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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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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.

Personally am very excited for AI improvements. I’m hoping something like ChatGPT will be able to act as a super personal assistant and analyst.

For example in personal life, would love to be able to type into a box that I’m looking to plan a trip with just a few parameters (date, general budget, etc) and have it send me options. I can then have the AI send even more options for what do on the trip and finally book reservations that only require my approval.

That’s just one example but there are plenty of admin type activities that I’d like to offload to an AI. The opportunities in professional life are even greater but I think that may take longer as the aversion to giving the AI access to confidential data may be high (it’s currently banned at my mega corp).

I’m hoping something like ChatGPT will be able to act as a super personal assistant and analyst.

At what level of 'smarts,' however, will an AI that is already training on how you do your job going to stop needing you around to do it?

I mean, you're basically happily accepting an apprentice who will lighten your workload whilst learning your job, except this thing is known to learn 100x faster than your standard human. The assumption that you'll have moved on to bigger and better things (or retired) before the apprentice steps up to take over your job may not hold here.

At what level of 'smarts,' however, will an AI that is already training on how you do your job going to stop needing you around to do it?

At some point soon we will at least increase productivity by 1.5-2x per person. At that point why don't we collectively demand a 3 or 4 day workweek?

As usual, WTF Happened in 1971 is a fitting reference. Productivity and compensation stopped correlating in 1971, and we haven't (effectively) collectively demanded a reduced work week yet.

We could have transitioned to three day work weeks way before 1971. The flaw in Keynes's famous prediction is that, past the point of basic subsistance, economic utility is relative. People don't want to make $20,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 or $200,000 inflation-adjusted household income to be happy. They want more than their peers. They want to have class-markers that low status people don't, not the luxuries that those class-markers manifest themselves in. It's why the canard about modern trailer trash having it better than kings in 1900 is so ridiculous.

If whatever happened in 1971 never happened, people would still be working as much as ever. The hedonic treadmill would just be moving faster.