site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The European Union has passed the Artificial Intelligence Act

The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behaviour or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden.

...

Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.

...

Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.

This is an extremely restrictive law that will really hold the EU back economically if AI becomes an important technology. It imposes huge burdens on all uses, for both the users and developers, and outright bans many very useful applications.

The law tries to mandate transparency, while at the same time discouraging it by restricting or banning certain uses. An AI specifically made for social scoring, for example, would be illegal, while a general purpose AI would almost certainly do something like social scoring internally as part of a more general ability. For example, if you have an AI run a company in its head, so to speak, how would anyone know what it is doing? How would you know how it is selecting job applicants? It would be a black box and current attempts to figure out how large language models actually work would be the only way to find out what they're doing. But continuing that line of research would expose the developers and users of these systems to liability.

The fines are also enormous.

Fines for non-compliance can be up to 35 million Euros or 7% of worldwide annual turnover.

This would be devastating for a small or low margin business. Many are just not going to do use this extremely valuable technology. Lots of online services are just not going to be available in the EU. In fact, this is already the case with Gemini and Claude, probably because of privacy laws.

I've long argued that the AI safety movement is unlikely to do anything for existential risk and will, if anything, increase it, while assuredly greatly limiting the benefits, and this is strong evidence that I'm right. The regulatory state does not have the capacity to deal with existential risk from AI, whereas it has a long history of stifling technological development.

I guess that possibly now mass-collecting and mass-analyzing data about citizens will be reserved for the European equivalents of the NSA, which then will share the data with the rest of the Five Eyes to protect democracy. According to some, it is not for private citizens or privately-created companies to have such power because we cannot trust them to take the right steps to protect democracy from leftist populists, chuds, libertarians, supposed Russian intelligence agents ("they must be Russian trolls because they disagree with me!"), and other sorts of wrongthinkers.

Why would transparency be a bad thing here? If the developers are doing something that could expose them to liability if it came out, shouldn't it come out?

I'm saying it would discourage transparency, because that would make it easier to do things which this law makes illegal. And no, if developers are made liable for things for which they should not be liable, it is better if they are able to hide what they're doing.

Can you give some examples of things the developers might be made liable for and that they should not be liable for?

There is nothing in the list above that I think shouldn't be allowed. Banning social scoring, in particular, is especially problematic.

Why, though? Why would we want social scoring (which I'm taking to mean something like the Chinese Social Credit system)?

I don't think that's what the legislation refers to. It's broader than that.

How would you know how it is selecting job applicants?

The answer to this will be "you are only allowed to use an explainable AI to select job applicants", just like you are not allowed to use illegible algorithms to score loan applications. The US will pass something similar as soon as researchers find a neuron that is activated by Black-sounding names in one of the networks that make important personal decisions.

That would amount to a ban on general purpose AI.

Is this not intentional, banning AI? It might be about making sure robots don’t take our jobs and not about safety.

In a sense it's about that, but the people whose jobs are threatened and are protecting themselves here are bureaucrats and politicians, not necessarily who you may have in mind.

AI is a potential tool for a challenger to the ruling elite, and the people who rule the EU know only one way to deal with challengers, and it's to regulate them away. They'll sooner condemn the entire union to a slow fall into irrelevance than compromise on the total power of experts behind desks deciding what ought to happen.

I'd be sad at how much of a joke the old continent has become. But one can only be disappointed so many times.

Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring

You think that's a challenge to the ruling elite, rather than tools for them to control us proles even more tightly?

Ask yourself who gets to do "Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring" right now. And who would under a new regime of automation.

The same people? I have no reason to think that automation will mean a change in the hands on the levers of power, one reason I'm so suspicious of the push for AI.

Similarly, I noticed little comment about the ban on facial recognition.

Basically. EU leaders see AI as a marginal improvement instead of something transformational.

Robots will still take EU jobs. This law just makes sure they'll be Chinese (or, god willing, American) robots instead of European robots.

