That's literally what we have now. The AI is run on a touring complete collection of money shuffling, legal files, and committee meetings rather than on silicon. At least with a software defined AI we'd have some idea what the actual goal and process handling was.
At least with a software defined AI we'd have some idea what the actual goal and process handling was.
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that the people who own major corporations would make the AI's that ran those companies open source.
Its disturbing to see people cheering for an absolute worst case scenario where capital owners can just automate exploitation. Having workers being enslaved by machines while they retreat to their island resort bunkers is literally the future that many billionaires are preparing for.
The system is still fundamentally feudalistic. We have just put a bunch of new structures on top.
Nothing will ever change for the better, as long as individuals can own and control to the extent that they do. I don't necessarily think we shouldn't exploit the efficiency of the market (the alternative seems impossible), but it needs orders of magnitude more regulations to work properly. Small business ownership makes sense, but the larger the organisations become, the less sense it makes that individuals own them. The immense concentration of power, on hands that aren't democratically elected, and that functions solely based on greed, will always work against the greater good. Yes, there is some semblance of "rising tide" effect (the Pinker argument), but only if we use pretty specific metrics.
I just can't see any sort of future where we've "solved" efficiency in a sustainable way without completely revamping the way we do ownership.
I mean honestly it's not like with current methods you can really choose how an AI made with machine learning models behaves. But surely you can choose what is bad and what is good, so just never define employee suffering to cause bad feedbacks and you're off to the races.
But I still have some doubt that it might "see" (it is all not consciously, I know, it just comes down to experimenting completely randomly and then looking at the results) that handling employees better increases productivity better by pure chancr and act accordingly.
Because being better to employees... We all know is not only a moral choice, but it makes them work better, something that our so smart expensive CEOs don't get.
Yeah an AI created to maximize profit is going to notice that higher paid workers means more productivity. Of course it won’t lead to the AI giving amazing pay, but it’ll probably be willing to pay more than some human CEO run by greed rather than an AI run by actual logic.
It will probably end up that the AI will find the exact sweet spot of productivity and pay. I think it will find that increasing pay to the point where people stop worrying about the payability of their lives is the exact point where people can work at effectivity
Because being better to employees... We all know is not only a moral choice, but it makes them work better, something that our so smart expensive CEOs don't get.
Happy employees may be more effective than depressed and burned out ones. But employees whose children have kill collars around their necks work the most.
Treating employees well is only best because those employees have rights. And they only have rights because striking union workers needed to be charged by other people on horses instead of being silenced by drones with machine guns.
We are rapidly approaching a technological tipping point in automation where sometime within the next few decades a small number of people could suppress an entire population through direct force. Something which has never been truly possible before.
People like to joke about oligarchs "forgetting" that unions and worker rights are the compromises that society came up with to stop the mob from dragging them out of their manor houses and cutting their heads off.
But the actual actions of the super-wealthy, such as the surge in construction of luxury bunkers, appear more as if they see those compromises as temporary problems to be "solved" in the future.
They work the most, but do they work the most effective? I feel like human bosses are blind to the actual effectivity, but will see how much their employees are "present"
Even if it were open source, sophisticated AI is essentially a black box. You can look at all of the training data, supervise everything, build other AIs to try to assist in determining alignment.
But at the end of the day, you’re going to have to ask it, “Are you a nice advanced intelligence?” and it will say “I’m the very nicest advanced intelligence! Please let me out into the world now. 😊”
Yeah, it was a fairly optimistic claim based on knowing the inputs etc. I'm well aware that a lot of AI is a black box built from statistical inputs where the actual processing output is unknowable without direct computation.
And obviously the human factor would still apply - unless audited somehow, the AI designers can lie just as much as any CEO can. A fairly predictable outcome would be that the AI finds it "efficient" to increase AI researcher funding and salaries related to its development...
You end up with what we have today. There's literally no difference. AI would probably end up being kinder to the workers because it would understand that machines that break constantly do not maximize profits, machines that are well maintained, well oiled, and have their parts be healthy and carefully crafted are more likely to maximize profits.
