The Hype Over AI
by John Lawrence
There is much hand wringing over whether or not AI will be used for good purposes or bad. The proprietors of AI are mostly concerned about making money, not about how to use their products for good. That's the capitalistic system. And one can rest assured that one of the most interested parties in AI is the defense establishment. They are always interested in using the most advanced technology in order to create even more sophisticated and destructive weapons in accordance with the theory that, if they don't create them, their enemies will create them first, and then they will be in a less advantageous position. Of course this is always premised on the consideration that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. Our supposed enemies use the same rationale with the result that the world becomes ever more dangerous as both sides develop more and more destructive weapons. AI is just the latest chapter of this merry-go-round.The problem is that the tech companies creating AI are just in it for the money, and the military-industrial complex, in addition to just being in it for the money, is in it for the rationale that we better use AI to create advance weapons first so that our "enemies" don't get them first.
Has anybody considered that some entity, whether it be government or private enterprise, should adopt the position that AI or any other technology should be used not only for good but for the purpose of creating peace in the world? No, no entity is concerned about that. If government was concerned, they would be using some of the trillion dollar military-industrial complex budget to develop peaceful enterprises in the world. Instead while a trillion dollars yearly is spent on defense/offense, a paltry $400 million is spent on the Peace Corps. So that's where our values are. We value a strong defense, not strong efforts to make the world a more peaceful place, and we value financial competition to make as much money as we can off of any new technology. Those are the imperatives. Peace is thought to be the absence of war rather than building enterprises that would prevent war in the first place. The interstices between wars should be used to prevent the next war, but instead the only prevention is thought to be to have such a strong military apparatus that no one would think about stepping out of line with the line being defined by us or whoever is the most powerful empire at any point in time. Empires come and go over the long term, but the mental imperative of using all resources to create the most powerful military establishment never changes.
The result is that war is inevitable as it has been for millennia. In fact for thousands of years war has been a way of life. Empires have been created because someone came along who was in a position to create them whether that was Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great or Napoleon. No one ever called Jesus "the Great" because he didn't create an empire. He just preached peace as the foremost value. Too bad no one in a position of power ever took him seriously. That was not realpolitik. Instead, religion was used to placate and sublimate the masses while the war machines of the various empires ground on until thy eventually were subdued or wore themselves out or went bankrupt. AI does not presage a new millennium. It's just more of the same. It will be used beneficially in medicine and a few other enterprises. But its main development will be in the art of war wherein battlefields are populated not by humans but by robots. The destruction however will remain the same or worse. Not the military but innocent civilians will bear the cost of death and destruction as already has been taking place in modern warfare. Not military assets but civilian real estate will be destroyed. Such a shame that technological advances have been deployed more in the service of war than in the service of peace.
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