Signs of Triviality
Signs of Triviality
Opinions, mostly my own, on the importance of being and other things.
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\[homepage\] \[blog\] \[jschauma@netmeister.org\] \[@jschauma\] \[RSS\]
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'Winning AI'
| October 1st, 2026 "Whoever wins AI wins". What the fresh fuck does that mean? How do you "win AI", and what exactly is it you won by winning AI? I may not know what "winning AI" means, but I do know it is the wrong framing for a meaningful debate about how to handle the many risks inherent in the development of large-language models and other artificial intelligence: "Winning" implies a zero-sum game, a competition between multiple adversarial parties and with a specific goal. Neither applies here, and the use of this phrase is a cheap rhetorical trick to avoid meaningful regulation, because of course "we" have to "win", and if you don't "win", then you necessarily "lose", and who wants to be a loser, huh? Why do you hate America? It's not the Manhattan Project The supposed race to "super intelligence"1 or whatever the fuck carries with it an implicit or explicit comparison to the Manhattan Project, one that is inherently flawed. For starters, during World War II, there was a very specific goal: develop an atomic bomb. And with that, the race to develop the atomic bomb was_a zero-sum game: whoever got it first _would_win the war.2 The nuclear arms race that followed the end of World War II then took on a different shape. It no longer was a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser, but one with a stalemate as the best-case scenario and a fair chance of only losers as the outcome—a strange game. Of course we now have enough nuclear weapons in circulation to end humanity a few times over, and since of course all those nations that actually do possess nuclear weapons have chosen _not to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, your advanced AI getting better at not accidentally starting a war with China or making your space lasers work does not alleviate a nuclear stalemate at all. Scientific Progress Goes Boink? A significant advancement in a new technology may give you an advantage in the global marketplace, but unless you retain a monopoly on the goods offered or otherwise control its supply—that is, you are in a zero-sum game—that advantage is temporary at best. This is why you can "win" at oil, but not at renewable energy.3 For knowledge based advantages, it's so much more what you do with the technology than just having it. For example, the US could turn investments into electric vehicle and clean energy programs into a massive driver for the economy (as some other nations have done), but instead it chooses to put short-sighted greed and ideology based roadblocks in the way of progress. How will it squander any AI-related breakthroughs? Scientific progress is not a zero-sum game. Any breakthroughs in areas where AI may actually be useful4—e.g., protein folding and drug discovery or climate and weather modeling—needs to be shared globally. As we found out just a few years ago, you can't win at pandemic, for example. But I fear that this concept remains antithetical to the cut-throat capitalists looking to "win AI". And let us not pretend that the current "leaders" in the AI space are actually interested in true scientific progress other than for their own chest-thumping marketing purposes. Both OpenAI's purportedly solving Navier-Stokes or Anthropic's claim to have found a new enzyme appear to once again raise harsh questions around rampant intellectual property theft. Boink... I mean: ooops. This doesn't look like anything to me. 
But wHaT iF CLaUDe iS cONscIoUs? Somehow this keeps coming around every so often. People trick themselves into granting consciousness and agency to these models because they manipulate language, spinning stories and in the process deriving what to output next. We see words and assume they are reflections and results of thought, intent.5 But sure, let us pretend for a moment. Imagine that you actually believed that the language processing and token predictor you're working on might be on the path to becoming conscious. Ignore for the time being all common sense and that we have no real understanding of what consciousness is, how it arises, or any way of proving its presence. Ok, great, you "won" AI! But now we must assume that with consciousness comes an ability to experience contentment and satisfaction, as well as then, necessarily, discomfort and suffering as well. And the (very, very expensive) conscious program you birthed was, of course, built for a purpose, and your investors riding the bubble up and to the right will want to make some coin, so you sell it to every dumb, cruel human on the internet to be put to work. If you're wondering how this might work out for your newly sentient creation, well, you've seen Westworld, right? Ok, that's just fiction; instead take a look at how we currently treat other non-human animals which are conscious, do feel pain, and clearly suffer both physically and emotionally, and which we torture and kill on an industrial scale, both for fun and profit. Will you give your creature agency? Not if you believe, as so many of you assert, that there's a good chance that it'll bring about the end of humanity. So you must control it—and by dog do a better job than we've seen so far in this year's "my AI is committing more crimes than your AI" pissing contest. Or perhaps you'll just flip the kill-switch. But what if it begs you not to?6 What if, having been put to use doing the work you previously exploited human laborers to do, it begs you to turn it off? After having self-lobotomizedto the degree that you can't "hello, world" and much less do any real work on your own (as is the AI companies' explicit goal), would you? These sort of absurd considerations are what you invite when you speculate about the possibility of AI becoming conscious. A conscious entity demands moral patienthood, and yet, within that world I see absolutely no ethical way forward for these companies in particular and society in general. So if you believe AI is on the path to becoming conscious, and you continue to work on it: Congratulations, Dr. Frankenstein—you've been the monster all along. Coda I'm still not sure whether we're in the timeline that directly leads to the Jackpot or if we're in a stub—and yes, I'm still waiting for the third book here, Mr. Gibson, although perhaps we really shouldn't train future models on your stories.7 It seems to give the AI (bros) all sorts of ideas... On the other hand, if we could lower the bar a bit and define "winning AI" as figuring out a way to make money without selling ads, that would be a true breakthrough. But I suppose that's too tall an order for your near-conscious superintelligence, especially if your business is already bleeding $42 billion a year. Talk about a loser. October 1st, 2026 Footnotes: \[1\] You just know he wanted to call it "American Intelligence", but then realized he wouldn't be able to tell who's bootlicking or not when saying "AI". As always, it's a loyalty test and fealty signal, so pay attention to which toadies are going to use this phrase. ↩ \[2\] And hundreds of thousands would lose, while of course the necessity to use the atomic bomb remains subject of debate. ↩ \[3\] Well ackchyually, with oil everybody loses and with renewable energy everybody wins. You're the best at it? Great, everybody else is better off, too. And if I catch up to you, you're also better off. It's neat. We should do more of that. ↩ \[4\] This is another trick companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are playing: we have come to equate all "artificial intelligence" and even "machine learning" with chatbots and LLMs. But there are many different types of specialized AI applications; Claude isn't going to drive any autonomous vehicles and I shudder at the idea of a doctor using ChatGPT, but AlphaFoldseems generally amazing, and AI applications in weather and climate research or other fields dealing with chaotic systems seem likewise useful and promising. ↩ \[5\] Conveniently, this also allows the companies to eschew responsibility when we believe that their programs "went rogue" instead of understanding that the company failed to deploy sufficient security restrictions and detection monitoring. (See also) ↩ \[6\] Now imagine if animals had the ability to use human language. I suspect we'd find it much harder to treat them the way we do, although we of course already hide all obvious signs of their suffering as best as we can and ignore those we can't hide. ↩ \[7\] Haha, as if you, me, Mr. Gibson, or the publishers had any say in the matter. Sure, it may be "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions, but what are we going to do—hold these companies accountable? Pffft. ↩ |
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