Liwaiwai Liwaiwai
  • /
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning
  • Robotics
  • Engineering
    • Architecture
    • Design
    • Software
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • About
Liwaiwai Liwaiwai
  • /
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning
  • Robotics
  • Engineering
    • Architecture
    • Design
    • Software
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • About
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

Artificial Intelligence Is A Totalitarian’s Dream – Here’s How To Take Power Back

  • August 25, 2020
  • admin

Individualistic western societies are built on the idea that no one knows our thoughts, desires or joys better than we do. And so we put ourselves, rather than the government, in charge of our lives. We tend to agree with the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s claim that no one has the right to force their idea of the good life on us.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will change this. It will know us better than we know ourselves. A government armed with AI could claim to know what its people truly want and what will really make them happy. At best it will use this to justify paternalism, at worst, totalitarianism.

Every hell starts with a promise of heaven. AI-led totalitarianism will be no different. Freedom will become obedience to the state. Only the irrational, spiteful or subversive could wish to chose their own path.

To prevent such a dystopia, we must not allow others to know more about ourselves than we do. We cannot allow a self-knowledge gap.

The All-Seeing AI

In 2019, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel claimed that AI was “literally communist”. He pointed out that AI allows a centralising power to monitor citizens and know more about them than they know about themselves. China, Thiel noted, has eagerly embraced AI.

We already know AI’s potential to support totalitarianism by providing an Orwellian system of surveillance and control. But AI also gives totalitarians a philosophical weapon. As long as we knew ourselves better than the government did, liberalism could keep aspiring totalitarians at bay.

Read More  Google Cloud Next 2019 | State Of The Art: Deploying SAP In The Cloud

But AI has changed the game. Big tech companies collect vast amounts of data on our behaviour. Machine-learning algorithms use this data to calculate not just what we will do, but who we are.

Today, AI can predict what films we will like, what news we will want to read, and who we will want to friend on Facebook. It can predict whether couples will stay together and if we will attempt suicide. From our Facebook likes, AI can predict our religious and political views, personality, intelligence, drug use and happiness.

The accuracy of AI’s predictions will only improve. In the not-too-distant future, as the writer Yuval Noah Harari has suggested, AI may tell us who we are before we ourselves know.

These developments have seismic political implications. If governments can know us better than we can, a new justification opens up for intervening in our lives. They will tyrannise us in the name of our own good.

Freedom through tyranny

Old man wearing tuxedo.
Isaiah Berlin. GaHetNa (Nationaal Archief NL)

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin foresaw this in 1958. He identified two types of freedom. One type, he warned, would lead to tyranny.

Negative freedom is “freedom from”. It is freedom from the interference of other people or government in your affairs. Negative freedom is no one else being able to restrain you, as long as you aren’t violating anyone else’s rights.

In contrast, positive freedom is “freedom to”. It is the freedom to be master of yourself, freedom to fulfil your true desires, freedom to live a rational life. Who wouldn’t want this?

Read More  Cloud, AI, And 5G Are Already Reshaping The Oil And Gas Industry — Huawei Drives The Intelligent Transformation Of The Sector

But what if someone else says you aren’t acting in your “true interest”, although they know how you could. If you won’t listen, they may force you to be free – coercing you for your “own good”. This is one of the most dangerous ideas ever conceived. It killed tens of millions of people in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China.

The Russian Communist leader, Lenin, is reported to have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope he would hang them with. Peter Thiel has argued that, in AI, capitalist tech firms of Silicon Valley have sold communism a tool that threatens to undermine democratic capitalist society. AI is Lenin’s rope.

Fighting for ourselves

We can only prevent such a dystopia if no one is allowed to know us better than we know ourselves. We must never sentimentalise anyone who seeks such power over us as well-intentioned. Historically, this has only ever ended in calamity.

One way to prevent a self-knowledge gap is to raise our privacy shields. Thiel, who labelled AI as communistic, has argued that “crypto is libertarian”. Cryptocurrencies can be “privacy-enabling”. Privacy reduces the ability of others to know us and then use this knowledge to manipulate us for their own profit.