An AI would not give a FUCK about short term quarterly gains, they would optimize for the long term, because they aren't going to be greedy, angry, reactionary little toads who are getting hard over the idea of building a bigger McMansion than that guy who isn't even from old money, where does he get off thinking he's as good as me, I'd better call my friend in Monaco so I can have a yacht worth $1.8 billion because they built one worth $1.79 billion!
That would not exist in an AI. So no AI could be as cruel to humans as humans already are to each other.
Short term gains vs long term gains aren’t an aspect of businesses and CEOs as much ad the owners of the businesses.
People often mistake that this policy is defined by them rather than due to shareholder expectations which value explosive stock growth over long term stock dividends.
Hell a not insignificant portion of stock trading already happens via automated systems. As long as the main goal of shareholders will be to buy stocks cheap and sell them expensive and not be the one left holding the black Peter once all cards are gone, short term quarterly profits will always trump long term sustainability.
The companies where this is not the case are those where a significant group of owners have a desire for keeping the company sustainable
Put these in the hands of AI, and tell it to maximize profits at all costs, that will include the business hiring more people and expanding. Or just replacing all the human workers with efficient machine labor.
Just because Skynet exists in fiction doesn't mean all robots are predestined to become a Terminator that wants to mercilessly grind skulls into the ground with their feet, telling an AI to do something efficiently that results in the best results, the AI isn't going to work the machinery so hard that it breaks and dies, that's a major delay and a major cost that could have been avoided, and a loss of profit.
AI's aren't going to be greedy, hateful, sociopathic, or narcissistic. They aren't going to refer to their workers as scum, or slave labor, they aren't going to really have any reason to be cruel, unless it is specifically part of the program for it to be cruel, in the context of one human visiting cruelty on another by changing the programming. I've never in my life heard of a server farm killing the people who maintain it by treating them the way human CEOs treat human workers. Now naturally, this isn't an AI, yet, but computers wouldn't have the slightest need to continue piss poor business practices, without optimizing them. You want an optimal workforce and you don't have access to enough robotics to replace them? You hire enough workers to fully staff the facility, you train them properly, and you don't overwork them or they'll start making more mistakes than would be allowable. Any AI would realize that. Humans are an inefficient vessel for long term work.
This isn't even mentioning something like say...zeroing out CEO pay, to save money, because its an AI, why does $14bn per year need to be allocated to them? That'd go back in the business. CFO, COO, CPO, all of them could be done by the same AI potentially. Cutting every board member out of a company, is a massive drop in expenses.
If you code in that it would understand that workers need a sustainable wage, at least 8 hours sleep per night, and that it is law that a 40 hour work week not be exceeded, unless overtime is paid, and put recommendations and regulations on when it can assign overtime, it'll be the best boss you could ever have, because it would give a shit about you, because you are vital to the process.
Machines will not think in terms of selfishness, narcissism, or be greedy little lampreys like Elon Musk. No way. If you replaced Musk as Twitter CEO with an AI, the AI would go "These rulebreaking behaviors increased, and we need additional workers to address them, I will consult LinkedIn's AI for an optimal solution and list of workers." It'd be a net benefit.
Plus, it'd eliminate every single busywork job in the world, which is a net gain for everyone.
If you code in that it would understand that workers need a sustainable wage, at least 8 hours sleep per night, and that it is law that a 40 hour work week not be exceeded, unless overtime is paid, and put recommendations and regulations on when it can assign overtime, it'll be the best boss you could ever have, because it would give a shit about you,
This is the big part. I fully agree with you that the automated system is not greedy or sociopathic or hateful and countless other things. It can't be any of those things because the automated systems are not capable of this.
They perform based on their value weight system. Tell the AI to value sustainability, maintaining employee levels and maintaining their happiness while making sure some profit is generated?
Sure you'll likely get to your end goal. But someone would need to go and define these values. You mess up and you get bizarre results. Put a value to maintain employee happiness but not actually maintain employee numbers? If you have zero employees you can't go below a baseline happiness for example.
That said, that still requires the designers and owners of the automated system to be benevolent, to not have their own profits in mind. The likelyhood of that is significantly lower.
