How to Survive AI

Why We Want Robots at Work but Humans in Art

We hate other people when latency becomes intolerable. As soon as a task is about speed, other humans feel like an irritating inconvenience. The Uber driver’s small talk annoys us. We wish we were in a Waymo. The cashier’s tip screen feels like a micro-ransom when all we want is a bottle of water.... See more

The ongoing functionality of Wikipedia relies on an army of software agents – bots – to enforce and maintain correct formatting, build connections between articles, and moderate conflicts and incidences of vandalism. At the last survey, bots counted for seventeen of the top twenty most prolific editors and collectively make about 16 per cent of all

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Let me answer your implicit complaint: “The Turing Test will be eventually passed.” That’s right (in some settings, Turing’s original prediction has been already achieved), but the truth is that any human relationship — even digital ones, even those not especially intimate like the ones between writers and readers (I love you, though) — requires... See more

In the Prologue to The Human Condition, with the promise that automation would empty the factories, Hannah Arendt worried that “it is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaninfgul activities for the sake of which this freedom would

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Yet, the hidden machinations behind everyone’s favorite social media and search platforms are engineered to exploit our primal instincts for validation, status, and mimetic desires (adopting or pursuing preferences and aspirations based on the influence of others rather than our intrinsic motivations), morphing into a manipulative force that feeds... See more

All six said that Lavender had played a central role in the war, processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.

Lavender was developed by the... See more

if these AI systems ever become self-aware and power-hungry, like people such as Geoffrey Hinton believe to be a possible scenario, they’ll know exactly what to do when they risk being shut off. The blueprint is readily available. It turns out all you need to do is to social engineer large swaths of the population into parasocial relationships and... See more