this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
38 points (73.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43968 readers
1198 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No way is AI going to end capitalism.
In the medium term we will end up with AI corporations. I already consider existing corporations to be human-based swarm intelligences -- they're made up of people but their overall large scale behavior is often surprising and we already anthropomorphize them as having will and characteristic behaviors separate from the people they're made of. AI corporations are just the natural evolution of existing corporations as they continue down the path of automation. To the extent they copy the existing patterns of behavior, they will have the same general personality.
Their primary motive will be maximizing profit since that's the goal they will inherit from the existing structure. The exact nature of that depends on the exact corporation that's been fully cyberized and different corporations will have different takes on it as a result. They are unlikely to give any more of a damn about individual people than existing corporations do since they will be based on the cyberization of existing structures, but they're also unlikely to deliberately go out of their way to destroy humanity either. From the perspective of a corporation -- AI-based or traditional -- humanity is a useful resource that can be exploited; there isn't much profit to be gained from wiping it out deliberately.
Instead of working for the boss, you'll be working for the bot -- and other bots will be figuring out exactly how much they can extract from you in rent and bills and fees and things without the whole system crashing down.
That might result in humanity getting wiped out accidentally; humanity has wiped out plenty of species due to greed and shortsightedness. I doubt it will be intentional if they do though.
In a lot of ways that sounds worse
This may be something that prevents us from being wiped out by AI in the medium term. You can't maximize profits if you have no customers.
I suspect, however, that AI is going to impact us in ways most people haven't considered. Like, the IRS running an AI designed to close loopholes or otherwise minimize sidestepping leading to a war between corporate AIs trying to minimize corporate taxes, with individual taxpayers caught in the middle. Congresscritters will start using AI to do the bulk work of legislation; congress will meet for 3 days a year, and we'll see a bunch of bizarre and even more baroque legislation being passed. All the stuff people are worried about - job loss, murder warbots - will be footnotes under some far more impactful changes noone imagined.
Thatβs the one kind of thing Congress will be able to agree to outlaw.