Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2024 July 17

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 17

AI abundance vs. AI servitude

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Just to be clear, I am not asking a question about a prediction, I am asking a question about the finer points (data, evidence) that supports the techno-libertarian idea behind the theory that Elon Musk promotes, for example, when he says "AI would eventually replace all jobs on Earth, making employment optional and transforming jobs into hobbies as AI and robots would provide all necessary goods and services." My question relates to the bolded text. Why is this sunny outcome even considered likely, when the historical reality shows that a darker, dystopian Elysium-like outcome is far more likely to occur, where most of humanity is forced into dire poverty amidst deteriorating environmental and social conditions, while the wealthy who benefit from AI escape to their own walled gardens and new societies free from the teeming masses? Again, I’m not asking about a prediction about the future, I’m asking on what basis are we supposed to accept the idea that AI will benefit humanity? The technological innovation of agriculture clearly didn’t benefit the masses of humanity, and likely enslaved the great majority of them in some form or another. Why will AI be any different? Viriditas (talk) 02:46, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

I want to add something else. I’ve recently been working on several articles about the history of pineapple. One of the most interesting things I discovered within this 500 year time frame, was that the best tasting pineapple varieties were for the most part extirpated. It turns out that there is an inverse relationship between taste and commercial viability (canning size, preservation, etc). In other words, what we know as commercial pineapple in the modern era is representative of the worst tasting pineapple cultivars, but those also happened to be the easiest to grow, produce, and distribute, hence the reason they were chosen and the others were discarded and disappeared (Side note, this may be true for all fruit varieties, I don’t know, but there was a recent article that implied the same holds true for commercial strawberries and blueberries). Why would this kind of thing not also happen with AI, such that the most beneficial AI tailored to help humanity progress to a post-scarcity society would be weeded out to serve the interests of resource extraction and scarcity instead? Viriditas (talk) 03:05, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

The current pineapple you find in stores is in no way the worst tasting pineapple. There are many varieties that taste far worse. Some taste like chewing on wet grass. Similarly, the avacado you can purchase in a store is nowhere close to the worst tasting avacado. Both of these are not "easy" to cultivate. Pineapple is very difficult to cultivate and requires a lot of land and labor, which is why you don't see pineapple farms everywhere. Avacados are even harder to cultivate. It is possible that there is a relative to both the pineapple and avacado that tastes better, but implying that we only cultivate the worst tasting fruits to increase profits is not justified. Another example is the tomato. A much easier to cultivate tomato was developed, but it tasted terrible. So, it was abandoned. As for the overall claim that AI will create a few rich and many poor, there were few rich and many poor in the beginning of recorded history. They had oral traditions talking about the few rich and many poor long before recorded history. Throughout all of history, humans have created nations with a few rich and many poor. Why wouldn't the future be a world of a few rich and many poor? That isn't the result of AI. That is the result of humans. A few rich exploit the many poor until conditions are so bad that the poor overthrow the rich and replace them with a new group of few rich. Alternately, a few rich in one area get their many poor to fight with the many poor of another area so they can take away from another minority of rich. If humans were studied like we study all other animals, this would be labeled normal human behavior. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 11:16, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

My source was Johanna Lausen-Higgins of Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. She's notable for her hands on work on the Lost Gardens of Heligan. She's a horticulturist and garden historian who studied at Bristol University. In the event that I misrepresented her, and it sounds like I did, here's a transcription of her 2020 lecture:

So the first classification that was done was by [Donald Monroe?] in 1835, and he lists around 52 different cultivars, many of which are thought to be lost now. And, this modern cultivar, iconically named [51MD?], really shows why many of these cultivars are lost now. [You've] got all the attributes of easier handling: you've got a smooth edge to the leaf, but also if you look at the outline of the fruit, it's basically been bred to fit neatly into a tin can, [so] cutting machines could cut equal slices with minimal loss...but the cultivars that were particularly favored in the 18th and 19th centuries, [are] very different. [You] see this strongly tapering outline to the fruit. And in the case of Sugarloaf and Queen...they also have very strongly outward protecting fruitlets. Which again is something that is not favored in the canning industry. And again, I can tell you the flavors are so incredible in these different old cultivars. So Abacaxi, so "Black Prince" now, a lost cultivar, is probably an Abacaxi type, actually has white flesh and really unusual, subtle flavors. You can still read in modern treatises on the pineapple, that Smooth Cayenne...this is the one that dominates the trade, has by far the poorest flavour. It's got the highest acidity and also possibly the highest amount of bromelain. Whereas Queen or Sugarloaf, which were particularly favoured as well...the aroma and the flavours are extraordinary.

