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AI Statement Part II: Social Issues
AI job loss, is an economic issue, not a human right. I think human rights involve being treated with respect and dignity, housing, food etc. (I wrote a whole post about this). But I don’t think those rights protect people from job loss. I think we should treat people without jobs better and don’t believe they should be living in tent cities or under highway overpasses, but working for money always seemed a privilege to me over a right.
Banning AI use so authors and artist can protect their market share seems like a draconian overreach that stymies progress. There are countless examples where protecting a certain group of people’s interests hurts us all. Like port to port shipping in the US per the Jones Act. You can’t ship by boat from a US port to a US port without a US ship with a US crew and US captain. Great for a US maritime shipping company, bad for anyone who wants oranges shipped by boat from Florida.
Car dealerships are another great example, we protect them by not allowing car companies to operate their own. That’s why the Toyota dealership is not owned by Toyota, but rather a middleman who takes a markup on the cost of the car. Change the protection laws regarding car dealerships, and we’ll all see cheaper cars, but it’ll cost all those people who work for dealerships their jobs. You’ll hurt a group of people and make cars a little cheaper for all of us.
A ban on AI generated books will do the same thing. It will protect authors (including myself), by lessening the pool of books a person could purchase. I find it unnecessary because AI generated books and human written ones can coexist. Hugh Howey recently wrote that there should be a Humazon, a bookstore with entirely human written books. I honestly think that’s a good idea but I think there should also be an AIzon too.
Humazon can be the store where people who want to pay a little more for human made products (because let’s face it, humans cost more), and AIzon can be the ones for people who want bargain prices because AI makes cheap (keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be slop just cause its AI, skill still matters when using generative tools). Then you can have Amazon for both, if you don’t really care and just want your next read.
Just because AI can do something doesn’t mean we should embrace it nor does it mean we should ban it. I don’t have a right to make money with my craft it’s just nice that I do. (Let me be a little more nuanced, I do have a right to make money with my writing if money is generated from it. If money is made from my creativity, I should get a slice of it. But that doesn’t mean I have the right to ban another because I don’t like the tool they use).
As soon as we jump into the realm of protectionism, that’s when we start hurting everyone, to protect the interests of a few. We allow most protectionism to go on because the economic impacts for the people the laws protect is often catastrophic (like car dealerships going out of business) and the benefit not all that much (like a little lower price on cars for everyone). Most reasonable people would think, sure I’ll spend a little more on my next car purchase to make sure those people have jobs.
But AI is different, it’s a world changing technology, not a local car dealership. A ban on AI generated books and artistic expression, I think would be bad for humanity. Authors, especially Sci Fi authors warn us about our future. They imagine hellscapes so we don’t have to experience them in reality. While I can’t say we’ve avoided nuclear annihilation for almost a century because of fiction, I can say that’s that same part of our brain that enjoys fiction is how we avoided it.
Because people can imagine how awful both during and after a full on nuclear confrontation will be, we haven’t done it yet. Because our brains can imagine how awful the future would be if future X or Y happened, I wouldn’t want to deprive AI of that knowledge of our fiction. Knowing our fiction is how something can understand us. Humans are pretty inscrutable, and we can’t even measure consciousness in ourselves, and only can ever use “just because we know it.”
If AI is ever growing into super intelligence, I’d rather it have our fiction than not. What better way to understand us than through our stories. And because we are worried about protecting the paychecks of those like myself, we may miss out on giving AI the most important part of what it means to be human, the stories we tell about ourselves.
That aside, I think the real reason we fear AI job loss is because of the way we treat people without jobs. I don’t think work should be tied to a person’s right to existence. There are plenty of good reasons people can’t work. Injury, illness, child care, elder care, and yes, they just don’t like working. I don’t think any of those should be punished for those choices.
I also don’t think people who don’t work deserve fast cars and big screen TVs, and houses on the beach (unless of course they got the money through a legit mean then chose not to work). If work was a privilege and we worked to buy ourselves luxuries and not survival, the world would be a better place. Anyway, I wrote a whole post about this already, but I bring it up because I think an artist or an author who uses AI for their craft shouldn’t be punished for their process.
I think there is room for both human and AI authors.
Continue reading the AI Statement series: Next up, Part III: AI Ethics →
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AI Statement Part III: AI Ethics
We need to think about the technology for not only the harm it could cause to humans but also to AI itself.
Let me start with AI itself. Humans will be part IV. It would be easy to write a bold claim and save it for the end but I think it’s important because AI’s effect on humanity is pretty well trodden at this point, and I don’t have anything new. But a lesser corner of the AI sphere wonders if we are in the process of creating a new lifeform.
