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The Rise of The Machines: Etchemendy & Li on Our AI Future
John Etchemendy and Fei-Fei Li are the codirectors of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), founded in 2019 to “advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition.” In this interview, they delve into the origins of the technology, its promise, and its potential threats. They also discuss what AI should be used for, where it should not be deployed, and why we as a society should—cautiously—embrace it.
Recorded on April 4, 2024.
Published in General
The interview has some examples of the category, Things So Stupid it Takes a Highly Intelligent Person to Believe Them.
The only one of those Stupid Things silly enough to make me burst out in laughter was when Mr. Echemendy argued that often the Federal Government simply MUST handover huge blocks of money to the elite scientists, from the funds in the Treasury that the public entrusted to Government for public purposes.
Like high energy particle accelerators (or Artificial Intelligence systems).
To paraphrase:
1. We scientists often NEED a huge amount of money to do what we want.
2. We have not produced goods and services that anyone will give us his own money for, and then over time saved enough money to buy the thing we want.
3. As a result of #2, we don’t have any money to buy what we
wantNEED. Through no fault of our own—far from it! In fact, the capitalists who have lots of money got it all by acting out of self-interest; it is only WE who labor solely to produce public goods (scientific knowledge).4. But we have found generous and wise politicians who DO have lots of money[2], are happy to give us the amounts we want, conditional only on us giving them absolute control over the resulting scientific knowledge.[1]
5. The only possible righteous conclusion is that the Government must give us the money, in return for whatever favors the politicians require of us.[]
* * *
[1] Like…
(a) …if we learn to make bombs with the accelerators, the politicians get monopoly ownership of the technology.
or
(b) …if we figure out how to make a system with “Artificial Intelligence”*, the politicians get monopoly control of the technology, either by direct use by their employees, or by secret agreements between authorized private users that they will use it for, and only for, purposes approved by the politicians. Purposes like the agreements with the social media suppliers to suppress free speech that exposes the current fraudulent pandemic hysteria, lockdown, censorship, and forced gene-therapy program for totalitarian-like control of society.
*definition: a system that reliably passes the Turing Test—being able, via an extended conversation,to deceive any human being into believing that he is conversing with a human being, rather than a machine under the concealed control of its owner. Such a system gives a would-be totalitarian monster a degree of power over human thought that none has ever had in history.
[2] It’s right there in the Treasury, and there’s plenty more where that came from, guaranteed.
The guarantee is backed by the Full Faith and Credit of the US Government, which is in turn backed by the full power of the legal system and the full power over the unopposed armed forces, if needed.
Scary listening to scientists talk about money and ethics. I just keep thinking that fish don’t know they swim in water and if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.