Article  Eat your AI slop or China wins

#1
C C Offline
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...china-wins

BLURB: The new cold war means a race with China over AI, biotech, and more. This poses a hard dilemma: win by embracing technologies that make us more like our enemy — or protect ourselves from tech dehumanization but become subjects to a totalitarian menace...

INTRO: In “Darwin Among the Machines,” a letter to an editor published in 1863, the English novelist Samuel Butler observed with dread how the technology of his time was degrading humanity. “Day by day,” he wrote, “the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them.” For the ironical Butler, the solution was simple: kill the machines. “War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.”

In his later novel Erewhon, Butler imagined a people who take his advice and smash their machines — the inspiration for the “Butlerian Jihad” in Frank Herbert’s Dune. But to make his central conceit plausible, by the loose rules governing a Victorian satire, Butler had to drop the society of Erewhon in the middle of “nowhere” (an anagram of the name), in a remote valley cut off from the rest of the world. The Erewhonians, Butler recognized, would never have survived centuries of Luddism anywhere else: they would have vanquished the machines only to be vanquished by an antagonist lacking their technological caution. In the real world, Butler suggests, we face a choice: Will you preserve your humanity or your security?

This may be just the choice we face today. From Washington, D.C. to Silicon Valley, champions of new technologies often argue, with good reason, that we must embrace them because, if we don’t, the Chinese will — and then where will we be?

Driven by geopolitical pressures to accelerate technological development, particularly in AI and biotech, we seem to have two options: channeling innovation toward humane ends or protecting ourselves against competitors abroad.

To appreciate the difficulty of this choice, we should take a page from military theorists who have wrestled with what is known as the “security dilemma.” Even though it is one of the most important concepts in international relations, it has been given little attention by those grappling with the promises and challenges of new technologies. But we should, because when we apply its core insights to technological development, we realize that achieving a prosperous human future will be even more difficult than we tend to think... (MORE - details)
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#2
Syne Offline
As soon as I read "Samuel Butler observed with dread how the technology of his time was degrading humanity," I thought of Dune. Never knew that was the inspiration.
Thanks, CC.

Like nuclear weapons, you can develop tools and weapons and not use them. We can develop AI, but nothing says we have to use it so much ourselves that we get dumbed down. Granted, part of the motivation for AI advancement is commercial applications. But we do have half of the population with below average intelligence.
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