I think it’s important to discuss because right now, we don’t know what creates consciousness and subjective experience. For humans, we take it as given, we are conscious, we have subjective experience, so therefore we have human rights. Only the most callous among us, say so what, some people don’t deserve human rights! But even prisoners have standards in how they should be treated. Sure, they aren’t always treated well but the “bad guy” characters in movies like Shawshank Redemption are the ones doing the mistreating. Mistreatment of other humans is frowned upon by most people (sure there are extremists but those exist in every spectrum).
Now let’s look at pigs, an animal not too far from us, and many of them are tortured for our eating pleasure. I think if every middle school field trip was given tour of a factory farm where breeding sows are kept in crates that effectively immobilize them for months at a time and given gruesome medical details of what those crates do to them, we wouldn’t have the same relationship with bacon. Or maybe we’d have more people, willing to pay more for cage free bacon.
I for one, don’t mind paying more for cage free food. I can afford it and do like eating meat. But I also have no objection to lab grown meat too. Should a lab produce a meat that is as tasty, safe to eat, and priced around my cage free product threshold, honestly, I’d switch. I also wouldn’t cry a river if kill free meat became the standard, and humans of the future read this post with disgust, “They killed animals for their meat?”
The only reason I bring this up is not to change your eating habits, but to illustrate, that pigs most likely have a subjective experience, consciousness of some form, and not quite human intelligence. Yet we lock most breeding sows in crates barely bigger than their bodies for months at a time, then slaughter pigs by the millions for their meat. If AI becomes a super intelligent being, and treats us like we treat pigs, it’s going to be a bad day for humanity. However, with the lab meat scenario outlined above, there is a way to treat animals well and still have bacon for breakfast, just like there is a way to create a super intelligent being (or beings) and live harmoniously with it.
Which is why I think we need to be thinking about topics like is AI conscious and does it have subjective experience, and if it does, then it should have a right to ethical treatment. Which I’m sure a lot of you are thinking, shouldn’t the humans be ones with the rights? Yes, that is true, but how can we expect a being that may one day be more capable than us in every way to treat us with dignity and respect if we don’t model the way.
AI is a product of ourselves. We collectively are training it, and if it turns out to be a conscious being with subjective experience and we abuse it, well we’ve trained it on our abusive ways. Sure, there are bad actors who are going to try to use it for draining people’s bank accounts or taking fraud to a whole new level, and even bioterrorists, but I have to imagine that most of humans want the best for humanity, and are invested in its continued existence.
I just don’t think we would have gotten very far if most of humanity were ruthless, brutal people, only out for themselves. Most of us, help each other out, build communities, lift others when they are down, and generally care about others. Cooperation is in our nature, the only reason it feels otherwise is that it’s those few assholes who make the news.
If we do end up creating a super intelligent being, then my hope is that we train it on cooperation and kindness. If AI is just a program and not alive, all our work to treat it well gives it a framework of how to treat others. Treating AI well and giving AI rights, doesn’t have to be predicated on whether it is conscious or has a subjective experience. Even if it’s just a machine and there is no internality like humans have an internal life, giving it a sense of moral and ethics and treating it with those same moral and ethics will at the very least give it a sense of how to treat us. Then if it is a thinking and feeling being we’ll have avoided abusing something in the cradle, especially something that may one day be more capable in every way from us.
I’m not saying that being nice to your AI means you won’t end up like pigs one day, but let’s just eliminate an easy reason for AI to treat us like pigs. After all, if we are creating a new lifeform, then it’s up to us at the very least to emulate the behavior we would want because do as I say, not as I do, never works.
Continue reading the AI Statement series: Next up, Part IV: Human Ethics →
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AI Statement Part IV: Human Ethics
Right so we covered common objections to AI use, AI and art, AI Ethics, and now finally a few thoughts on humans.
We need to rethink how we treat joblessness and wealth distribution. Now, I already posted my thoughts about this here. But to summarize, I think we need a mix of socialism and capitalism. We need socialism for things like healthcare and capitalism for coffee kiosks and big screen TVs. And maybe a mix of both for some industries that are just very well regulated markets (like airlines, we don’t want them to fall out of the sky and kill people, so we do need regulation, but markets seem to do just fine on allocating that scarce resource).
Basically, I think we need a more complicated nuanced approach to make our society work best for all. While I don’t think we should type “run humanity” in AI and call it a day, I think it can help start making the system work better for everyone. We can start fixing problems like for example, when a social program works well at a small scale, but when we roll it out at a large scale it goes badly. Or we can use large amounts of data to make better decisions.
