. I think it's a method of natural control. Listen, text me and then I'll decide if I want to text you back, what time I want to text you back, or if I'm going to put it on ignore for now. But technology has just made us work harder. We're working far more hours now. We're more connected than ever. Emails are sent instantly back and forth in businesses, the stock market, trading. Everything is so automated and there's so much oversight over our lives now that I believe that we've advanced probably too quickly and we don't really understand the overall implications of what has occurred. I'm willing to go even as far as looking at things like the exposure of people to pornography. It's so rampant and available online that we haven't even begun to discover what that means for us as a species in our society as well now. I mean, pornography has been available for a very long time, but it's so instantly available now, and there's so little safeguards around it. And now we have AI added into the mix. Artificial intelligence, chat, GBT, all the other kind of rip offs, mid journey AI for making art. AI is here, and I don't think it's actually a good thing. I think it's advancing too quickly under these megacorporations controls, and we don't have the safety valves necessary if things go off kilter. I would highly recommend that if you haven't it's not a long read, and you can listen to it for free on YouTube that you listen to. I have no mouth and I must scream. It is probably the most depressing depiction of humanity and artificial intelligence ever written. It is a book of no hope. It is about an artificial intelligence that gains sentience, and it hates humanity, it hates us with a fervor, unbelieved and unknown prior, and it basically keeps a group of humans alive as ragtag torture puppets for it. I won't say anymore, but I highly recommend that you check it out. Do I think this is necessarily the future? Who knows? But AI could easily end up like the plot determinator. It could the Matrix, these are all realities that can occur when we have artificial intelligence, and there could be realities that are beyond our wildest horrors. What I figure is most likely to occur when artificial intelligence gets to a certain point is that our society is going to fracture and it's going to look very similar to the plot of Elysium. That is where I think we're headed towards, is the plotline of Elysium now, without all the special effects and all that sort of stuff. What I'm talking about is a society of hyper technology within an elitist sphere. There will be a group of elites. They will retreat, probably not to some substation in space, but probably an area on the planet, and all of us. The rest of us will be using AI and technology to manufacture comforts for those people. We're already doing it on a lower scale. The phone that you own, so much of what you own is made by slave labor. That EV car that everyone's driving saying I'm being environmentally sound and I'm being the hipster here, probably mined coal bolt by children and open pit mines in some third world country with no laws to protect people. But that's okay. We're in North America. We just stay ignorant of those things. We want the cost of things to remain low, and so we just continue to farm out our jobs and our economy to other countries where they exploit children and slave labor and stuff like that. And it's all promoted by the neoliberals. And so that's where I think we're headed. I think we're headed for a society within maybe one or two more generations, depending on how advanced AI gets and what that does for technology, where the elites will simply consolidate their power. They'll go to an area where they are going to flourish in standards that are unbelievable, wealth unimaginable. Well, we will be left to toil in servitude. They won't call it that. We'll still have our phony elections. We'll still have the illusion of freedom, choice, and safety as long as we continue to manufacture goods to supply to these people. And so I think we need to really ask ourselves, what type of future are we building right now? There's a lot of fervor online, that's for sure. Lots of people, including myself, lots of things to say online. But what are we doing in our communities to make things better? What are we doing community wise, community building? As conservatives, what are we conserving? That's another question we need to ask ourselves. As AI advances, as these things rapidly take hold. What are we conserving? And are we conserving things of value and things that are going to enable future generations to have good times like we've enjoyed? Anyways, that's just my thoughts on AI and kind of the AI sphere and kind of what's going on right now in the world. It's kind of a little pessimistic, I know, a little black pilled, but I don't think it's over. People say, oh, we're already in dystopian hellscape. I disagree. You look at stuff like 1984 and v for Vendetta and things like that, and if they truly had one, then we wouldn't still have some culture, and you wouldn't be able to just go and kick your feet up on your chair and watch the hockey game, watch the Leafs play, or whatever your favorite hockey team is. You wouldn't be able to do that if they had complete control, you wouldn't be able to still produce content and put it out on the Internet itself. If they had complete control, if they had complete control, those things just simply would not be available to you. And you look at the countries that have been under authoritarian rule, those things just simply were not available. So we're not there yet and that's why the propaganda is that powerful, they need the propaganda. If it was hopeless, then they wouldn't be pushing the propaganda so much. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Yet again, Russell here from the Canadian Conservative. Thecanadianconservative substac.com, that's my website. And just a final reminder that all my content is independent. So that means I think up the topics, do a little bit of research and then I kind of script things out a bit before finally courting editing and pushing out to the world. And so if you enjoy my stuff, I do have subscription service, I don't push it on people, I really try not to. You could subscribe at my substac, which is my website. All right, that's everything. Thanks everyone.