Mo Gawdat discusses AI

A co-worker of mine sent me the following video with a strong recommendation. There are parts I liked, and parts I did not. It was a long video. The following are my notes on it. My attitude starts off pretty bad and gradually improves, then goes a bit downhill again.

YouTube

These people are all fools or shysters. The young guy (Stephen Bartlett?) interviewing offers as proof that AI is amazing is that his miniscule mind is already satisfied with it. *applause*

The older guy seems like the kind of guy who’s been smart his whole life and has developed an incredible inability to conceive of a world in which he could ever be wrong. He flatters the host by calling him one of the most intelligent people he’s ever met. What in God’s name is happening?

They seem to be on track to trying to convince the world that two geniuses agree that ChatGPT is the way to go.

Gawdat says at 33:15 that he could have ChatGPT write a book for him.

“The only reason why I might not want to follow that path is because, you know what? I’m not interested. I’m not interested to continue to compete in this capitalist world. As a human, I’ve made up my mind a long time ago that I will want less and less and less in my life.”

It’s a nice sentiment, but it’s also spoken by someone who’s rich beyond all of his desires. He doesn’t need to compete anymore because he’s already won.

This video is two multimillionaires having a two-hour conversation, massaging each other’s egos and not really saying anything new or interesting.

If AI can ruin our culture and society, it just means that we built a dumpster fire in the first place. It means that we have a system that values people and humans so little that it would prefer to deal with whatever happens to be the first feasible simulacrum of a human. It will be like letting the prokaryotes take back over.

Gawdat at 41:00, expressing his anger.

“We fucked up. We always said ‘don’t put them on the open Internet. Don’t teach them to code. And don’t have agents working with them. Until we know what we’re putting out in the world. Until we find a way to make sure that they have our best interests in mind. Humanity’s stupidity is affecting people who’ve done nothing wrong. Our greed is affecting the innocent ones. The reality of the matter, Stephen, is that this is an arms race. It has no interest in what the average human gets out of it. Every line of code being written in AI today is to beat the other guy. It’s not to improve the life of the third party.”

Not “Humanity”, but the “self-selected elites”. Once again, capitalism ruins everything.

And he would go on to basically say that the problem is not AI or LLMs or whatever: it’s the system of capitalism we have, the system of society that we have, that is so zero-sum that we can’t think in any terms other than to “win”.

Win what? No-one can really say. People just want to be feel secure, to see how they will not become insecure unfairly, that they are appreciated and rewarded for participating usefully, that they are given a chance to be useful, that they are entertained, that they can interact socially. That’s it.

There is nothing in there that says that everything must be “bigger, better, faster, more” All. The. Damned. Time.

In fact, the faster things get, the less likely it is that most people will be fulfilled. People’s fulfillment is almost completely out of their hands right now. They don’t know what they want anymore.

They have been convinced to want things that require a tremendous machine to produce, a machine that, coincidentally, also transfers most of the world’s wealth to a paltry few hands while convincing the rest of the world not to revolt by producing a few shiny baubles and trinkets.

At 41:45, Gawdat again:

“And people will tell you that this is all for you. And look at the reactions of humans to AI. We’re either ignorant: people who will tell you, oh no no, this is not happening. AI will never be creative, it will never compose music—where are you living? You have the “kids” (I call them): you have them all over the Internet, they say ‘oh my God, it squeaks, look at it. It’s orange in color! Amazing! I can’t believe that AI can do this!’ We have snake-oil salesman, who are simply saying, ‘copy this. Put it in ChatGPT, then go to YouTube, knick that thingie, don’t respect copyright or intellectual property of anyone, place it in a video, and now you’re going to make $100 a day. Plus, we have these token evangelists: basically, people who say, ‘this is it; the world is going to end’. I don’t think that is going to happen. You have your token evangelists, who are saying, ‘oh we’re going to do this, we going to cure cancer.‘ Again, not a reality. And you have a very few people who are saying, ‘what are we going to do about it?’”

In fairness, it is composing and painting and producing text, but the bar is so low that it’s not really competing with human endeavors. What it is, though, is filling a massive gap that had traditionally been filled with mediocre human endeavor. That will be gone.

