Job loss & the moral hazard ...

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Moving along, it seems AI's going to do a number on jobs as
it's cheaper to have a bot do the deed than us rubes.

Considering that AI is literally designed to model human capabilities and thus automate human tasks, it's a fair question — and one that a group of professors from New York University (NYU), Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) may have just helped to shed a little bit of light on in a new paper, aptly titled "How Will Language Modelers like ChatGPT Affect Occupations and Industries?"

"We find that the top occupations exposed to language modeling include telemarketers and a variety of post-secondary teachers such as English language and literature, foreign language and literature, and history teachers," write the researchers. "We find the top industries exposed to advances in language modeling are legal services and securities, commodities, and investments."

So, to recap: our teachers and our financial services, according to these researchers, might just be the first to succumb to language-modeling AI like ChatGPT, which we should probably note is bad at both providing factual information, which probably isn't good for the "teaching" part, and also is very bad at math, which similarly doesn't behoove success in the realm of finance. Cool cool cool.

The moral hazard ... 

Let's just say, as a hypothetical, that someone does build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — human-level AI that, if realized, would undoubtedly change everything.

The world economy would likely turn upside down overnight, while radical changes to social structures, political systems, and even international power dynamics would follow closely behind. What it means to be human would suddenly feel much less concrete, and meanwhile, those who build the system would rapidly accumulate financial and political power.

If just one piece of technology could do all of that, you might have some thoughts about which individual or group might be the ideal — as in, least world-ending — candidate to bring such a machine into existence.

Functioning as a non-profit would make sense; money would certainly be needed to create this and any other piece of world-changing machinery, sure, but presented with the need to generate consistent revenue, both objectivity and safety can go out the window quite quickly. You'd also probably want the tech to be open-source, and you probably wouldn't want any legacy Big Tech companies to own a controlling stake.

OpenAI is for-profit, closed-source, and very much in bed with legacy tech mammoth Microsoft, which has billions vested into the buzzy AI leader. But unlike other AI competitors, who may have started out as for-profit to begin with, OpenAI has very different roots.

Dividing Line/rev II

Indeed, as Vice writer Chloe Xiang brilliantly put it, the current iteration of OpenAI is everything that the company once "promised not to be" — a pretty damn sleazy detail, especially considering that these are the folks who might just be the ones to bring AGI, if it's ever actually possible, into existence.

When the outfit launched back in 2015 — the brainchild of SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, alleged vampire-lite Peter Thiel, and Y Combinator co-creator Jessica Livingston, among other major industry players — it was open-source (hence the name) as well as firmly anti-profit, arguing that a revenue-dependant model would compromise the integrity of the tech.

"OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," reads OpenAI's introductory statement, published back in 2015. "Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact."

That statement almost reads a bit alien, considering where the firm is today. Corporate and fiscally motivated, moving with the familiar — and familiarly flawed — "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley approach, it's ventured so far from its original goal that even co-founder Elon Musk has become a vocal opponent of the company.

1 point perspective/rev II

The Moral Hazard/rev II

But three days at OpenAI’s office—and nearly three dozen interviews with past and current employees, collaborators, friends, and other experts in the field—suggest a different picture. There is a misalignment between what the company publicly espouses and how it operates behind closed doors. Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration. Many who work or worked for the company insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or feared retaliation. Their accounts suggest that OpenAI, for all its noble aspirations, is obsessed with maintaining secrecy, protecting its image, and retaining the loyalty of its employees. - MIT Technology Review