Thanks. Viriditas (talk) 23:13, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Throughout all of history, humans have created nations with a few rich and many poor. Why wouldn't the future be a world of a few rich and many poor...If humans were studied like we study all other animals, this would be labeled normal human behavior.

Forgive me, but this sounds identical to an appeal to tradition. It's also the same argument abolitionists were met with when they opposed slavery. They were told that slavery was natural, and it was normal, and even that god approved of it. They were also told that they were going against the natural order of things in their opposition to it. Viriditas (talk) 23:17, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Example: Thomas Roderick Dew (1802–1846) professor, public intellectual, president of The College of William & Mary (1836-1846). Best known for his pro-slavery advocacy based on his belief that blacks were racially inferior, "defending slavery based on race as consistent with the natural order". Viriditas (talk) 01:23, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I do not see it as an appeal to tradition. It is refuting the precedent. Your claim appears to be that because of AI, the future will change so that there will be a minority of rich people and a majority of poor people. That is refuted by stating that there has always been a minority of rich people and a majority of poor people. Therefore, the precent that the result is because of AI is invalid. You can make any claim you want. Because (whomever gets elected in November) the future will have a rich minority and poor majority. Because the Simpsons was signed for another season, the future will have a rich minority and a poor majority. Because Beyonce went into country music, the future will have a rich minority and a poor majority. etc... It isn't an appeal to tradition. It is a statement of history which should lead you to refine your claim. Because of AI, how will the rich minority and poor majority change? Will the minority become smaller? Will the gap widen, which is already does every generation? How much AI is required to make the change you are discussing? 75.136.148.8 (talk) 15:03, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't think its refuted at all. You're ignoring the rise of economic inequality over the last several centuries. What I think you are doing is ignoring recent history. And this is, in fact, what all the discussion about AI focuses on.[1][2] So, I just find your comment a bit odd. Your comments are also highly reminiscent of all the discussions I've had with right-libertarians who refuse to accept there's even a problem and see the nation state and democracy as the true threat. Most of these types of people don't accept the concept of wealth disparity or income inequality and think it should be ignored. Viriditas (talk) 21:57, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

IMO bringing in this fruit analogy does not help to clarify the central issue. The best tasting varieties were not "extirpated" and are mostly still available – only not in your local supermarket. Growing and transporting produce requires resources, which have a limited capacity. Capacity is unlikely to be a major limiting factor in deploying beneficial AI. If AI and robots provide all necessary goods and services, no one will have an income to buy them. Can one expect the profit-driven owners of the means of production to make them available to all for free? Why should they do that? They'll be happy when they themselves are provided with all necessary goods and services and have no incentive for extending this to the rest of us.  --Lambiam 12:13, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

The example I was aiming for with the fruit analogy was to try and show that the agricultural preference for viable, commercial fruit that led one to select a certain variety for its qualities related to growing, packaging, shipping, and shelf stability, are comparably the same kind of commerical qualities we might expect with human-driven, artificial selection in AI development, leading to something like an algorithmic bias favoring poor outcomes for humanity, much as the flavor and palatability was selected against with the commerical dominance of Smooth Cayenne. According to Wikipedia "Smooth Cayenne is now the dominant cultivar in world production." Viriditas (talk) 23:45, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

I agree that historical precedents suggest rather strongly and convincingly that the most powerful people are not likely to give up their relatively privileged position voluntarily and will even resort to brutal measures to stay on top. Total control over the use of AI will make it much easier for the rulers of the world to remain the most powerful. They will need us no longer, so something drastic is necessary to save humanity from getting stuck in an Elysium-like future, one I'm afraid Matt Damon will be of little help getting us out of.  --Lambiam 11:49, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

