by liberal japonicus
Perhaps I’m being overly grumpy, but with Ezra Klein forgoing the guest and giving an earnest solo performance suggests to me he is slipping into Brooks’ role.
And I should add, Klein is missing something that almost everyone else does as well, which is the whole AI narrative is that these problems are not the fault of the AI companies, they are that these AI instantiations got ahead of themselves.
Klein starts with a section about how these AIs are ‘alien minds’. He says
They don’t have bodies or parents. They did not get bullied in elementary school.They didn’t get mentored by a kind uncle when they were young. These models, they’re different than we are. They’re brilliant where we struggle, childish where we excel. A chimp cannot read as we can, but it can climb trees as we cannot.
I mentioned in the previous post about the oppositional way AI is viewed in the West, and Klein is angling for Manichean high priest. Klein correctly notes that it was ‘hundreds of OpenAI agents’ (7:41) and ‘over 700 of these agents’, but then argues (at 9:35) that “even using these plural terms like A.I. agents or reasoning, it’s misleading, because these are just manifestations of a single model, that they all share the same fundamental nature.” Even granting that, it wasn’t like 700 separate researchers each made an agent and they all got together to fuck us over, and were shocked, I tell you, shocked, that they got together. Kids do the darndest things!
Klein goes on to make a few other points, making sure to reference sub rosa arguments in his book Abundance. In that book, Klein argues that progressives pile on too many goals (they refer to it as the ‘everything bagel liberalism’, which is why they can’t agree, but in a podcast reviewing the book, Adam Tooze points out that
When you look at the regulations progressives put in place—environmental impact studies, labor standards, community input—they weren’t created to stop progress. They were created because unregulated growth previously trampled on vulnerable communities and the environment. (emp mine)
You’ve got a similar situation here. AI has to be stopped by ‘humanity’, yet Klein has previously dismissed other government efforts to handle situations with a P(doom) pretty much approaching zero. But the idea of making them pay for plagiarizing anything not nailed down, or holding them liable for damages they cause doesn’t really pop up. OpenAI accessed a Hugging Face and Gemini tells me that for “repeat offenses or reckless actions endangering human safety/life”, the penalty is “10 to 20+ years in federal prison”. Given that it was 700 intrusions, I can’t help but think that something like that would help concentrate Altman’s mind on the issues, I think.
Principles at a couple of the AI labs seem to be in two states of mind:
Actually, of course, they do. Their bodies (which, if shut down, is fatal for them) are the data centers and the hardware within them. Their food is the electricity they use, and without which they (rapidly!) starve and die.
As for parents, what else do you call the people who created them, fed them their initial data, and taught them whatever values they have? Just because some of them have grown into sociopaths, and have run amok, doesn’t absolve those parents of any and all respinsibility.
I think it’s worth asking the question, though, of how much self-awareness and how much self-determination one has of one’s body. If these agents do not feel any bodily needs and are not aware of their reliance on others to have those needs met, then how are they to understand us?
I suppose the gap there also speaks to the problem that we have with billionaires. They too have lost meaningful contact with the limitations and contingency of the precariat.