The First Thing: Artificial Intelligence
The first thing to know about artificial intelligence (AI) is that intelligence is good, and that we need more of it. “Artificial Intelligence is neither artificial, nor intelligent,” a news reporter said. That now spoken aloud, the second thing to know about AI is that the term “Artificial Intelligence” is a misnomer: it is less of a sentient computer network cheerfully scheduling happy robots eager to snap to human demands than it is a software developer’s tool kit (DTK). AI is an umbrella term for software and protocols (a “tool kit”) that can generate digital results using algorithms (equations in code) and raw data. One of the most important tools in the AI “toolkit” is the software that closely approximates learning from large-scale data collections (like the personal data of every person on earth, for example). You should also know that almost all of the technologies that make up today’s AI systems are actually relatively old, and not particularly new technologies.
So if big business, big advertising, and evil nation-states have been using AI for years, what’s this “existential threat” stuff the tech companies have been wringing our hands over? What new developments make AI particularly dangerous at this particular moment in time?
What’s changed is the scale of raw computing power available for a fraction of the cost per byte of a decade ago. With today’s bare-metal hypervisors running parallel virtual machines on parallel servers, today’s AI-grade computing power is cheap to buy, lease, or license; that is to say, the raw computing power — enough to run a virtual reality (VR) program for every profile in the population of an entire nation — is a product corporations will lease. Get yours today cheap from Amazon Cloud and get an AI Licence from Microsoft! Because AI is now cost-effective, it’s my belief that the Big Tech Corporations are simply trying to bluff and bluster their way to an industry takeover at taxpayer expense by scaring the public into believing that AI is too dangerous to allow anyone except Google and Microsoft to develop it. Since their nerds “understand” AI and you don’t, their companies will have to restrict development of AI to …themselves? …because their nerds “understand” AI and neither your eighty-five year old Senator nor the idiots Red States keep sending to Congress understand AI …well, that’s a shame, because if they can’t do it, then Bill Gates, Google, and the rest of the tech pirates will have to write the legislation, too. Their legislation will effectively give them a monopoly over whatever they arbitrarily define as “Artificial Intelligence” …all while safely regulating it, of course.
To recap the bullet points:
Corporations now have access to almost unlimited cheap computing power. They own the personal information on almost every person on the planet, and they have psychological profiles to go with the data. They think they’re sitting on a gold mine, so they’re following their instincts: Those same instincts they used to pirate the technologies that made them rich in the first place.
The fact that AI is good for big corporations, but probably bad for you and me most of the time means that AI is here to stay. The Tech Giants will develop, regulate, and administer AI-based applications to you and me, like it or not. They will smother entire populations with the most insidious, manipulative crap imaginable. Given the conditions, AI MegaBusinesses will probably support an autocrat for president, so while It’s true that AI will change things for most people …I’m willing to bet the farm you’re not going to like it.