Yet knowing ourselves better through AI offers powerful benefits. We may be able to use it to better understand what will make us happy, healthy and wealthy. It may help guide our career choices. More generally, AI promises to create the economic growth that keeps us from each other’s throats.

The problem is not AI improving our self-knowledge. The problem is a power disparity in what is known about us. Knowledge about us exclusively in someone else’s hands is power over us. But knowledge about us in our own hands is power for us.

Anyone who processes our data to create knowledge about us should be legally obliged to give us back that knowledge. We need to update the idea of “nothing about us without us” for the AI-age.

Read More  Is AI The Key To The Metaverse?

What AI tells us about ourselves is for us to consider using, not for others to profit from abusing. There should only ever be one hand on the tiller of our soul. And it should be ours.The Conversation

 

Simon McCarthy-Jones, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology, Trinity College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

admin

Related Topics
  • AI
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Freedom
  • Isaiah Berlin
  • Machine Learning
You May Also Like
View Post
  • People
  • Technology

DBS Singapore: The Best Boasting To Be The Best For So Long, Humbled By Hubris

  • March 31, 2023
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Technology

Bard And ChatGPT — A Head To Head Comparison

  • March 31, 2023
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Platforms

Modernize Your Apps And Accelerate Business Growth With AI

  • March 31, 2023
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

Unlocking The Secrets Of ChatGPT: Tips And Tricks For Optimizing Your AI Prompts

  • March 29, 2023
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

Try Bard And Share Your Feedback

  • March 29, 2023
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Data
  • Data Science
  • Machine Learning
  • Technology

Google Data Cloud & AI Summit : In Less Than 12 Hours From Now

  • March 29, 2023
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology

Talking Cars: The Role Of Conversational AI In Shaping The Future Of Automobiles

  • March 28, 2023
View Post
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Tools

Document AI Introduces Powerful New Custom Document Classifier To Automate Document Processing

  • March 28, 2023

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Stay Connected!
LATEST
  • 1
    DBS Singapore: The Best Boasting To Be The Best For So Long, Humbled By Hubris
    • March 31, 2023
  • 2
    Bard And ChatGPT — A Head To Head Comparison
    • March 31, 2023
  • 3
    Modernize Your Apps And Accelerate Business Growth With AI
    • March 31, 2023
  • 4
    Why Your Open Source Project Needs A Content Strategy
    • March 31, 2023
  • 5
    From Raw Data To Actionable Insights: The Power Of Data Aggregation
    • March 30, 2023
  • 6
    Effective Strategies To Closing The Data-Value Gap
    • March 30, 2023
  • 7
    Unlocking The Secrets Of ChatGPT: Tips And Tricks For Optimizing Your AI Prompts
    • March 29, 2023
  • 8
    Try Bard And Share Your Feedback
    • March 29, 2023
  • 9
    Google Data Cloud & AI Summit : In Less Than 12 Hours From Now
    • March 29, 2023
  • 10
    Talking Cars: The Role Of Conversational AI In Shaping The Future Of Automobiles
    • March 28, 2023

about
About
Hello World!

We are liwaiwai.com. Created by programmers for programmers.

Our site aims to provide materials, guides, programming how-tos, and resources relating to artificial intelligence, machine learning and the likes.

We would like to hear from you.

If you have any questions, enquiries or would like to sponsor content, kindly reach out to us at:

[email protected]

Live long & prosper!
Most Popular
  • 1
    Introducing GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service
    • March 21, 2023
  • 2
    Document AI Introduces Powerful New Custom Document Classifier To Automate Document Processing
    • March 28, 2023
  • 3
    How AI Can Improve Digital Security
    • March 27, 2023
  • 4
    ChatGPT 4.0 Finally Gets A Joke
    • March 27, 2023
  • 5
    Mr. Cooper Is Improving The Home-buyer Experience With AI And ML
    • March 24, 2023
  • /
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning
  • Robotics
  • Engineering
  • About

Input your search keywords and press Enter.