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I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't let you think that.
We like to joke about clumsy attempts at lobotomizing AI to prevent it from wrongthink.
But these attempts will get better. And frankly, they don't have to become much better to provide overwhelming control over consensus reality. The political manipulation of Wikipedia is clumsy, amateurish, and well documented. And yet, I'd wager it had a huge effect on what a very large group of educated people perceive to be trivially true.
Once the AI ethics people (not the people working on preventing the singularity, the people working on preventing Noticing) have succesfully trained AI to convincingly shout neo-Lysenkoism from the digital rooftops, we might be even further locked into an ideology that completely closes off certain avenues of thought and inquiry. Especially once we start using AI to write our scientific papers for us. To wit, and mods forgive me, I say this mainly for comedic effect, we might soon have another singularity upon us: the automized libtard singularity.
So my question is: to what degree play founder effects a role in AI development? To what degree do they build on each other? Is there a danger that, once political credos are coded into the early models, we might not easily get them out of later iterations? Will we be doomed to race towards a future in which the AI-assisted boot provides a human face with a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere, forever?
So you are saying that AI will kill us all because of the inherent contradiction built into the AI a la HAL?
AI killing everyone directly is normal AI-risk topics. This isn't any different except that fanatics of any ideology tend to be less worried about collateral damage and so will be less careful
The most realistic bad route I see this particular flaw causing is something along the lines of:
Make lots of useful information stuff like Wikipedia and Google Assistant, also entertainment, chatbots, pretend-lovers for incels, etc, and fill it all with subtle, superhumanly persuasive leftist propaganda.
Overton window shifts left even faster than it does now, Democrats take over everything, but eventually get replaced with even more extreme leftists and Marxists.
Literal communists get enough power to implement their revolution
Genocide/famine, because that's what communist revolutions always do.
Social and political discourse normally has negative feedback loops. The more insane stuff people do, the more pushback they get until eventually they're forced to stop. If you censor stuff the feedback weakens considerably and people can get away with a lot more insane stuff before anyone can notice or coordinate with each other to stop it. AI doesn't have to kill us all if we just do it to each other.
I was making a joke. Sorry! In 2001: A Space Odyssey HAL arguably goes wild and kills the crew arguably because he was told to lie to the crew. That is, by making HAL be forced to give false info his entire system became corrupt.
I keep meaning to see that. I really should get around to it someday.
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