Jaron Lanier on AI — the good, bad and ugly of Lanier

"There is no AI": An interesting piece by Jaron Lanier. He notes that it's not intelligent and not an independent mind, among other things.

These are all things I've been saying, including about the hyped new ChatGPT et cetera.

He then says if we treat it as a tool, not a person, we'll worry less.

He then becomes Jaron Lanier, saying he disagreed with a petition against AI invading privacy because "we don't know what privacy is," going on to:

It’s a term we use every day, and it can make sense in context, but we can’t nail it down well enough to generalize. The closest we have come to a definition of privacy is probably “the right to be left alone,” but that seems quaint in an age when we are constantly dependent on digital services. In the context of A.I., “the right to not be manipulated by computation” seems almost correct, but doesn’t quite say everything we’d like it to.

First, what's wrong with the first half of that and why can't it be updated to today's age? Lanier offers no explanation. Did it seem quaint when, after the telephone was invented, the predecessor of the FBI did wiretaps without warrants at first?

Second, I can't believe that he missed the parallel to Potter Stewart's famous:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Because there is at least some degree of parallel.

He goes on to note that AI researchers he notes agree that things like deepfakes need to be labeled as such, but that there might be problems getting there.

In all of this, he sounds like the Lanier of reality not legend of a decade ago, when Yevgeny Morozov nailed him for handwaving, strawmanning vagueness and other things. He's also, per that piece, got a history of positioning himself as an outsider when the reality is not so much.

Lanier also, way back then, was already talking about surrendering to digital snooping, rather than fighting it.

Near the end of the piece, he notes that AI might produce a movie that has no "backstory." Well, Jaron, I don't know about movies, but novelists talk about their stories taking on a life of their own to the degree that the original backstory bears little resemblance to the final work.

In the jobs world, he talks about "data dignity." This sounds halfway convincing, but "data dignity" re AI-driven tree trimming robots does not. But, given the "nailed him," where Lanier a decade ago talked about us all becoming internet entrepreneurs, not surprising. It also, per that piece, sounds as naive on issues like this as he was a decade ago. Or, if not naive, grifting for some legendary "better angels of Silicon Valley's nature."

Then, Jaron Lanier becomes, once again, the Lanier of reality not legend:

Many people in Silicon Valley see universal basic income as a solution to potential economic problems created by A.I. But U.B.I. amounts to putting everyone on the dole in order to preserve the idea of black-box artificial intelligence.

Knowing the Lanier of reality — while knowing that there are multiple varieties of BI, despite the lies on that by Scott Santens, and knowing that Silicon Valley promotes the tech-libertarian type — this is still not surprising out of his mouth. And, per that link above, the "nailed him," he's still ultimately a libertarian, so that's also why this isn't surprising.

Now, if he wanted to say that BI is insufficient, like Douglas Rushkoff's push for "basic assets," THEN we'd be talking. But, that's not his idea.

As for Santens? Basic laundry list:

• Called Trump "the basic income Moses," per a piece where Scott is himself associated with the World Economic Forum, as in Davos, while getting more alarmist about AI then than Lanier is today;
• Wants to junk entitlements, including even trimming Social Security — more here;
  
• Is a crypto-bro;
• Denies that there are libertarian and non-libertarian versions of BI that don't square with each other;
• And on all of this, can't do math on how to pay for his ideas.
  

Anyway, read the whole thing. It's a definite longform. 

And, make sure to get to the bottom, to note that his tagline notes he works for Microslob. Why would you trust a Bill Gates minion on any of this?