I guess my followup question is this: why do Musk and others in the tech community keep repeating this line? Are they merely hopeful, technological utopians, or are they deliberately lying? Hacker News has thousands upon thousands of comments by people in the tech industry insisting that AI will make jobs a thing of the past and everyone will have leisure time to pursue their own hobbies. The thing is, I'm familiar with the older literature. People have been saying this for a little over a century. It never happened, but what did happen was the complete opposite: human productivity was expected to increase just as industrialization maximized output, resulting in less leisure time than in the past. In fact, the conventional wisdom now is that feudal serfs had more leisure time 500 years ago than modern workers do today. So are people deliberately lying about AI or are they just delusional? Finally, if you're familiar with Musk, then you know his position is that humanity needs to merge with the machine as a cyborg. That's literally his answer, I'm not making this up. Why am I the only person who finds this unacceptable? If you're the least bit familiar with science fiction, the evil scientist who somehow convinces the public to become cyborgs always ends up removing their individuality and exerting complete control over them. Surely, someone else has pointed this out? Viriditas (talk) 00:01, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Just to add a bit to the cyborg argument: my understanding as to why Musk and others make this argument comes down to this: 1) They believe that humanity has evolved or gone as far as it can go without being threatened with extinction by machine intelligence 2) They believe that one way to insure survival into the foreseeable future is to compromise by becoming part-machine and merging with it as a kind of cyborg 3) This idea almost seems to contradict their assertion that we won’t need to work and everybody will have access to abundant resources 4) Newer data indicates that AI consumes far too many resources and energy requirements that makes it a direct threat to human existence. 5) See 1. Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Viriditas (talk) 03:53, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Hah, i recall an earlier question of yours concerning a passage in Consider Phlebas, did you continue past the cannibalism of the islanders living in a natural state to the comic passage of Horza delighting in his destruction of the shuttle AI?

I am going to question your understanding of history. If you believe that the technological innovation of agriculture clearly didn’t benefit the masses of humanity then i wonder what kind of metrics you are using to evaluate the human condition? History has been a very long path out of darkness, towards greater standards of living and more liberal societies. While i think you are correct to take a skeptical look at the AI hype, i don't think you have a historical argument for imagining a future where most of humanity is forced into dire poverty. Many live in dire poverty now, and poverty is widespread, but along with technological innovation there has been a substantial positive trend:

The chart shows that almost 10% of the world's population live in extreme poverty. It also tells us that two hundred years ago, the same was true for almost 80% of the world’s population. In 1820, only a small elite enjoyed higher standards of living, while the vast majority of people lived in conditions that we call extreme poverty today. Since then, the share of extremely poor people fell continuously. More and more world regions industrialized and achieved economic growth which made it possible to lift more people out of poverty: In 1950 about half the world were living in extreme poverty; in 1990, it was still more than a third. By 2019 the share of the world population in extreme poverty has fallen below 10%.

— Max Roser, "The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it", Our World in Data

If you have a basis for your fears i'm not sure how it comes from "historical reality". fiveby(zero) 01:40, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I think you misunderstood what you read. I was citing the famous passage from Harari, which I assumed everyone was familiar with by now considering how much it has been quoted. His argument is that we didn’t so much as master agriculture as it mastered us and turned us into slaves. Harari argues that we were the ones domesticated by the plants, which changed our lives from one of leisure to one of toil. Keep in mind, Harari is intentionally turning the conventional narrative on its head. He’s arguing that the agricultural revolution was not as great as we make it out to be. It destroyed our bodies with labor, it eliminated our leisure time, it gave us a poor diet, it was less economically secure than hunting and gathering, and if the monoculture was threatened or the climate changed, it killed millions of peasants. It offered less security due to the need to protect possessions and provisions. “Since we enjoy affluence and security, and since our affluence and security are built on foundations laid by the Agricultural Revolution, we assume that the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful improvement. Yet it is wrong to judge thousands of years of history from the perspective of today. A much more representative viewpoint is that of a three-year-old girl dying from malnutrition in first-century China because her father's crops have failed. Would she say 'I am dying from malnutrition, but in 2,000 years, people will have plenty to eat and live in big air-conditioned houses, so my suffering is a worthwhile sacrifice'?...Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud." Viriditas (talk) 02:01, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

