[ad_1]
The Urgency of Getting AI Regulations Right
AI has the potential to greatly enhance our lives, but it also has the potential to cause great damage. With 48% of AI researchers predicting that there is a 10% chance of it leading to human extinction, it is essential that we maximize the upside of AI while minimizing the downside.
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, both economists at MIT, have delved into a thousand years of technological innovation to gain insight into the probable impact of AI on our society. In their book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, they argue against the popular belief that technology inevitably leads to widespread prosperity. Throughout history, new technologies have been used by powerful elites to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Acemoglu and Johnson fear that AI, exploding onto a world where powerful elites have more control than ever before, will accelerate this trend. They argue that it is essential that we educate public opinion and recharge democracy if we are to align AI with the common good.
Section 1: The Dark Side of Technological Innovation
Acemoglu and Johnson cite examples from history to demonstrate how new technologies have been used to enrich elites and extend control over their subordinates. For example, agricultural improvements during the Middle Ages enriched landlords and clergy at the expense of peasants, while Eli Whitney’s cotton gin entrenched slavery and extended its adoption in the US. Similarly, the tech revolution since the 1980s has made bosses rich while keeping workers’ income flat through a combination of outsourcing, re-engineering, and ideology.
Section 2: Countervailing Forces to Elite Enrichment
The authors concede that technological progress is often the work of challengers to the status quo. The authors praise the combination of electoral competition, trade union power, and reforming intellectuals and politicians. Yet, they worry that AI is exploding on to a world where such forces have been emasculated. Business titans enjoy more power and prestige than they have since the gilded age, organized labor is puny, and democracy has been captured by money. The winning formula (innovation plus guidance) has been replaced by a losing one (let the elites control technology).
Section 3: The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism
Acemoglu and Johnson suggest that the digital revolution has already been hijacked by self-seeking elites, creating surveillance capitalism. This new economic system gathers information on all of us to sell to advertisers. These advertisers can use this information to manipulate the masses more effectively than they have ever been manipulated before, personalizing ads, shaping the information environment, and playing with people’s emotions. The result is a fundamental challenge to John Stuart Mill’s 19th-century notion of the sovereign individual.
Section 4: The Authors’ Solution
The authors’ main worry about AI is not that it will do something unexpected like blowing up the world, though that would be undesirable. It is that it will supercharge the current regime of surveillance, labor substitution, and emotional manipulation. Their grand solution is to use public policy to refocus the new technology from machine intelligence to machine usefulness. But they warn that before we can have a chance of doing that, we need to educate public opinion and recharge democracy.
Section 5: Policies to Produce a Better Version of the Future
Acemoglu and Johnson propose an interesting set of policies to create a better version of the future. They suggest providing government subsidies to develop more socially beneficial technologies, refusing to give patents to technologies aimed at worker or citizen surveillance, eliminating tax incentives to replace labor with machines, breaking up big tech companies that enjoy market shares not seen since the days of the American industrialists John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, repealing Sector 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that protects internet platforms against legal action or regulation because of the content they host, and imposing a digital advertising tax.
Conclusion
Acemoglu and Johnson’s book provides crucial insights into the regulation of AI. While their arguments drive home the urgent need for public debate and policy action, their one-sided view ignores the benefits that technological innovation brings to consumers. The book argues for the regulation of AI to align it with the common good, but the authors should include suggestions for creating positive incentives for elites to invest in technologies that are socially useful.
FAQ
1. What is AI potential?
AI has the potential to improve most aspects of our lives, including medicine, politics, and education.
2. What is the potential downside of AI?
48% of AI researchers predict that there is a 10% chance that its impact would be extremely bad, that is, lead to human extinction.
3. What is the solution to regulate AI?
Acemoglu and Johnson propose government subsidies to develop more socially beneficial technologies, refuse to give patents to technologies aimed at worker or citizen surveillance, eliminate tax incentives to replace labor with machines, break up big tech companies, repeal the 1996 Communications Decency Act’s Sector 230 that protects internet platforms against legal action, and impose a digital advertising tax.
4. What is surveillance capitalism?
Surveillance capitalism is an economic system that gathers information on all of us to sell to advertisers, affecting our privacy, information environment, and emotions.
5. Are there any positive incentives for investing in socially useful technologies?
Acemoglu and Johnson’s book argues for the regulation of AI to align it with the common good. Still, authors should include suggestions for creating positive incentives for elites to invest in technologies that are socially useful.
[ad_2]
For more information, please refer this link