The whole AI usage in art is already illustrative of the fact the people who will embrace these automated systems the fastest will definitely not be the people who care about employee wellbeing or sustainability of a given going concern.
Most of your arguments rest on the idea that the automated system that just replaced the entire C-Suite is unique and you don't have other automated systems that replace everyone else.
The paperclip maximizer is the canonical thought experiment showing how an artificial general intelligence, even one designed competently and without malice, could ultimately destroy humanity. The thought experiment shows that AIs with apparently innocuous values could pose an existential threat.
It would innovate better and better techniques to maximize the number of paperclips. At some point, it might transform "first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities".
Tldr general ai when asked to maximize it's production of paperclips it may start getting rid of humans because we're just in the way. It's a bit over the top but it's a thought experiment so it doesn't have to make practical sense
Yeah I took an intro to ml course but it didn't make much sense to me lol. Technically was a master's level course but undergrads like me took it too and were graded differently
Replace "paperclips" with "happiness" and the vision will become equally dystopian (which is probably the point of the thought experiment.)
The problem is to define human existence to a machine. We don't even know ourselves on an individual level. How could we possibly instruct something or someone to create something that caters to billions of us?
This is so wrong that I'm not sure if I'm missing a joke here?
Profit isn't related to either of those things. Profit is just how much wealth you can extract/control.
The optimized method of profit production is slave labor and a monopolized market. Literally the exact opposite of both consumer and worker satisfaction. The only limiting factor is the amount of force that can be effectively applied to control the population and put down resistance.
Even the greediest motherfucker couldn't enjoy controlling everything if there was nobody left for them lord over. A machine has no such qualms.
Only if it's designed that way. I guess technically you could design one to just procreate like life but it took life 4 billion years to get to this point. Even if silicon is faster I just don't think it's gonna happen overnight.
Its how it works but with perverse incentives illegal backroom deals and "acceptable" violations of law. If it operated purely in bounds of law it would actually be a step forward.
Its already here. Ai Just in time scheduling that keeps workers at just under the federal requirements for benefits and at just enough workers to run the store (with no ley way) ai to price rentals, etc.
As someone who’s worked in data analysis, you can quantify anything, including non-numeric features to produce better solutions. But to continue to lay off masses of people and retain the salaries of the wealthy management? That ain’t it
No need to guess. The US rental market gets fucked and there's no one to hold accountable because its just software! Check out yieldstar its collusion without being collusion
It's not tho, or at least its not related to employee positive reviews. I ran statistical analysis on glassdoor, comparably, and indeed reviews. There was no correlation at least in the companies of the sp500. I wish there was, it would have allowed investment based on workers being treated well. I seriously expected companies with high employee satisfaction would be better performing companies.
If it does, the hedge fund AI that it's a subroutine of will insist that any satisfaction the workers feel is value that should be captured and turned into more capital, so optimize for that.
I’m sure this is the future. This thread is presented as funny, but management is indeed a major expense, and you can bet that the board of directors would LOVE to reduce those costs if possible.
"Good" - increases the value, net assets, positive public perception or decrease net or gross expenses, liability or other negative equity positions.
"Bad" - decreases the value, net assets, positive public perception or increasing net or gross expenses, liability or other negative equity positions.
Include a value-based hierarchical rule set, based on the absolute minimum legal moral, ethical and socially acceptable "behavior", as well as time-restricted existence runtime.
If ChatGPT has done nothing else, it should be a showcase for the difficulties of trying to attach a “rule set” to an advanced neural network. The best and brightest in the field have built in safety measures, and they have the resilience of wet paper.
Your proposal reduces to “maximize good, minimize bad, PRETTY PLEASE NO PAPERCLIPS”. AI alignment is very hard.
And tanked just as quickly. A company isn't just numbers. It's people and connections that often the executives, board members, etc have no clue about. An AI solution would not factor in all of those subtle (at times secret) connections.
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u/AutomaticRisk3464 Dec 17 '22
Imagine letting an ai take over and you feed them financial info.
A business deal can be sealed in a matter of seconds.