From another POV, see Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983), which nicely illustrates the clash of civilizations in terms of agriculture. The colonists didn’t want to even try to understand how and why the indigenous people refused to settle down and stay put growing food on farms, aghast that they would even incorporate "lean times" into their worldview as an acceptable practice and normalized part of their life. Why don’t you just store food so you don’t have to go hungry, they would ask? The author investigates this question, finding that the nomadic, always on the move practice could have serious ecological benefits for the land, providing a kind of harmonious resiliency when things went well. Of course, when they didn’t, the risk of starving was very real. The book presents a very real look at an alternative way of life to agricultural farming in one place, perhaps a kind of living that has been entirely lost to history. And in spite of the ever present risks and dangers, there is a sense of a kind of special freedom and leisure that we no longer are aware of, one that has been lost to time. Viriditas (talk) 02:27, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Hah, i recall an earlier question of yours concerning a passage in Consider Phlebas, did you continue past the cannibalism of the islanders living in a natural state to the comic passage of Horza delighting in his destruction of the shuttle AI?

Yes, I made it all the way to the eighth book, Matter, which I have in front of me. I threw it against the wall after getting so depressed by the events in it. I made it halfway through. I do plan on picking it up again so I can finish up with Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata. One of the things I don't like is how Banks constantly reuses the same words and imagery. One of the things I do like, is how he manages to combine very serious drama, violence, and humor all in a single chapter. That's quite an achievement, and I can't quite recall another author successfully mixing all those elements together before. Viriditas (talk) 03:05, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

By positioning the upcoming robot revolution in a general setting of revolutionary cultural transitions, its unique character gets obscured. Read this article by Noah Smith: "Drones will cause an upheaval of society like we haven’t seen in 700 years", until its last sentence, "the age of freedom and dignity and equality that much of humanity now enjoys may turn out to have been a bizarre, temporary aberration."  --Lambiam 08:29, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. I think it's pretty obvious where this is going. This 2020 opinion piece from scholars around the world, "Do Democracy and Capitalism Really Need Each Other?" indicates to me, based on the trends that we are seeing, that AI will be used to eliminate democracy once and for all. It's also interesting to note how the philosophical impetus for cryptocurrency fits into all of this. Crypto was intended by anti-democractic libertarians to be used to bankrupt the state, paving the way for right-wing billionaires to take over and use AI to create a new world where they aren't taxed and where the general public works for them on corporate slave plantations (company towns) with no regulatory framework, no guarantee of human rights, and no public infrastructure for healthcare, safe water, food, or air, in an economy based on servicing the wealthy and powerful. Viriditas (talk) 21:56, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Little curiosity about 2016 Us election

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

If Hillary Clinton had won the Electoral College, in 2016, would there have been in reverse roles, faithless electors who would have prevented her election? Thanks. 2.35.188.164 (talk) 19:16, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

There is no way one can answer this question about a counterfactual hypothetical situation. There is no known reason to assume that some of the hypothetical pledged electors would have been faithless.  --Lambiam 19:51, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Please read Faithless elector which describes several such Clinton electors in the 2016 presidential election. These were, in effect, protest votes cast when it was clear that Trump had won. Personally, I doubt those protest votes would have been cast had Clinton won the Electoral College, but this is speculation about a hypothetical. Cullen328 (talk) 19:56, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

One can speculate about this counterfactual hypothetical, but there is no known reason to assume that some of the pledged electors in this hypothetical situation would have been faithless – unless Clinton had won by a landslide, but then any faithless electors would not have prevented her election. However, there are no known facts that imply it is impossible that many would have voted for Faith Spotted Eagle. Therefore there is no way one can answer this question.  --Lambiam 06:24, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

This is very complicated because the electors are ruled by state law, not federal law. The Supreme Court (Jan 2020) affirmed that electors fall completely under state law. Since then, states have taken more and more action to stop and punish faithless electors, including proposing laws to invalidate and replace a faithless elector's vote. In the end, it is state law, so any complete answer would require a discussion of how each state would be handled, along with the changes in the laws from year to year. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 20:30, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

An exhaustive discussion of how each potential case would have been handled in each of the several states, informed by the changes in their laws from day to day, will not be of help in answering he question.  --Lambiam 06:30, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

That's because, as you keep pointing out, nobody can ever say what would have happened if some event that didn't happen had happened. The closest we could ever get is reporting the opinion of some commentator about what would/might have happened. But that's just their opinion; no-one can say whether it would actually have happened that way or not. And that is why we do not entertain questions that call for hypothesis, speculation or debate. And that is why I'm closing this now. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:26, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.