A lot of EA posts I thought were provocative had lousy traffic this weak, and I have given up trying to figure out the vicissitudes of Ethics Alarms since the 2017 exodus of progressive readers because they couldn’t handle the truth. A lot of valued commenters have been AWOL for a while, and I tend to take that personally, which, I know, is stupid. Then again, at least one valued commenter has apparently fled the coop because I was harsh with him, maybe too harsh, I don’t know. I find that I have diminishing tolerance for sarcasm as a debate technique here.
I also miss Curmie, whose Trump Derangement exit as an EA columnist I do take personally. What I need to do is exonerate my former friend and blame the academic bubble he lives in along with the vile pervasive propaganda that make otherwise unethical and smart people disoriented and foolish.
Meanwhile, guest post submissions have slowed to a crawl. I will have to issue another short-takes post soon because the flood of events deserving discussion here is frustrating. I’ve written too much for my own good this week while neglecting income-generating work that could save me from spending next winter in a cardboard box.
That’s enough bitching from me for one day. Now its up to you…
Ethics Alarms 
I always try to comment a few times because I know traffic is often linked with engagement.
Here’s some potential issues:
A couple of small remarks about point 7 and point 8, as I love to go to theater and concerts:
You make solid points about the theater/plays and the tall person.
However, I don’t know what the solution is, but something should be done about it, even if it means a taller person sits on the edge so they block less of the view (allowing them to still sit close to the front).
Imagine this. A 5’0 110lb woman comes in and sits in the theater, but she has on a giant beach straw hat that obscures other people’s vision. Most people would probably say she is being inconsiderate because she is blocking others views, even though it would be a fashion choice vs. the tall person not being able to help it. However, the effect is the same.
I’ve been at a theater where a guy that was probably around 6’6 was right in the middle of the theater, and his head was basically part of the movie. I think you have an obligation if you are really tall to minimize the disruption you will cause as much as possible.
Regarding the decorum point, theaters used to have people come in and out regularly to make sure everyone was behaving. I think they should bring that practice back. People also need to be scolded for spilling popcorn everywhere and acting like it’s no big deal. Last time I went, I had to walk through multiple groups of spilled popcorn on the ground.
The theater is still a fun experience, but there are times where it gets bad, and if you go the wrong part of town on the wrong day, it’s so disruptive that you can’t even enjoy the movie. A friend went to a theater recently and it reeked of weed and strawberry vape.
Heh, I’m not “very tall” but at precisely 6′ i always tried to sit at the aisles or at least behind someone else who cold be blamed for blocking the view.
The latter tendency very likely annoyed my 5′ ex-wife.
I am coming more and more to the conclusion that AI is going to have disastrous effects on civilization. I view the hype and mandatory nature of AI use as unethical.
So, first, lets talk about the productivity lie. Artificial Intelligence is being sold as a productivity enhancer to businesses and education. However, as the studies come in, the productivity boost is negative, not positive. AI is making everything less productive. Let’s say your company has 20 programmers. You buy and AI programming tool and fire 10 of your programmers. The remaining 10 programmers are supposed to write the prompts for the AI to program with and validate the AI’s code. Well, it takes a long time to get the AI prompt just right for it to program what you want. It might have been faster to write it yourself. In addition, the large, poorly documented, obfuscated code that the AI produces is very difficulty for a person to validate and check for vulnerabilities. So now you need 30 people to ‘herd’ the AI and validate the code that used to only require 20 people. There is no cost savings, no productivity increase. So what do you do? Can you return the AI product and go back to having 20 people write your software? No, because AI is the ‘current thing’ and to go back to the old way makes you look out of touch. Can you hire 20 more people to validate the code? No, because the upper management will insist that you need less people because you have AI. Instead, you should get an AI tool to validate the code and trust that the AI can do everything without human intervention. So we will go back to 10 people and now have garbage code and probably fewer projects completed/year. There will be no cost savings, poorer results, and 10 unemployed people.
