Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society... Doesn't sound sinister at all

Re: Phase 1: fact-checker AI

Now that I think about it, we may already have invented Artificial Dishonesty in the form of search engines and price-comparison sites; if we combine these with Microsoft's ground-breaking work on Artificial Stupidity then we may have the first non-organic Artificial Politician...

Re: Yeah right

we are living longer, healthier lives, in more comfort, than at any time in history.

Yes, we are. But a bitter price was paid for our comfort by our forebears; chronologically before that was this period known as the Industrial Revolution. You might want to look into what life was like for the majority of people, and the few powerful magnates who owned all the factories they were forced to work in, during that time.

Read The People Of The Abyss by Jack London, a non-fictional first-hand account of the horrors endured by the working classes in the Victorian / Edwardian UK, for example. The Iron Heel, also by Jack London, and Hard Times by Charles Dickens, are fictional, but are telling illustrations of the entitled sanctimonious indifference of the ruling elite to the plight of the slaves who made their luxurious lifestyles possible.

The lesson of history here is that world-changing, civilisation-restructuring technologies inevitably end up funnelling absolute power into the hands of those who have gained control of the technology, and humans being what they are, those people invariably use that power to cement their absolute and unyielding control of the lives of everyone else in their servitude. Only wars, rebellions and civil uprisings alter this state of affairs.

Therefore it is certainly possible that a new Golden Age will dawn for humanity. Most likely some time in the next century. In the meantime, the Information Revolution is looking more and more likely to result in the 21st century being to us, what the Industrial Revolution was to the cottage-industry villages and farms of the post-Rennaisance era. For our great-great-grandchildren, maybe life will be wonderful. For us, however, the sun has set and the long night is only just getting started. And our children, and their children, and their children, are likely to live their entire lives in that horror before the new day dawns, if history is any teacher.

So they will drag me into that analogous "factory" in the form of ubiquitous cloud AI, kicking and screaming with my head bashed in. And if that means I get called a Luddite for valuing my freedom and my wish not to be a slave to greedy and manipulative puppetmasters, so be it.

Re: Yeah right

@yesyouare, I am not being ironic in this case. I side with Steven Roper here. I realise AI might be of great benefit to a lot of people out there, but this "Partnership" is definitely NOT about creating that benefit for those people. It's not about improving lives. It's about improving profit margins and building new products to make more money. I am well aware those things might benefit people in the long run. But especially "real" AI could very well be a danger to human kind as a whole. I'm not so sure we should be rushing into it without giving some serious thought to what the consequences could be.

It reminds me of the Sci-Fi story "Manna" by Marshall Brain. (http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm). This "Partnership" is about building Manna, not about building "the Australia project". (There are plenty of problems with the story and the societies it depicts, but the main 2 themes are very applicable in this case)