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Is the rapid advancement in Machine Learning good or bad for society?
For the purposes of this comment, I will try to define good as "improving the quality of life for many people without decreasing the quality of life for another similarly sized group" an vice versa.
I enjoy trying to answer this question because the political discourse around it is too new to have widely accepted answers disseminated by the two American political parties being used to signify affiliation like many questions. However, any discussion of whether something is good or bad for society belongs in a Culture War threat because, even here on The Motte, most people will try to reduce every discussion to one along clear conservative/liberal lines because most people here are salty conservatives who were kicked out of reddit by liberals one way or another.
Now on to the question: Maybe the best way to discover if Machine learning is good or bad for society is to say what makes it essentially different from previous computing? The key difference in Machine Learning is that it changes computing from a process where you tell the computer what to do with data, and turns it into a process where you just tell the computer what you want it to be able to do. before machine learning, you would tell the computer specifically how to scan an image and decide if it is a picture of a dog. Whether the computer was good at identifying pictures of dogs relied on how good your instructions were. With machine learning, you give the computer millions of pictures of dogs and tell it to figure out how to determine if there's a dog in a picture.
So what can be essentialized from that difference? Well before Machine Learning, the owners of the biggest computers still had to be clever enough to use them to manipulate data properly, but with Machine Learning, the owners of the biggest computers can now simply specify a goal and get what they want. It seems therefore that Machine Learning will work as a tool for those with more capital to find ways to gain more capital. It will allow people with the money to create companies that can enhance the ability to make decisions purely based on profit potential, and remove the human element even more from the equation.
How about a few examples:
Recently a machine learning model was approved by the FDA to be used to identify cavities on X-rays. Eventually your dental insurance company will require a machine learning model to read your X-rays and report that you need a procedure in order for them to cover treatment from your dentist. The justification will be that the Machine Learning model is more accurate. It probably will be more accurate. Dentists will require subscriptions to a Machine Learning model to accept insurance, and perhaps dental treatment will become more expensive, but maybe not. It's hard to say for sure if this will be a bad or a good thing.
Machine learning models are getting very good at writing human text. This is currently reducing the value of human writers at a quick pace. Presumably with more advanced models, it will replace commercial human writing all together. Every current limitation of the leading natural language models will be removed in time, and they will become objectively superior to human writers. This also might be a good thing, or a bad thing. It's hard to say.
I think it's actually very hard to predict if Machine Learning will be good or bad for society. Certain industries might be disrupted, but the long term effects are hard to predict.
As @2rafa and others have mentioned, ML will be a step change in how human society creates value and interacts with the world more generally. Once we've achieved AGI, roughly defined as having an AI that can act at the level of an ordinary human, our ability to solve problems will drastically increase.
Intelligence is the generic solver for essentially any problem. Sam Altman himself has said that by 2030 he envisions a world where every product and service will either have integrated intelligence, or be angling towards that. This means that our phones, laptops, PCs, will all obviously be intelligent. However what most people don't realize is this technology will also effect our coffeemakers, stoves, thermostats, glasses, and practically every other technology you can think of. I'm sure adaptive clothing will exist soon with camoflauge like capabilities. People will be able to get realtime instructions into headphones telling them exactly how to complete each task.
Even these predictions only scratch the surface. If the true promise of AGI comes out it will also let us break through issues in hard mathematics, create brand new drugs, find extremely dense and powerful new materials. It will help navigate endless layers of bureaucracy, effortlessly pruning through the thousands of regulations that hold up large projects, helping us pinpoint ruthlessly where cost is added to solve the cost disease problem, and generally help unstick our public works. We could be building scintillating skyscrapers of filament-thin materials with bridges across the sky that glisten in the air, all in a decade. The future is truly difficult to even envisage, let alone predict.
In terms of comparisons to other revolutions, @2rafa says below:
I agree that the agricultural revolution led to issues, a la Scott Alexander's review of Against the Grain.. That being said, I find the comparison of the AI revolution to agriculture as facile. Ultimately the reason the agricultural revolution proved bad for us was that we shifted our lifestyles from nomadic culture to a static culture - which inherently leads to problems of physical fitness, freedom, social control, and cultural institutions have to rapidly shift.
With the AI revolution, we have no idea how far it will go. The possibility space is far beyond what could have existed for any previous revolution. As doomers say, we could all die. We could all transcend our fleshly forms and become gods in ten years. China may create an ASI and lock us all into a totalitarian doom state forever.
The stakes here are far higher than the agricultural revolution, and I highly doubt our situation will parallel that trajectory.
At the end of the day if we can survive the AI revolution without any horrible outcomes of the x-risk or s-risk variety, I think it would be ridiculous to posit any sort of negative future. With intelligence at our fingertips, we will be able to finally achieve our potential as a species.
Where have I heard this one before?
Seriously, this seems too specific to be a coincidence. Was it a deliberate reference?
Thought your link led to this
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Nope. I actually don’t like referencing that story because I think it’s pretty short sighted, although does have some interesting ideas.
This is a very common thought in any hard sci fi that has AI. Manna is by no means original just popular in the rat sphere.
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