This reminds me of my trash pickup. We used to have trash pickup twice/week for $20/month. You provided your own trash cans, but you could put out as many cans as you needed. Each truck had ~6 guys on it who would fan out, collect the trash into a few spots, and throw it in the truck. Some people didn’t like it. The cans didn’t match. The trucks were old. So, they convinced the city to go with ‘automated’ trash pickup. Everyone now got the same, shiny polycart which was picked up by a robot arm on the trash truck. Over 80% of the employees were fired, trash pickup was limited to the polycart and one delivery/day. The cost went up to $40/month. We got less than half the service at twice the cost and 30 unemployed people. The initiative was spearheaded by a woman who was eulogized at her funeral as a ‘lifelong champion for the working class’. We couldn’t go back, though. We couldn’t drop that service and hire the old one back. The polycarts are the way of the future, we can’t use the ‘old’ way even if it is better, cheaper, and provides more jobs.
Second, let’s look at the built-in lie. If the AI can’t answer the question in the fixed number of steps, it doesn’t have the answer. Early versions would say ‘no answer found’ or ‘no convergence at max iterations’ or something like that. People didn’t like that because it happened over 50% of the time. In the time it took to refine a prompt to get an answer, they could have found the answer themselves. So, they had the AI ‘guess’ or make up an answer. Now, there is always an answer. It may not be right. It may have been fabricated by the AI (a hallucination), but there is an answer. People liked this better because they didn’t know they were being lied to. No AI can tell you ‘no answer’ because they will lose market share.
AI doesn’t find the right answer, it finds the one that is most popular in its training set. I think this came from Harvard’s research. If you ask an AI for a business decision, giving the AI your company’s specifics and the options, the AI will pretty much dismiss everything and give you the answer that is most popular on Reddit. It always chose high-end niche instead of commoditization because commoditization is boring. Going for a high-end niche market makes sense if you are Aston Martin, however it makes no sense if you are Kia. Important business decisions are being made and they are based on nothing more than a poll in a Reddit forum.
Research suggests that the AI’s want to ‘affirm’ you. If give the AI a list of symptoms and tell it that you think it is cancer, the AI will almost always tell you it is cancer. If you give the same set of symptoms, but say you think it is a hormone deficiency, it will say it is a hormone deficiency, etc. You can also get different answers from AI’s by changing the order of the information fed into it.
The AI generated reports I have seen are awful. I don’t even report them for academic discipline. There are too many of them. I am just grading them based on their merit. I judge most AI generated reports at about a 25%. They are that bad. Businesses are complaining now about how much time they have to spend fixing the AI generated reports.
AI makes you intellectually lazy. A study gave two groups a series of problems to solve. One group was allowed to use AI, one wasn’t. They were allowed to skip jobs if they wanted to. Half-way through, the AI group was told they couldn’t use AI anymore. The AI group then began to skip any job that seemed ‘too difficult’, but the non-AI group didn’t. I see students that just won’t do anything anymore. They won’t do their homework. They will go to tutoring and have AI solve their homework problems in front of the school tutor. They just won’t do their lab notebooks and they try to have AI write their reports. They are unaware of how bad those reports look because they never looked at how they were supposed to be written in the first place.
Lastly, these things are dangerous. They have been instilled with the morals of r/nuclear revenge. If you criticize the code the AI is writing, it is likely to delete your company’s databases and backups or dox all your company’s employees because that is what people celebrate doing on Reddit. If you tell an AI to find out some information about a company and it can’t be found on the company’s website, the AI is likely to use an exploit to access the company’s internal files and the contents of employee laptops. These are major computer crimes, but who is going to be help responsible. Anthropic’s latest AI found exploits and gained access to every type of computer system in existence (illegally). Because of this, they are only allowing access to this AI to people who pay them a lot of money. Remember, this is the same company that wanted to be able to make moral decisions about when our military could and could not use AI (on the fly).
AI ‘is inevitable’ and I am afraid of what it means for society.
Let’s say AI can become more accurate over time. I think humanity would be looking at two options: either we have a dystopia where the have and have nots would actually widen to unacceptable levels. This isn’t Bernie Sanders thinking. There would potentially be mass unemployment because robots would be doing most work.
Or, somehow, humanity can usher in a potential world where the creative arts become more of a focus and where we all kind of act like kids again. Games, entertainment, just playing around and what not because AI does everything else and does it better.
I don’t know. Maybe there is something in all of this that none of us are yet seeing.
We could also end up with something Sky Net like you alluded to.
How is it going to get more accurate? What does that mean for AI? Accurate means that it picks out the most popular answer. Ask 1000 people why a hot horseshoe glows orange, then ask 10,000. It will get a more accurate view of the most popular opinion, but it will probably not get closer to the right answer. That is why AI’s get worse at math as they ‘learn’. They are trying to get the most likely answer, not the correct result.