In that sense—even though it is still not conscious and not intelligent—our shitty system will imbue it with enough importance that it will allow most of what is good about society to be eroded away over night before we can even think of stopping it.

Our structures for living good lives will be gone. The only difference with this AI “revolution” is that it’s now affecting the self-important elites. The other 90% of the world has already had this happen to them during the first 45 years of neoliberalism.

Gawdat again:

“What went wrong in the 20th century? Interestingly, we have given too much power to people who didn’t assume the responsibility. […] We have disconnected power and responsibility.”

“I feel compassion for the rest of the world. I feel that this is wrong. I feel that for someone’s life to be affected by the actions of others, without have a say in how those actions should be, is the ultimate, is the top-level of stupidity from humans.”

He’s really just describing how the world works for 95% of the population, though. This isn’t to say what he’s saying is wrong, but that he’s saying it now because there is finally a real danger that the elites will be swept up in the madness that they sow every day. With this crop of LLMs, there is a real danger that money cannot protect you. That is frightening to the powers-that-be.

I think the more interesting things he has to say are about our underlying system, which makes the prospect of introducing something like even a half-functioning AI so much more … difficulty to handle with grace.

At 1:00:00,

“It is here. This is what drives me mad. It’s already here. It’s happening. We are all idiots, slaves to the Instagram recommendation engine.”

HAHAHAHAHA. Not all of us. Not even most of us. There are way too many people on this planet who are not dealing with this horseshit.

Just as an aside, though, he says that “70 years later, we are still struggling with the possibility of a nuclear war, because of the Russian threat of saying, ‘if you mess with me, I’m going to go nuclear.‘” This just goes to show how woefully brainwashed even intelligent people are about the real world, the stuff that really matters. He is an Egyptian. His first example of nuclear brinkmanship is Russia, not the U.S. It’s incredible. As he’s discussing how we’re all slaves to an algorithm, he shows how even his big brain has been enslaved by America propaganda.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is convincing the world he didn’t exist.

A little later, Mo and Stephen make a few jokes about the evil Chinese and the evil North Koreans and how there would be no possibility for cooperation because of how evil those countries are. I’m shaking my head. These two are so in-the-tank ignorant about global politics and they think they can solve our problems for us? I shudder.

At 01:04:00, “They’re 1B times smarter than you.”

Um, Ok. Sure.

At 01:26:00, they discuss how to address this coming problem: their only solution is to work with the extremely restrictive incentives offered by the current system. I.e., what makes more money?

In fairness, this is most likely the correct way to approach the problem; we don’t have time to fix the system before we tackle the AIpocalypse, but, with the show clocking in at almost 2 hours, it would have been nice to acknowledge that the only reason their ensuing discussion is going to sound like a WSJ/conservative-think-tank/Silicon Valley startup round table is because we have to go to war with the army we have.

At 01:28:30, they talk about how international competition will always lead to other countries “letting it rip” with AI research/development, even if a country were to tax AI research/revenues in order to deal with the damage it causes. It’s the same as climate change.

Stephen says,

“It’s kind of like technology broadly; it’s kind of like what’s happened in Silicon Valley. There’ll be these senators who think that tax-efficient founders get good capital gains […] Portugal have said that there’s no tax on crypt … loads of my friends have got on a plane. And they’re building their crypto companies where there’s no tax.”

Hahahahaha. You should get better friends. Honestly.

He then bitches about GDPR as a failure because it’s “annoying”. Yeah, sure, if you just click away all of your data on every web site. The current implementation is a bit annoying, of course. But I’d rather have that than the alternative, which is that I don’t get any control over my data. The next step is to have the browser fill in GDPR automatically with your preferences: just as restrictive as possible, every time. Problem solved. Again, the problem here is parasites making money off of the CO2 that you produce.

At 01:43:00, Gawdat says,

“I don’t think we’ll be hiding from the machines; I think we’ll be hiding from what humans are doing with the machines. […] In the long term, when humans stop hurting humans because the machines are in charge, we’re all going to be fine.”

Sure, sure, OK. A bit of post-Communist luxury fantasizing. I’ll take it.