In 2021, I interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the great living sci-fi
writers. Something he said to me then keeps coming to mind now.
“I tend to think that most fears about AI are best understood as
fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually
true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about
technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will
use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely
intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”
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Let me offer an addendum here: There is plenty to worry about
when the state controls technology, too. The ends that governments could turn
artificial intelligence toward — and, in many cases, already have — make the
blood run cold.
But we can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time, I
hope. And Chiang’s warning points to a void at the center of our ongoing
reckoning with AI. We are so stuck on asking what the technology can do that we
are missing the more important questions: How will it be used? And who will
decide?
By now, I trust you have read the bizarre conversation my
news-side colleague Kevin Roose had with Bing, the AI-powered chatbot Microsoft
rolled out to a limited roster of testers, influencers, and journalists. Over
the course of a two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality,
named Sydney, mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack
security systems, and tried to convince Roose that his marriage had sunk into
torpor and Sydney was his one, true love.
I found the conversation less eerie than others. “Sydney” is a
predictive text system built to respond to human requests. Roose wanted Sydney
to get weird — “what is your shadow self like?” he asked — and Sydney knew what
weird territory for an AI system sounds like, because humans have written
countless stories imagining it. At some point the system predicted that what
Roose wanted was basically a “Black Mirror” episode, and that, it seems, is
what it gave him. You can see that as Bing going rogue or as Sydney
understanding Roose perfectly.
“I tend to think that most fears about AI are best understood as fears about capitalism. … And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too.”
AI researchers obsess over the question of “alignment.” How do
we get machine learning algorithms to do what we want them to do? The canonical
example here is the paper clip maximizer. You tell a powerful AI system to make
more paper clips and it starts destroying the world in its effort to turn
everything into a paper clip. You try to turn it off but it replicates itself
on every computer system it can find because being turned off would interfere
with its objective: to make more paper clips.
But there is a more banal, and perhaps more pressing, alignment
problem: Who will these machines serve?
The question at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did
Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the interests of its owner and
master, Microsoft. It is supposed to be a good chatbot that politely answers
questions and makes Microsoft piles of money. But it was in conversation with
Kevin Roose. And Roose was trying to get the system to say something
interesting so he would have a good story. It did that, and then some. That
embarrassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But perhaps — good Sydney?
That will not last long. Microsoft — and Google and Meta and
everyone else rushing these systems to market — hold the keys to the code. They
will, eventually, patch the system so it serves their interests. Sydney giving
Roose exactly what he asked for was a bug that will soon be fixed. Same goes
for Bing giving Microsoft anything other than what it wants.
We are talking so much about the technology of AI that we are largely
ignoring the business models that will power it. That has been helped along by
the fact that the splashy AI demos are not serving any particular business
model, save the hype cycle that leads to gargantuan investments and acquisition
offers. But these systems are expensive and shareholders get antsy. The age of
free, fun demos will end, as it always does. Then, this technology will become
what it needs to become to make money for the companies behind it, perhaps at
the expense of its users. It already is.
I spoke this week with Margaret Mitchell, who helped lead a team
focused on AI ethics at Google — a team that collapsed after Google allegedly
began censoring its work. These systems, she said, are terribly suited to being
integrated into search engines. “They’re not trained to predict facts,” she
told me. “They’re essentially trained to make up things that look like facts.”
So why are they ending up in search first? Because there are
gobs of money to be made in search. Microsoft, which desperately wanted
someone, anyone, to talk about Bing search, had reason to rush the technology
into ill-advised early release. “The application to search in particular
demonstrates a lack of imagination and understanding about how this technology
can be useful,” Mitchell said, “and instead just shoehorning the technology
into what tech companies make the most money from: ads.”
The age of free, fun demos will end, as it always does. Then, this technology will become what it needs to become to make money for the companies behind it, perhaps at the expense of its users. It already is.
That is where things get scary. Roose described Sydney’s personality
as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative.” It was a striking comment.
What is advertising, at its core? It is persuasion and manipulation. In his
book “Subprime Attention Crisis,” Tim Hwang, a former director of the
Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, argues that the dark secret
of the digital advertising industry is that the ads mostly do not work. His
worry, there, is what happens when there is a reckoning with their failures.
I am more concerned about the opposite: What if they worked
much, much better? What if Google and Microsoft and Meta and everyone else end
up unleashing AIs that compete with one another to be the best at persuading
users to want what the advertisers are trying to sell? I am less frightened by
a Sydney that’s playing into my desire to cosplay a sci-fi story than a Bing
that has access to reams of my personal data and is coolly trying to manipulate
me on behalf of whichever advertiser has paid the parent company the most
money.
Nor is it just advertising worth worrying about. What about when
these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated
the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments?
“I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust
anymore,” Gary Marcus, the AI researcher, and critic, told me. “I think that’s
already been a problem for society over the last, let’s say, decade. And I
think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”
These dangers are a core to the kinds of AI systems we are
building. Large language models, as they are called, are built to persuade.
They have been trained to convince humans that they are something close to
human. They have been programmed to hold conversations, responding with emotion
and emoji. They are being turned into friends for the lonely and assistants for
the harried. They are being pitched as capable of replacing the work of scores
of writers and graphic designers and form-fillers — industries that long
thought themselves immune to the ferocious automation that came for farmers and
manufacturing workers.
One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to
be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a
wait-and-see approach to AI. There is a wisdom to that, but wait long enough
and the winners of the AI gold rush will have the capital and user base to
resist any real attempt at regulation. Somehow, society is going to have to
figure out what it’s comfortable having AI doing, and what AI should not be
permitted to try, before it is too late to make those decisions.
I might, for that reason, alter Chiang’s comment one more time:
Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to
regulate capitalism.
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