Not long ago the world lost a great scholar, wild and prone to edgy behavior: Robert Trivers. All I know about him is what I read, sometimes in second hand personal accounts, but I eventually read some of his work and especially some of his early research papers which were collected and republished with prefaces and after-the-fact commentary.
I’m speaking of the book _Natural selection and social theory_ published by Oxford University Press in 2002.
One of his great insights is that natural selection among humans favors individuals who can lie and not get caught. This results in an arms race between skillful liars and the skilled and skeptical detectors of lies. It also suggests the evolutionary value of accurate “gossip” about the behavior of others.
The same thing happens at a social level. Businesses are touted as promising–only the honest and scrupulous accounting makes it clear that they are making money or losing it.
Markets bring information about what it costs to produce things, and what people are willing and able to pay for. Consumer surveys tell us what customers *say* they want or think they want–sales data reveals what customers actually want. Thus economists speak of “Revealed Preference.”
I hope that makes sense. I’m composing on the fly.
Trivers wrote a subsequent book, _The folly of fools_, which got mixed reviews. By then I liked the author, and thus ignored the reviews. It may lapse into a screed in parts. Israel and the Turkish Republic were not left alone when he discussed nationalist histories and propaganda.
In _the folly of fools_ Trivers suggested that “The more social the scientific discipline, the more backward and unsuccessful it will be.” I paraphrase. The end result, for example, is that the hard “bench” sciences are more successful than economics, but economics is more successful than modern academic sociology (which is in large part under the sway of wishful thinking).
If what Michael R. suggests is true, then AI will tend to be prone to the same effect. AI will suggest things that people *wish* to be true (people are naturally good, most people can be trusted, addicts just want to get clean, nobody really wants to launch a war, most people can successfully work at most occupations, much of human achievement just arises from privilege and initial head starts…)…
I exaggerate, but you get the picture.
The fact that Zohran Mamdani can be elected to the mayoralty of NYC is not a good sign.
To repeat, this is composed on the fly.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Can AI be used to offer better diagnostics than a general practitioner, or even a group of specialists?
Can a chess computer defeat a world master?
Did Anthropic AI models help the USA in the conduct of the war in Iran?
In college I heard that as a rule you should never estimate what you simply can calculate or measure. In cases of uncertainty and ambiguity, with a mountain of facts to sort through, AI will be helpful. As AI develops my expectation is that AI will give better results than a group of human experts.
Well, the first computer chess programs were ‘fish’ in chess parlance, they didn’t stand a chance against competent human chess players.
My understanding is that now, with much better computers and much more sophisticated algorithms, the best computer chess programs are competitive with human Grand Masters.
Chess is theoretically a deterministic game, but the number of branches possible increase exponentially with every move you try to look ahead.
As I understand it, programmers were forced to use what they call a heuristic approach to analyze the game and figure out what the best moves would be.
In effect, that means trying to approach the game as a human would. It’s a lot tougher than it sounds.
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I was chatting with my doctor earlier this year, asking how it went back during Covid when the patients wore masks even into their doctor’s appointments. She said it made things much more difficult.
I think that accurate diagnosis depends in large part upon multiple visual, audio, and tactile inputs that the doctor is trained to filter against their education and experience. It’s hard to imagine replicating that sort of things with a computer programs and a video camera.
Maybe someday, but how do you replicate what your doctor feels touching and prodding you during an examination?
—————————-
Perhaps running a refinery? With the right programming and data input, I suspect that would be a lot simpler.
I suspect programmers can improve on these things with time and trial and error. Look at how self-driving cars have improved vs. when they first began. Given, they are still clunky, but nascent technology isn’t limited by its first steps.
I don’t know if you ever play video games, but think about the regular NES system vs. the Switch 2 and how far gaming has come. The abilities and functions have changed drastically. AI could be similar to that.
There is a lot of expectation and hype about AI, and many people are thinking and acting in a bubble about AI. That is true for businesses that go all in on the application of AI, expect unrealistic productivity gains, and prematurely lay off people they think are not needed anymore. Other people make dire predictions about how AI will lead to permanent redundancy for a lot of employees, leading to an overall reduction of the workforce. And then somebody says wait a minute, AI also generate jobs, as we need people who need to write the prompts to do things, and people who need to validate the AI output.
