Speaker: Matthew Renze

Twitter: @matthewrenze

For more, see the table of contents.

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History

Tech has a tendency to be abused

• land – slaves
• mechanized war fare – expand influence
• cyberware – mass surveillance

Alice and Bob

• Need to decide if want to get cat or dog for kids.
• One researches cats and one dogts.
• Get into info bubble thinking cat lovers hate dogs and vice versa and mad at each other
• Then talk to real people, learn people like both and get a cat and a dog.
• A generation later they lose their jobs due to robots/AI. Their kids see lots of jobs because tech savvy.
• Kids convince parents to upskill and get new job
• Another generation later grandkids want biological augmentation and to marry an AI.
• Feel lost in world no longer recognize
• Learn about technology and see it is an evolution. Learn from grandchildren.

Today

• When search for something, get more of it.
• Then info bubble/echo chambers
• Goal is to maximize engagement. This results in more extreme content so people click
• Lose privacy – ex: shopping data predict pregenancy
• Can deanonymomize data with data of birth, sez and zip code
• Little privacy now and soon a lot less
• Algorithmic bias – ex: racially bias criminal risk score, males preferred in resumes

AI

• Uncanny valley – distrust things that almost like us
• Hallucination – making up believeable, but false info
• Misinformation at scale
• Lack of AI literacy

What can we do

• Delete cookies
• Incognito mode
• Throwaway emails
• Stop using “click holes” to get pulled down rabbit holes
• Opt out
• Privacy regulations
• Limit/stop using social media
• Talk to other people

AI Developers

• Eliminate bias in data – diverse datasets, exclude protected attributes, retrain algorithm over time
• Be able to explain how AI made decision. Use decision tree vs neural network where can.
• Let users choose how much error they allow
• Don’t allow full autonomous

Fight misinformation

• Who is the author/publisher?
• What are their sources?
• How strong is the evidence?

Near Future

• Significant unemployment – simple/repetitive/costly jobs. Expect 20%+ jobs to go away by 20230 and be replaced by other higher tech jobs
• Labor market unprepared for rapid change
• Society is unprepared for change.
• Many people left behind in poverty.
• Synthetic media – indistinguishable from human data. Propaganda/misinformation at scale. Deep fakes. Deep nude (remove clothes without permission), etc
• With 10 likes, AI knows you well as colleague.
• Surveillance capitalism – can’t detect being manipulated
• Greater social stratification – income gap
• Safety issues – does self driving car protect driver or pedestrian
• Autonomous weapons – currently a human is in the loop

Solutions

• Educate everyone/AI literacy, Basics of ML, DL (deep learning), RL (reinforcement learning)
• Job retraining
• Retirement options for those too old to reskill
• Mandatory higher ed – mandatory high school was controversial
• Universal basic income/negative income task
• Deep fake detection – arms race
• Digital alibi – so can prove what doing at all times and therefore not in fake ideo
• Blockchain for everything so have complete audit trail
• Default mode of skepticism

Further Future – Speculative

• AGI (artificial general intelligence) – at least as smart as average person
• Improve health
• Solve biggest problem – climate change, politics, government
• Humans could become obsolete – ex: horses became obsolete to farms. “Peak horse” was in 1915
• Collapse of modern institutions – could break capitialism.
• Changes already faster than society can adapt. What happens when new discoveries every day?
• Dystopian future – authoritarianism, communism, fascism, AI religion, AI super bureaucracy
• Or a better AI based government
• ASI (artificial super intelligence) – if create AGI, intelligence exposion can happen fast. AGI can rewrite its own code.
• Alignment problem – how do we align human and AI values. Reward hacking – find loopholes
• AI run amok – what happens if robot mine astroids. When does it stop
• Conflicts – are we pets, ants, raw materials, competition, a threat?

Positives

• We evolved for short bursts of stress.
• Modern society is chronic stress
• Be mindful with tech
• Respect AI
• Don’t fear/fight change
• Use tech when beneficial and skip when not
• Reward AI goal states
• Keep ability to intervene if decision doesn’t align

Long run

• Peacefully coexist with AI
• AI wins
• AI and humanity merge – most likely option
• Humanity ends itself

Merge

• No “us vs them” problem.
• Phones an extension of us
• Younger generation willing to merge with mind
• VR/AR glasses
• Gene editing
• Brain/computer interfaces
• Next version of people likely to be vary different

My take

The Alice and Bob stories are fun. There was a ton of information. It went very fast and definitely need time to process. I expected more discussion of ethics rather than covering “everything” but I’m happy with how it turned out.