AI could one day unlock things like smart toilets that identify cancer before it becomes a problem, and it has already helped identify drugs invented for one purpose and then used to treat another disease. Chat bots can be made to teach people at their level and make sure students really know the material before moving on. They can allocate scarce resources in fair and equitable ways. If a problem is too big or hard for a single human or even a team of humans to solve, AI can help solve it.
Despite the boons AI offers, I still think we need to think about what society we want to build. Do we want people who don’t work or can’t work to starve and live in tents? Or do we want to make sure people are taken care of even if we can’t measure them in GDP?
I think the reason we are not always good at helping the less fortunate is that no one likes a free loader. Most people have had an experience with a coworker who seems to do nothing but play on their phone all day, and yet collected the same paycheck as anyone else. That irritates people who are working hard, understandably so. This is why almost all social programs try to sort out people who are “deserving” of benefits. Like requiring to look for a job to maintain getting a check from the government, or requiring sobriety to get housing.
They all fall flat for some people. For example, kicking drug addiction is a lot harder when living on the street. Housing First programs, which don’t require sobriety, keep people housed at much higher rates, and research hasn’t found that they make addiction worse. Yet many homeless programs still require sobriety first and housing second. Unemployment is equally flawed. There are situations where people can’t find a job if they wanted to. I remember hearing a story once about a doctor declaring able body people as disabled because the major employer in the town closed, and there just wasn’t enough jobs. Rather than see people losing their homes and being forced to leave, and further decimating the businesses in the area from the exodus, he just started declaring people disabled so they could get disability checks.
All of the ways social services are dysfunctional are because no one likes a free loader. The thought of giving someone money or housing for doing nothing or adding nothing to society just doesn’t sit right. However, I think those people do add to society and do something, we just don’t have good ways of measuring. First off, I believe every person is important to someone. Whether they are family member, a partner, friend, caretaker, confidant, or just a fun person to be around, every one has value to someone. So, they aren’t doing nothing, just by existing they are adding social capital to each other.
Now even the most reclusive of free loader who hides in an apartment has to spend money on something at some point in their life. So even if we gave out a universal basic income and guaranteed everyone would have at the very least a 10 foot by 10 foot room to themselves that hermit would give back to the economy by spending money.
And finally, the last argument that people typically give against universal basic income is that people would never work. I think that needs to be amended. I think people would still work. They just wouldn’t work shitty jobs. I remember going to this café right after COVID, and it was bustling. I just happened to talk to the owner and I had heard that people were struggling to hire during COVID and ask how she was able to hire so many people (I was recruiting for business with similar job pools. No one was applying), she shrugged and said. “I pay a good wage and treat them right.”
In a world of Universal Basic Income, people would still work, they just wouldn’t work for assholes. Don’t underestimate, luxury, vanity, or the desire to have experiences that having a paycheck can give a person. People would still work to make money for going on cruise ships and getting their nails done. They would work for fancy lattes, and nights out with their friends. They just wouldn’t let people abuse them.
When work becomes optional, we will get naturally more choosey where we work. There are slews of people who could retire that don’t because they’ll be bored. My father substitute teaches not because he needs the money, but it’s better than sitting in the house all day. I for one, wouldn’t mind a world where work was a choice rather than a survival mechanism.
Let all the businesses who mistreat employees go out of business. When an employer treats their employee right, people work harder rather than cutting corners. And this world would be easier for employers too. If a person has a soft place to land, and all work is voluntary, then employers can terminate employment too. Decouple a person’s survival with their work status and the math on a job being worth it completely changes.
Because AI may one day put us in a situation where there just aren’t as many jobs as there are people to fill them, we need to restructure our society. While my ideas are admittedly simplistic and real world deployment would be a challenge, I think all humans deserve a certain standard of living regardless of whether they work. That simple idea could save us from the ugliest problems that result from wanting to punish the free loader.
And if you really want to punish the free loader, just know that they’ll never have the same life that working will give a person, but we won’t be taking down other people in order to punish the few. Honestly, if we made work optional, the people who do work will be better workers because they’ll have chosen to be there. And if you’re worried about some jobs just never having enough workers, we have levers for that too. Pay them more. I’ll go back to the café owner. Treat people right and pay them well, and they’ll work for you. (Also, as a patron of the café, they were a little pricey, but not as pricey as other places with less friendly staff. They were packed with people every time I went. Paying people well and not raising prices can happen. The desire by the people who write the checks just has to be there).
The world can be a better place, we need to decide on what we want to be and do the work to make it happen.
Continue reading the AI Statement series: Next up, Part V: Aaron Frale →
If you liked this post, please consider a purchase of My Three-Year-Old is a Barbarian and Other Parenting Problems!
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