The AI Threat to Open Societies
I&#x27;ve been interested in science and engineering since my youngest days and I&#x27;ve always considered myself a hacker from way back.  At school, my fellow schoolmates nicknamed me &#x27;The Boffin&#x27; as back then the terms &#x27;hacker&#x27; and &#x27;nerd&#x27; hadn&#x27;t yet been coined.  My profession is electronics engineering and IT and for my entire career I&#x27;ve followed and worked with the latest developments in the field.  Right:  I&#x27;m an insatiable technophile!<p>My other studies were in philosophy (ethics, etc.) and government and over the years I&#x27;ve found my formal training in them truly invaluable, they&#x27;ve broadened my perception and worldview about the ways science and engineering dovetail into society and make the world a better place by improving the lives of its citizens.<p>I have to agree with the tenet of George Soros&#x27; message for many reasons but from my perspective perhaps the most significant one is that we are moving at a frenetic pace headlong from an industrial age into a post industrial one that&#x27;s driven by advanced technologies (and primarily through the use of information).  We&#x27;re entering a new era whose paradigms will have morphed into ones so very different from anything humankind has ever before witnessed and the changes are coming so very fast that they&#x27;ll almost certainly cause fear and social disruption on an unprecedented scale unless we act now to adapt technology to our human needs and not those of governments and large multinational corporations—after all, they ought to be our servants, not vice versa as it is at present.<p>At present, society is both ill prepared and ill equipped to handle monumental changes of such a magnitude without considerable preparation, and we&#x27;ve hardly even begun to discuss the matter let alone draw up viable plans for society to adapt to them.<p>Leaving ML and AI aside for a moment, let&#x27;s just look at the metaphysical† aspects of the Google&#x2F;Facebook revolution.  Both behemoths, but especially Facebook, are floundering in the mire over very important issues such as those concerning privacy, fake news, damaging effects on democracy and politics in general, and there&#x27;s precious little light on the horizon to shine upon any potential solution let alone any commonly-agreed methodologies or viable options.<p>Let&#x27;s look at what has effectively happened here:  internet technologies evolved to a stage where worldwide networks such as Facebook became feasible and thus they were built without any real thought of the wider social consequences other than the paramount need to make money.  Zuckerberg et al would like us all to believe that they had actually executed both their financial and social objectives as they&#x27;d planned but as we now know this is far from being the full truth.<p>Not only did Big Tech companies have secret plans all of their own with the deliberate intention of exploiting users but they kept these intentions hidden from both governments and users alike thus no independent scrutiny was possible until the inevitable leaks occurred.  The lesson from this is that with no oversight, undesirable metaphysical effects arose from their complex systems the consequences of which have come back to bite them.  Inevitably, this will happen again and again with ML and AI unless careful and sophisticated (and mandatory) regulation is introduced.  To think otherwise would be foolhardy in the extreme.<p>It&#x27;s clear to many that these &#x27;geniuses&#x27; of Big Tech would have been fully cognizant of and understood how new physical properties often emerge from complex systems that are not foreseen from just examining their less complex building blocks.  Moreover, similar but metaphysical processes evolve in human minds when they encounter complex systems.  For instance, examining fine architecture brings an aesthetic experience to humans that no examination of a brick to the nth degree reveals.  Therefore, there can be little if any excuse for Zuckerberg and his cronies for not anticipating in advance emergent human problems (such as those that have arisen from the Cambridge Analytica fiasco).<p>When in 1847 Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero* invented nitroglycerine and immediately perceived its extreme dangers he became so scared and concerned about what he&#x27;d actually done that he kept the fact secret for over a year.  However, unlike Sobrero who clearly had ethics on his side, the likes of Zuckerberg et al never gave any serious consideration of the consequences of their &#x27;inventions&#x27;.  As day follows night, they were expecting human problems but they simply ignored them until it was too late.  Their lack of concern for humans—the hands that actually feed them—is palpable in the extreme; ethically and morally they&#x27;re bankrupt.