Or, more likely in a European context, making sure robots don't provide a reason to halt the flow of infinity migrants into Europe.

Europe- or at least Europe’s elites- doesn’t seem to actually a flow of infinity bomalians. They don’t really know how to stop it- as it turns out there is no magic ‘stay in your home country’ button.

No doubt you’ll point out that everyone in Hungary is Hungarian, at least in the sense that they actually belong there. But the migrants don’t actually want to go to Hungary anyway; they want to go to Germany or a Nordic country(or the UK), because while Hungary might be a nicer place to live than anywhere in Africa, and the vast majority of the Middle East, it’s a lot less nice of a place to live compared to the countries north and west of it. My understanding of the Hungarian immigration crackdown was that it was more of a ‘no, fuck you, you take them’ when Germany tried to make immigration to the EU less appealing by declaring that fake refugees would be distributed around the EU instead of going to the country of their choice. Basically the same thing Greg Abbott is doing in Texas, because making migrants take a slightly different route is fairly doable(and this is what Texas has actually done; migrants are now crossing in the other three border states instead).

Eurocrats, no doubt, have options for dealing with mass migration that they’ve taken off the table. Some of those options are rooted in ideological beliefs that have nothing to do with ‘infinity browns is awesome’, like ‘muh international norms and treaties’ and some of those are rooted in practical concerns, coordinating border security over dozens of countries is not actually very easy. But that doesn’t mean the EU is firmly committed to having an infinite flow of third worlders coming in! They’re not the US(where democrats at least seem to genuinely have a commitment to infinity bomalians or whatever). Certainly, the EU isn’t going out of its way to invite in more migrants.

There is, in fact, not a flow of infinity migrants into Europe, and this increased regulation of AI is happening at the same time as increased regulation of migration in EU generally at the EU level.

It's certainly not the way I'd word it, but I think that "infinity migrants" does capture something about how this is treated in mainstream discourse. Does European leadership have an actual end state where all of this is going to lead to in mind, a certain ratio of natives:immigrants where they'll close down the borders? I don't think so. Instead, there is a vague sense that immigration is good and that, as long as people are willing to come, we should continually take in a significant number, whether on moral or economic grounds. At least that's how I'd describe most European political organizations from the center leftward on this topic.

I'm now old enough that I can remember three distinct phases of a few months to maybe a year where politicians were making migration-skeptic noises and sometimes even went through with some measures that mildly decreased the inflow for a while (like the recent border police controls here in Germany). These were triggered by momentary increases in the number of arrivals or terrorist attacks. Of course, these phases came and went and in the meanwhile, the numbers go up and up, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but always up. Infinity is an exaggeration, but it's the direction things are and have been going towards for all of living memory.

You keep saying that and it plainly contradicts the evidence of my own eyes, I'm literally passing tens of African boys on my way back from work every day (they're not causing trouble as far as I can tell, they seem to be playing football most of the day). There's two different parts of Europe I watched fill up with "refugees" in a similar manner. The "increased regulation of migration" seems to boil down to locking them up in hopes they'll stop coming, a policy that is obviously unsustainable as per your own article.

Immigrants are, in fact, still coming, and the EU is, in fact, doing very little to stop it.

Yes, of course there are migrants coming. No-one has denied that. That's different from the dumb catchphrase "infinity migrants", let alone the implication that EU is specifically regulating AI to facilitate immigration.

I don't know what being literal is supposed to bring into the conversation. His claim is that Europe has the goal of continuing mass immigration, you claim here, and in other comments, that actually they are clamping down, I'm claiming that they're not, and they're measures are symbolic at best. Do you agree or disagree with that? Debating current state of immigration is somewhat interesting, debating the literal meaning of a culture-warry comment that got modded is not.

AI will kill off white collar and beurocrat jobs first. Surprise surprise - guess which ones are protected in the legislation. No one is banning strawberry picking and roofing robots.

You’ve been making a habit of hyperbole when it comes to the culture war. Please resist the urge to cast your enemies as cartoon villains.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats