34C3 - Dude, you broke the Future!
media.ccc.de4 HN recommenders · 2018–2024
42K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2017-12-27
Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.
HN returns to it whenever corporations as paperclip-maximizer AIs or AI risk come up.
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7 comments from Hacker News
Charles Stross read the text at the 34C3. If you want to listen to it rather than read it: [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] EDIT: Sorry, the read mode on mobile did not show the embedded video.
You could say the same about a credit card skimmer on an ATM. It's passive, right? It's just a sensor that sits there and absorbs people's data. I don't think this argument makes a lot of sense. The point is, there needs to be some law and order in place so that when people abuse this tech to harm people and society and get caught, there's some precedent to stop them and punish them. It doesn't matter if the technology is passive. The intent and action to use it to harm people are not passive and are not analogous to thought crime at all. There is dire need for regulation with a lot of emerging technologies right now. We're building systems with enormous power which can break human society if misused. I think the intangibility and "passivity" of this tech (or at least how it is perceived) gives us a very false sense of security. Like how a few decades ago very few average people could understand how the internet might have a great impact on society. Obviously they aren't thinking that way anymore. Check out Charles Stross's speech at C3 about regulatory lag relative to the the accelerated nature of tech growth: [VIDEO]
This reminds me a lot of Charles Stross' talk at 34C3, where he described corporations and competition between them as "human-powered AIs" that maximize profit as their only goal, similar to how a neural network only blindly minimizes a loss function. [VIDEO]
For another take on this corporations ≈ ai idea, I cannot recommend enough Charles Stross' 34C3 talk on this very topic. [VIDEO] (picks up approx 10mins in).
> I don't think the author literally believe corporations are AGIs In the video questions section he confirms he means literal. [VIDEO] Look at HN as an AI, you can ask a very complex question and get a very complex answer, it's AGI. 4chan can send humans out to do its real world physical bidding. It can literally get people shot. These are very complex AI's.
Obligatory mention of Charles Stross' talk where he knits together exactly those two thoughts. "Dude, you broke the future": [VIDEO]
Talk that introduced me to this idea of corporations as Paperclip Maximiser AI - "Dude you broke the Future" [VIDEO]