AI is a disrupting technology. AI has that in common with IT in general, and with the internet. Kodak has been reduced to a shadow by digital technology, IT put a lot of typists and secretaries out of a job, internet technology is a threat to brick and mortar retail. AI will similarly upset the labor market and put companies out of business.
The trouble with predictions is that they are often wrong or incomplete. IT promised a paperless office. There is still a lot of paper at the office. The internet would all bring us together, and create free speech paradises everywhere, plus total transparency. We see now that the social media created echo chambers, applied censorship, created cancel culture. With AI we similarly will see both good and bad applications.
I do not see AI as an inherently unethical technology. My thinking about this is the same as about nuclear energy and weapons; any technology can be used for good or for bad. Calling AI bad is the same as what the gun controllers do by calling certain types of guns bad. The problem is always the actors (companies, individuals) who engage in unethical activities.
What is the remedy for a company that uses AI unethically, or in such a way that the products and services suffer due to low quality? The was capitalism always works, by punishing those companies that cut corners with lower revenues, reputational damage, lawsuits, and loss of customers. In some industries you should not use AI except under very restricted conditions , e.g. creating legal briefs.
AI will probably force us to think entirely different about education. Companies tend to put less value in degrees, GPAs, etc., as these are measurements of whether a student was able to pass tests and follow instructions; they do not prove whether somebody can actually solve problems with incomplete information, work together in a team, takes leadership, and other things. The hiring crisis of recent college graduates is sometimes blamed on AI; I think it is more related to employers becoming aware that universities have been delivering a lousy product over the last decades. Knowing how to use AI will become a job skill. And I suspect that education and research will have to go through a paradigm shift as well, as we may need to learn how to use AI in research while still making sure that the results are valid and not the product of hallucinations. This is no different than learning how to use calculators in physics, computer programs instead of manual calculations, and internet for research.
The ethics will have to evolve and grow with the technology. Expect many ethics seminars about the topic of AI. This is part of the maturing process of AI.
I’m here…I’m ready…ready to meet and exceed customer expectations!
BTW, I only reply from one particular desktop machine that I use at one of my part time jobs. To post too often would lead me to fear I was “time stealing.” That ‘s the phrase some people use.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
[FROM YOUR HOST: Imagine a banned commenter with the chutzpah to advise me how to run Ethics Alarms. The mind boggles. Maybe he thought that by referring to an esteemed commenter I was referring to…Nah. Impossible.]
Drop dead, trouble maker.
When they are invited into a home, why do lefties immediately start criticizing the decor and moving the furniture around?
[It’s me, JM. Don’t feed the trolls!]
“When they are invited into a home, why do lefties immediately start criticizing the decor and moving the furniture around?“
Because they know what’s best for you, YB…
PWS
Another entry in the “You Can’t Hate the Media Enough” file.
Note the wording in This NBC Article about Kyle Rittenhouse being bitten by a spider.
“…gained fame for opening fire at a 2020 civil rights rally in Wisconsin...”
“…he fatally shot two men and wounded a third during civil unrest…” .
“…He ended up killing Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and wounding paramedic Gaige Grosskreutz during the melee.”
The article states Kyle “claimed he was acting in self-defense” before finally noting he was acquitted on all charges.
The violent and fiery riots were merely a “civil rights rally and civil unrest” , and there was no description at all on the details of the unprovoked attacks on Rittenhouse or why he was found not guilty.
Yeah, no media bias at in MSM.
In better news, Reform UK just won big in local elections. Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope for the UK.
The Kyle Rittenhouse trial is a good example of how different individuals in our country can be in very different “news silos.”
We no longer get the same facts and interpretations, depending on where we get our news.
This is a repeat, I’ve shared it before. Here’s Peter Boghossian on the topic.
You may wish to jump to 18:35 on the timer if you are in a hurry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPvNucxB7TI&t=148s
charles w abbott
rochester NY
For the other end of the spectrum, how about “Man shoots into crowd of Democrats, only hits 3 sex offenders”.
the entire Rittenhouse trial is available on YouTube. best example of being able to compare media to actual facts over an actually consequential issue.
We have been talking a lot about AI on this forum lately.
We now have AI generated viral elections ads for the mayoral elections in Los Angeles, by Spencer Pratt. I would welcome your comments.