I found a video, How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping Humanity - With Dr. Paula Boddington (Jonathan Pageau, 02/18/2021) which provides analysis on lots of the ideas I started to explore here in this blog.

Notes with timestamps follow,

• 01:00—introduction to "pop science" conception of this topic; people coming up with "Codes of Ethics" for AI ("Artificial Intelligence"); in order to do this right, you have to get more fundamental issues clarified. For instance, what are people (and what are systems we call AI)
• 05:10—AI gets "personified"; "intelligence" viewed as the pinnacle of human existence
• 06:10—when do we want to replace humans? enhance humans? clearing a landmine is a good use-case for not using a human. but what about enhancing humans? bias towards the "cognitive"
• 07:10—image of golem; popular in 19th c w/ Frankenstein and stuff. It is a kind of mirror; reflects our ideas of morality. Making people "better" usually means something like... adding power/capacity.
• 08:30—"AI dethroning humans"; anthropological issue of the place of humans relative to other things and creatures in the world
• 09:30—What are humans being "dethroned" at? Obviously, we have machines that can travel faster than people, lift heavier objects, etc. Is winning at chess/go/etc similar?
• 10:20—"underdog/revolutionary" story dominant in the West. Desire for AI takeover, alien takeover... cuckolding? Stories from Greeks
• 11:30—technical impossibility of "general intelligence"; beyond this issue is what people believe is true. We don't even know if other people are conscious; how can we tell that machines are? We operate in the world with assumptions about how stuff works. e.g. we assume people are more important than animals
• 13:50—idols as the creation of a body to host intelligence
• 14:40—we trust big tech in the same way the ancients trusted their gods; system set up so you are forced to interact with these entities
• 16:00—some people looking forward to "superintelligence", others afraid—a false dichotomy in that we're already in this system. Similar to in ancient times, through a "priestly caste" the will of these things is explained to us. Nowadays, this caste includes tech elites. Superior in understanding? Do you want to entrust your fate to them?
• 18:25—analogy of "ethics of weapon making"; can you impose an ethical system on AI? or, just recognize moral implications
• 20:20—the way we think about privacy is shaped by how we use technology. Technology is changing the way in which we interact with each other in its own image. There is a kind of parasitic relationship between info tech and people.
• 21:30—humans as "sex organs of the machine"; 22:30— however, we should also recognize the agency of tech oligarchs in operating/directing the machine
• 21:50—without the Internet, social media, etc the whole COVID phenomena we are experiencing now wouldn't be possible. Lock-downs wouldn't be possible.
• 24:20—"In reality, there was no lock-down. There were just middle class people hiding with working class people delivering stuff to them"
• 25:00—digital interactions strip lots of things from interactions—"body language", smells in the room, etc; we sense lots of things in places where we meet people
• 25:40—social media as entertainment brought to the person-to-person level
• 26:30—electricity, electricity going beyond our bodies
• 27:00—we can sense people looking at us. Animals too have all sorts of ways of perceiving. Digital tech is extremely focusing/limiting
• 28:00—digital interactions "clean up" interactions—this makes me think too of how all these cartoon avatars/profiles and stuff are popular. People are trying to get rid of the "messiness" of interactions
• 29:10—attention as the basis of reality; LIKE mechanism as a measure of attention. Quantifying attention.
• 30:20—attending to a person is a very complex thing. LIKE as a "currency of attention" is rather crude in that all sorts of ways of paying attention can be reduced to the same thing—all "likes" counted the same, regardless if some video/article/etc is life-changing or just seen in passing. quantity > quality
• 32:00—the system itself ("turning attention into currency") limits the extent to which ethics can be applied
• 33:40—reducing intelligence to quantity, mechanizing this—humans are treated like animals or machines
• 34:40—FB and Twitter recognized you get people via attention. Setting up a "false god" they didn't yet realize the way to optimize attention grabbing is by appealing to the "lizard-brain" (base passions)
• 36:00—intelligence comes from humans; human output is fed to machines. Horrendous jobs of content moderation. Actual people doing the labor; it is false to say machines are doing this. Rather, poorly paid people are
• 36:40—human intelligence is "farmed" and fed to machines
• 37:30—Unlike the film The Matrix, humans are being farmed for "intelligence" rather than body/heat
• 38:00—whole system is really "energy hungry"; rather than having endless leisure because machines do all the labor for us, what do we find?
• 39:50—Genie and the wish; people wanted something, but didn't think of the side effects
• 40:00—"hate speech" detection. Can machines detect irony? Or all the people that inform the machine algorithms? Can you get rid of "bias" to begin with? Cultural issues!
• 41:15—social media itself fuels the creation of "hate speech". People are trying to control a thing they themselves created. Anonymization, physical distance, and so on gives people more opportunity to unleash darker aspects of themselves. Efforts to control these problems (online) end up spilling out into "normal society". Things like "dogpiling" in comments sections don't occur so often in normal interactions. Unfair oustings also less common.
• 43:45—weird "appeal process". How can you appeal some action if you don't even know what you're being accused of? Opaque rules
• 44:50—people working on problems of "hate speech" have certain assumptions; they don't seem to realize how these rules might be applied to them
• 46:30—contradiction. Unification with the dominance of a particular sort of English. E-mail autocompletion. On the other hand we see fragmentation, e.g. in the multiplication of different gender categories. Marginalized groups have their voices amplified so they appear as larger portions of society than they actually comprise. This in turn leads to more attention against these people.
• 50:20—weird upside down world "created" to combat "hate"; margin has to be promoted in this inverted hierarchy. "Activists" boosted in this attention economy.
• 52:00—AI effectively boosts the power of the leading players; e.g. What appears on the first page of Google? people are fighting over this. Clearly there are people behind this.
• 52:50—handwavy explanation of "Oh, it's the algorithm"; we know this isn't true and that people bake their biases into things... Is there even such a thing as an "unbiased view of the world"?
• 53:50—problem isn't getting rid of bias, but rather imposing your bias on others. Refusing to acknowledge problems... imagining things are more "equal" when in fact there is just a different hierarchy.
• 55:40—are emotions seen as the problem? ironic because the whole system is based on manipulating emotions; AI are better because they don't have emotions, yet they exploit our emotions?
• 57:00—relationship of tech companies to politics. Tech company people are unelected! This is compounded by lock downs where we're all forced to look at screens for a long time each day. A totalitarian system.
• 58:20—we shouldn't despair. Some people have tried to set up alternatives (and then we see these got attacked); it seems control from big tech is extremely strong... 1:01:00—but maybe people are getting ready to "let out". Studying AI technology can be like a mirror reminding us to look at what we (people) are.
• 1:00:00—taken for granted that private conversations are "shady"
• 1:03:00—lots of work on AI ethics stuff is "utilitarian" or "consequentialist"; definitions of intelligence like "being able to take steps to reach goals" (instrumentalist type view). "Enlightenment" ideas of rationalism/reason, like Steven Pinker type stuff.
• 1:04:40—but we can have lower and higher goals; understanding intelligence in terms of goals might be fine, but we have to consider what sorts of goals we can have, and to identify quality.
• 1:09:05—we need to realize that we still have free will; we should use our will and also think about what sorts of lives we want to live