On Control of Technology

I started reading this book yesterday that was recommended by Professor Gruber. The book was about technology and how the world has changed over time because of it. So I think the first comment I had was: you know, the whole “productivity” discourse. 

Ever since this whole AI thing came out, I don’t know why tech billionaires are so obsessed with it. “AI is going to take your job; you’re not going to need to hire everyone.” And it’s going to make employees 10 times more productive; you’re going to get “100x engineers,” one person can do 100 jobs and deliver faster. 

And then it brings me back to “policy congestion,” which is a term that I learned from a systems-thinking lecture. What “policy congestion” means is: when people go on and on about a new tool, at the end of the day it’s because of the newness, and it still creates congestion. For example, let’s say there’s traffic, and a new road is built to reduce congestion on some other roads. 

Now, because the new road has been built, people who normally would have thought, “Oh, this road is so bad so I’m not going to go,” decide to go out more. It also leads people to relocate to that part of town and inadvertently leads to more congestion. That is policy congestion, and the same thing happens with productivity, not just with AI, but with the production of steam engines and every other wave of technology that has come before. 

We eventually had a case where people just ended up working more, and only a few concentrated areas became rich. So back to my question: why are tech billionaires so obsessed with replacing people as part of automation? So, marginal productivity - outsourcing parts of our work that we do not like. For instance, I do not like laundry; I do not like cooking. They are so tedious - going to markets; I do not quite like that. So why are they also obsessed with, “Oh, we’re not going to pay these people salaries,” and getting more output without knowing that… 

This is probably a conspiracy, but I’m heavily leaning towards it: all these tech billionaires, especially at OpenAI, want people hooked on the platform and to lack critical thinking skills. So when you can’t even write or you can’t even code, you don’t have a panic attack; you use AI as a crutch. What happens is—and this is an experience that I’ve had, and I’m dealing with it; I’m trying to wean myself off—is that you pay anything to use whatever provides that. That is why these days they’re already increasing prices; they’re cutting this. I mean, flat-out: “Oh, you’ve got only five hours,” or they’re cutting the tokens. And of course it makes sense business-wise; I’m not negating that. 

But when they offered the free trial - getting people so hooked - and then withdrew it, that will cause some people to say, “Okay, fuck it, let me just pay $20 a month.” And that was how Google hooked us with our storage. You are storing your memories, and then eventually you are forced to pay for storage. And that was why I was so vehement that Snapchat was not going to do that to me. And then I downloaded all my Snapchat videos manually, packed them up—yeah, better I pack it up with the money that I would have used for a year’s subscription than what would happen subscribing every year, because they always get you with the subscription. So you are forced to be in the ecosystem every year, every year. 

 Now, the questions we need to answer about this whole artificial intelligence thing: obviously it’s going to disrupt how we work, it’s going to disrupt how we see things, it’s going to disrupt everything that we already know, and it already has done that. But the thing is: how do we make sure that the impact is not just increasing productivity, but also helps reduce power and boost prosperity for ordinary people? Honestly, from what I’ve seen (and this is just from the first chapter), my understanding is that over time, technology is touted to bring about prosperity and make everybody rich. Yeah, it does make some people rich. I mean, it does enable some people (the “peasants”) to get up to the middle class. But it always, always favors the few who brought it about; it always makes sure that the profits are concentrated among those who are driving it. 

In any case, I’m just going to highlight some of the points that were brought up, and it’s more so on older people because, yes, there was actually the first time I learned about the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal - these makeshift water regions, artificial water bodies that were created in order to allow navigation to areas. And one of the things that I noted about it is how much that depends on influence. I mean, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is one of the bestsellers of the century, by miles, so those exist but it’s more so how influence enabled him (Ferdinand de Lesseps) to get the first one, and then living on that past, not taking directions, not taking instructions - first, the development of the second one (Panama) that caused the death of over two thousand men, and yet it was not successful until the U.S. intervened. 

And I eventually heard that after the U.S. intervention, they took control of that place for about 60-some years before they started sharing, and then eventually Panama got complete control by 1999. And this whole geopolitics thing is - wow. 

Now I’ve kind of digressed a bit from the artificial intelligence part, but it’s just… wow. But one thing that I gleaned from this (and it’s almost as if I’m repeating the same thing) is that the peasants are the ones that inadvertently suffer at the end of every new revolution. 

In the steam engine era, peasants were the ones working; when agriculture was everything, it was the laborers, the serfs that were tied to a house - they were the manual labor and they didn’t really gain, so it’s overlords that take and reap the profits. I mean, the steam engine like the Suez Canal that we just mentioned and the Panama Canal: who got all the glory for doing it? 

This man, of course, his intelligence mattered; his intuition mattered; but the workers that spent decades, that were brought in from the West Indies, and the people that were basically saved there, they were the ones that actually put in the sweat and their lives, by the way, to get things done. So I’m afraid the same thing is going to replicate itself in this AI era. People, at least even with the phone, right? I think I saw the documentary on the Congo: how, you know, people - the ones mining the raw materials needed to get the phone and then people are changing phones every year. So it’s just more than… I think it’s slavery. 

And one thing history has always taught us is: yeah, people will just repeat history, just across different timelines and slightly different actors, but it’s just the same story day in, day out. And it’s quite sad if we think about it