<p>As history illustrates yet again, we&#x27;re now well past the point where it&#x27;s safe to leave extremely powerful technologies in the hands of political novices who possess so precious few ethics—or whose few ethics are easily trumped on by their zealotry for certain technological fixes and or financial objectives.  The fact that they may be the inventors or owners of newer technologies such as Facebook is irrelevant; what matters first and paramount is what is best for the citizenry and society at large.<p>The Google, Facebook et al cases ought to have been a non sequitur from the very beginning as the general will of the populus should have nailed them dead from the outset but it never happened for many reasons, including the highly addictive properties that Big Tech deliberately designed into their pernicious technologies.  Tragically, over the past 40-50 years or so, many traditional ethical values which would have put the kibosh on these Tech Giants long before they&#x27;d gotten started have largely evaporated as our societies have become more homogeneous and international—nowadays, the lowest common ethical denominator is just that—pretty low.<p>Given that societies are still struggling with very basic ethical issues such as withering of our hard-fought democratic processes, rise of totalitarian power from both governments and Tech Giants then we&#x27;re not even at ground level when it comes to solving the ethics of ML and AI.  For starters, there are serious cultural differences (hence little or no agreement) over how to resolve the infamous trolley car&#x2F;moral dilemma problem‡.  At present, it is abundantly clear the various societies of an international world are not able reach a common worldview or consensus on this conceptual problem let alone a specific ML&#x2F;AI incarnation thereof, consequentially we have precious little hope for solving even greater moral and ethical dilemmas that undoubtedly will be created by these fast-advancing technologies.<p>It seems to me very first steps must be taken to forge a common moral and ethical consensus for humankind.  We need to first begin with the easiest problems to agree upon such as the inviolability of human life and then work upwards.  Expect this to take a long time and it will.  Of course, the huge dilemma is how to hold technologists and technocrats sans ethics (and common sense) at bay whilst various consensuses are being reached.<p>I am strongly of the opinion that (as I was fortunate enough to experience), we should begin by ensuring that core training for all engineers, scientists, technologists and technocrats—and for that matter, politicians—also include compulsory training in key philosophical subjects, especially ethics, moral philosophy and formal logic as well as basic&#x2F;essential political science (the study of government).<p>I&#x27;m realistic enough to realise that despite such ethical studies being both core and compulsory, there is every that they will only have a minor impact in changing human nature if anything at all (at least in the beginning).  Nevertheless their compulsory nature will achieve one major objective which is that every engineer, scientist and technologist and technocrat will be forced to learn the essentials of morals and ethics as they should be practiced in our increasingly technological societies.<p>Thus when their technologies go belly-up and damage both societies and people lives, with compulsory training in ethics under their belts, the Zuckerbergs of this world will no longer be able to claim ignorance as an excuse for their negligence, they will not be able to say that they &#x27;did not know&#x27; or that &#x27;we never considered that outcome&#x27;.  The only likely excuse that they&#x27;ll have left to argue is that of &#x27;force majeure&#x27;—and it&#x27;d had better be a pretty good instance thereof or they&#x27;ll be toast.  …And good riddance.<p>Good effort George, keep the pressure up.<p>_____________<p>†  As many will be aware, the uncomplicated definition of &#x27;metaphysics&#x27; is &#x27;above and beyond physics&#x27;, that&#x27;s to say ontological a priori deductive concepts of existence, of being, of becoming, reality etc.  As far as Physics is concerned, metaphysics deals with ethereal, intangible concepts that are inconsequential to its Laws but nevertheless they&#x27;re key to human existence as we know it, what it is to be human, our values, beliefs and ethics are metaphysical.<p>‡  The Moral Machine experiment , Nature, vol. 563, pp59-64, 2018-10-24 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41586-018-0637-6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41586-018-0637-6</a>  Especially note graphs in Fig. 3:  &#x27;Country-level clusters&#x27;.<p>*  Incidentally, Alfred Nobel was a student of chemist Ascanio Sobrero.<p>___