Kyle Roth

Having heard about the terrible privacy policies of car manufacturers and Ford’s new patent to automate vehicle repossession, I was finally able to formulate some thoughts I’ve had brewing for a while about ownership in this world of ubiquitous computing. Before the industrial revolution, humans could essentially understand what a thing did by looking at it, and ownership was about possession of the object. Now we don’t understand our tools, and so possession does not imply control.

In late March 2023, the NYT released a series of explainer articles about AI. The first article in the seriesYou can also read it on Archive.org if you don’t have a subscription. characterizes the recent history of AI as a progression of new technological ideas appearing over time. Of course that’s partially true, but it gets the order wrong and misses important non-technical events that are key to understanding our current position.

This book was a good one for quotable critique of modern capitalism. Here are some good ones: These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.

The examples in this book make it clear that there is no easy line we can draw between autonomous and non-autonomous weapons (and by extension, autonomous AI agents). There is a smooth gradient of autonomy, which makes the question of allowing autonomous weapons much more nuanced. It’s probably the case that higher-level alignment becomes important proportionally to the level of autonomy and intelligence. He analyzes the Patriot fratricides,In a military context, the word fratricide means the killing of someone on the same side of a conflict. and ends up blaming the individuals involved for automation bias. I would say that these humans in the system were set up to fail by the training and the functioning of the system. They’re expected to decide whether the computer is right, with only seconds to decide. He acknowledges this later when he talks about Aegis.

This book was published in 2007, before the Great Recession. It definitely reads that way. Very capitalist, very Christian, very neo-liberal. I enjoyed learning more about Adam Smith. I feel like Skousen does a good job painting the importance of his ideas as an invention that drove the Industrial Revolution. According to Skousen, Marx is the devil incarnate, and his ideas are a dangerous disease infecting the minds of intellectuals and workers. Skousen takes a strange interest in painting Marx and Keynes as deranged, sexual deviants, etc. (“The Truth about Keynes’ Homosexuality” is a section in this book.)