This really is a different era. I have found it undeniable since AlphaGo conquered the namely most intricate chess game, which was until recently ruled by a human “King”. A fascinating era, but more to speak, a dangerous one. Many more caveats have been out there in the real world as well as in the virtual space now than all previous civilization periods.
The term “Online Police” came to me after I finished reading the new Economist top post Why China’s AI push is worrying. As is recognized that “rogue AI would be a problem for the planet wherever it emerged”, not a country could do a good enough job in protecting people from self-interested hackers and technology magnates. Not to mention “country” is yet a misleading agency, behind which are more often governments than people or citizens.
While the laissez-fair Economist is still, as usual, busy engaging with criticizing the so called state-owned country, they offer too limited a definition of dictatorship in the digital age in this article. Their arguments give too much credit to democratic institutions in Western society in their role of creating ethical boundaries and producing benefits rather than constraints. We so often forget that Capital is just another name of chain, which shares the same blood with the term State, both bound by their potentials in ruling out humanity. The Iron Curtain was no longer scarier ever since ISIS started to occupy the front page in our news, and now neither terrorism nor communism should be considered the most terrifying threat. I hate to say it, but it would be as foolishly funny as being tragically meaningless if we were still fighting to divide our society while our society is already eking out an existence.
How can we stop Artificial Intelligence from being Autocratic Intelligence? Here is the paradox: to fight against artificial junks everywhere we need a social machine that is well-functioned and powerful, thus the stronger, the better. Meanwhile, we also need this machine to be self-corrected and well-supervised, in another word, we need to reduce its authority by restricting its reign. It is difficult, if not completely impossible, to build up a system like that, especially due to the plausible fact that we are still in a very primitive stage of internet age. To our knowledge, we’ve practiced for thousands of years trying to build a satisfying government, and we’ve only been doing just okay. We got ourselves cakes and flowers, but also wars lasting years. Will we do better this time?
If any Third World War were to happen, the battlefield will be expected to come in a different way, regardless it is a war among regional interest groups (say goverments) or more than that. Considering the wide and fast spread of the online empire, hypothetically the war would be fatal to all of our possessions, including ourselves. My worries are not nothing. For now it’s vague to see, yet disasters, natural or humane, come from the accumulation of tiny incidents that wouldn’t be spotted until people recognize what happened afterwards. The past is shaped only by tomorrow, and the tomorrow might be already around the corner.
These are not just my own concerns. To quote the conversation by a modest but never “over-rated” scientist Hawking’s speech (RIP, who died on March 14, 2018), “In short, the rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which.” This is in the same line with Einsteins’s conservativeness in atomic bombs. Think about the triumph of the Allies when American scientists made this breakthrough, and alert yourselves that people are still paying for it today, from Chernobyl, Fukushima, and to the whole world eventually.
Now, if you are a fan of Game of Thrones, you must remember the horror in people’s eyes when the white walkers come close. Nevertheless, there are people in the north sitting still in the summer without realizing their fate. Remember the white walkers were created by the sons of forests, before long the latter tribe were overtaken. Bear this metaphor in mind, you’ll soon realize that our real world is increasingly mocking the fake story. The fire burns the hand of the king, and the tools rebel and endanger their masters, and folks like us create weapons to kill ourselves just the same.
Ignorance could kill us all. Weaponless people would be manipulated to bring themselves to ashes; before long the pains could only be consumed by the leaders of nothing.
Believe me, it cannot be overstated. We know destroy happens faster than construction; we learn information now transfer with the speed of light; we should also be told that humanity is vulnerable in face of dehumanization. Human beings have strengths in quite a lot of fields, but what makes us unique, knowing that we are existing, feeling ourselves and thinking for the future, also makes us weak. Emotions and concerns salvages us from the earth that was once liveless, but they also become Achilles’ Heel.
Men cannot die twice, so do treasure the first and the only one.
(Revised on Nov. 7, 2018)
The reflections in this article ought to be attributed to the graduate seminar “Organizational Failure” I took with Prof. Diane Vaughn during 2017, and a lot of the thoughts (surprisingly) correspond to the undergraduate lecture “Organizing Innovation” where I am a teaching assistant for Prof. David Stark one year later.
I still agree with this article a lot (let’s see what might happen after years), although I believe we can be more positive for which I look upon our generation and the following ones.