Jaron Lanier – Who is Civilization for? (+ Q&A with Ulrich Kelber) Willy Brandt Lecture 2018

The best proposal I’ve heard to deal with the societal/economic problems this sort of A.I. poses were made by Jaron Lanier: ▶ this video …I can see why his proposals of providing (micro-)compensation to people whose tremendous efforts end up being mined by these algorithms would not be popular with researchers/companies who stand to benefit vastly (…presumably including the investors who own this site?). The lobbying power/political power/ awareness/financial resources of your average (atomised) artist/programmer/musician etc. is pretty much nil in comparison… Forgive the clumsy analogy, but I have a feeling the whole thing might end up something like a haulage company that doesn’t want to pay any taxes to help fix the roads though?

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First I wanted to say I'm not trying to guilt trip you or anything, I admit I wrote my response quickly and didn't think it would attract this much attention. So just wanted to let you know I value your views and am not trying to put you down! > That doesn't really answer the question though. If knowingly making society worse were the standard for feeling shame, I think I'd be too depressed and shame-ridden to even get out of bed. I mean, you want to talk about damaging society: every single day I get into my car and burn fossil fuels on my commute to/from work, which is essentially slowly killing the planet. I know it's bad for society, but I do it anyway. Knowingly. On purpose. Can you imagine how psychopathic I am to treat society with such casual disregard? I think you bring up a good idea here. I recently came across a lecture by Jaron Lanier that discusses this kind of thinking and how to reason about it. > I came up with an image to help me think about who the beneficiary is of our activities, whether we're engineers or writers or anything else, and I called this the 'circle of empaty'.... Those who are inside the circle are the beneficiaries of what you do, and anything inside the circle deserves your empathy. Things outside the circle perhaps don't deserve your antagonism but on the other hand they're not the beneficiaries of what you do. So I hope that people believe that all human beings should be inside the circle. That's not always the case; there are racists and

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About Minsky being too optimistic: "I would tell Marvin this whole AI thing is just horrible. Why are we doing it? And he would say it will be effective for getting our grants, so shut up and just play along and in fact, it was true. It was very good for getting grants back in the early days, in the 70's was when I started at this, you would go to a grant making organization such as the Defense Department, you'd say we're going to build this super smart thing and if we don't do it, our enemies might and it'll get smarter than people and it was Okay, here's your money, here's your money, oh my God, you better... and so it was very effective. And actually, the whole thing started off as storytelling to get grants" ▶ this video

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