'Luddite' Tech-Skeptics See Bad AI Outcomes for Labor - and Humanity

'I feel things fraying,' says Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour.

But he's one of the more optimistic tech skeptics interviewed by the Guardian:

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience — taking things slowly for a novice like me — that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines.... Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California... 'If you put me to a wall,' he continues, 'and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.' By 'remaining timeline', Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things...

Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences — AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of 'Ooh, look at that!' smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don't imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture 'an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us', in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to...

[Molly Crabapple, a New York-based artist, believes] 'a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that's introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it's shaped by power, and it's generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they're dumb? That was concocted by bosses.' Where a techno-pessimist like Yudkowsky would have us address the biggest-picture threats conceivable (to the point at which our fingers are fumbling for the nuclear codes) neo-luddites tend to focus on ground-level concerns. Employment, especially, because this is where technology enriched by AIs seems to be causing the most pain....

Watch out, says [writer/podcaster Riley] Quinn at one point, for anyone who presents tech as 'synonymous with being forward-thinking and agile and efficient. It's typically code for 'We're gonna find a way around labour regulations'....' One of his TrashFuture colleagues Nate Bethea agrees. 'Opposition to tech will always be painted as irrational by people who have a direct financial interest in continuing things as they are,' he says.

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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