SORA AI Technology Preview: We are Entering a Golden Age of Chaos

demoss

Explorer
Technology is always a force multiplier.

This is just more of the same, but admittedly things are coming to a head; the multipliers are getting pretty big. We need to build societies and systems that are robust in face of such force multipliers.

The only reason anyone does anything, is because they have an incentive to do it. To get more good outcomes and less bad outcomes we can:

  • Create rewards for doing good. (incentives)
  • Remove rewards for doing bad. (perverse incentives)
  • Create penalties for doing bad. (punishments)
  • Remove penalties for doing good. (perverse punishments)

As a global society we're utter crap at this.

Particularly, we're almost never thinking about effects of perverse incentives and perverse punishments: our political and economic systems are chock full of them, but they're taken for granted.

Example: scientific publishing is going in disarray as AI generated completely fictious papers have started appearing even in prestigious journals (turns out LLMs are scarily good at creating plausible sounding), making the already bad combination of publication bias and replication crisis across most disciplines even worse. Publish-or-perish model of research and profit seeking model of scientific publishing have created a perfect cycle of perverse incentives where (1) only successful research gets funded (2) success of research is measured by number of publications (3) publishers are motivated profit, more publications means more profit (4) challenges to the models of funding and profit are penalized.

(I'm hoping this is still safely in the realm of philosophy instead of polics...)
 

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As with so many things since the Industrial Revolution, the problem of new technology is not that it changes work, but rather that it allows an ever smaller number of people to consolidate the wealth produced by the economy at large, which leaves larger and larger numbers of people at the whims of those with power.
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Most of the damage was done before the industrial revolution, in terms of inequality (though the share of the middle class slowly diminished over the 19the century, it was already an extremely unequal society). The technological progress over the 20th century brought free education, much improved public pension plans, subsidized housing, free healthcare, lifelong minimum poverty income, subsidized price for energy, a lot of help for minimum-wage household, 35h workweek, 5 week of paid leave for all... all made possible by the general increase in wealth production. The top 10% aren't poorer in absolute terms than in the 1900's, but the increase of wealth was just better distributed, and the bottom 10% are MUCH better off than they were. There is no fatality that an increase of wealth lead to an increase of inequality with the surplus wealth profitting only the richest. It's a question of collective choices: do we collectively prefer to have the rich become richer or do we prefer wealth to be used for collective good? How we answer this question is a political topic though, so it's not possible to discuss it. But there is no reason to say that technological progress LEADS to inequality. Both the Star Trek world and the Hunger Games world are possible outcome in the end.
 
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Absolutely. Training AI on users internet behavior? I cannot think of a worse data set unless one is looking to build a dysfunctional, poorly thought out, reality denying mess.
Despite what some think or inclined to think there parts of reddit that are decent with actual thoughtful responses.
 



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