Musings Report 2018-27 7-8-18 Will AI "Change the World" Or Simply Boost Profits?
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Will AI "Change the World" Or Simply Boost Profits?
The hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and its cousins Big Data and Machine Learning is ubiquitous, and largely unexamined.
Let's start by asking: who owns all this powerful AI? This raises two other questions: who benefits as "software eats the world" (to use Marc Andreesen's pithy phrase), and to what purpose is all this technology being applied?
The answers are all painfully obvious: large global corporations, many of which function as quasi-monopolies (Facebook, Google et al.), are the owners of these new technologies, and the purpose being pursued is to maximize profits and secure a monopoly that insures high profits into the future.
The hype takes two predictable pathways, one Jetson-cartoonish euphoria and the other dystopian ruin.
Self-driving vehicles will change the world in wonderful ways by eliminating the source of accidents: human error.
And that's a nightmarish prospect because what will those millions of people currently driving vehicles do for a living?
Few people ask: who will profit from all this? Obviously, the manufacturers of self-driving vehicles and the owners of services which replace private vehicles.
The real race in AI is to secure profitable franchises and eliminate competitors by scaling up faster than other corporations.
This is why the market cheers Netflix burning billions of dollars every year: if they're burning billions, they must be scaling up faster than competitors, and thus they will be the ultimate "winner" in the race to create and distribute mediocre content globally.
Consider the uses which corporate-owned AI has already been used to maximize profits: Facebook's manipulation of its users' data and content feeds and its selling of their data.
After a brief downturn due to fears of regulation, the market is back in love with Facebook's immense profits, and Facebook's stock is once again at record highs.
AI and Big Data collection is the profitable heart of Surveillance Capitalism, which includes Amazon's gargantuan contracts with the National Security agencies and many other lower-profile contractors (SAIC, et al.)
Rather than a Jetson-cartoonish world of intelligent robots doing all the work so we can all become poets and watch mediocre films all day long, what AI is doing in the real world is extracting profits from data collected from the populace either to market something more effectively or to control the populace more effectively.
The AI-robotics enthusiasts never seem to actually work in the AI-robotics industries. They extrapolate extrapolations without asking the key questions: who will own this technology, and what will be the core purpose to which its applied?
We know the answers: global corporations, and maximizing profits.
To dismantle just one part of the Jetson-cartoonish worldview of robots and AI becoming essentially free. Fabricating a robot will never be free because robots require large quantities of energy and resources for their manufacture and maintenance. Even if human labor has been completely eliminated, the costs of extracting, refining and transporting resources remain, along with the costs of extracting the energy to do all this work as well as manufacture and assemble all the parts.
Eliminating human labor removes very little of the cost structure.
As for AI software being "free"-- it will be free like the Android operating system and the Apple iOS: free to those developing profitable uses of corporately owned franchises.
In my worldview, AI has one purpose: eliminating bias and privilege. Properly programmed software won't keep track of skin color or other sources of human bias.
The danger is corporately owned software tracks everything that can be used to market or control the populace, and this includes every nuance of bias and privilege.
The real battle isn't between a cartoonish vision or a dystopian nightmare--it's between decentralized ownership and control of these technologies and centralized ownership and control.
The CLIME system (as described in my book "A Radically Beneficial World") is in effect a decentralized, distributed AI system that organizes a network of independently, democratically operated community groups that pay members to perform needed work in their communities.
AI that isn't being harnessed to maximize profits for a few wealthy, privileged owners gets very little attention.
Highlights of the Blog This Past Week
We Are All Hostages of Corporate Profits (7/6/18)
The Gathering Storm (7/4/18)
Keynesian Economics Is an Artifact of Cheap Energy (7/2/18)
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Harvested and shared 100+ pounds of lychee fruit from our trees.
Market Musings: Everybody's Complacent and Confident (Again)
Take a look at the NYMO (McClellan Oscillator), which I mentioned here two weeks ago. It is shooting up to levels that correspond extremely well with market tops: Everybody's Complacent and Confident (Again), a pattern which has repeated monthly since the February "surprise mini-crash" caught the Bulls off-guard.
Every month starts with a monster rally that doesn't need any justification other than the calendar.
Once again, even perma-Bears are throwing in the towel and confessing all the charts look bullish.
My gut feeling is this entire pattern is Distribution: insiders selling to suckers who look at the usual indicators and charts and declare the Bull is alive and well: look at these higher lows and higher highs, look at the strength in the FANG tech stocks, etc.
The insiders and their trading computers are keeping the market aloft while they unload their positions to chumps. A few more days of NYMO spiking increases the odds of a downturn few think possible.
If you owned NFLX all the way up from $80 to $400, what would you do if you wanted to sell to suckers? Put out a target of $500 and sell, sell, sell.
From Left Field
The Death of a Once Great City: The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence -- we should specify "very unequally distributed affluence"...
Fragmented Future: Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones. -- it depends on the cultures and the specific history of a place and the local economy...
"Trade War Is The Beginning Of A New Global Monetary System" -- excellent explanation of the need to run trade deficits to become a dominant economy/own the reserve currency-- a very poorly understood aspect of economics...
The conservative case for universal health care (via LaserLefty)
State of AI -- 156 slides
Amsterdam drained a canal, and cataloged every single thing that was at the bottom, going back hundreds of years (via Benedict E.)
Ten years after the Wall Street crash, record stock buybacks and mergers (via LaserLefty)
This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson. (via Cheryl A.)
"Stylish" browser extension steals all your internet history (via Maoxian)
A Reporter’s Reporter: a Conversation With Seymour Hersh (via LaserLefty)
The last maître d’ is here to serve you from a bygone time -- a more genteel time, to be sure...
"The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat." Norbert Wiener
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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