The Coming War on General Computation [2011]
The Coming War on General Computation [2011]
Transcription of a talk given by Cory Doctrow in 2011
Great talk, though it was distressing to realize I'd basically forgotten about SOPA.
That's always the biggest challenge with these sorts of efforts to maintain technological freedom; the consequences are abstract and sometimes hard to follow for your average person. It's like fighting while standing on a water bed.
I’ve seen this guy’s stuff floating around on the Fediverse recently—first the enshittification article and now this. Seems pretty interesting, thank you for sharing!
I've been following Cory loosely for almost two decades, and he's always done great stuff. I saw the Enshittification post make the rounds the other day, but didn't manage to read it. Thanks for reminding me, I've now read it, and feel like it made a lot of pieces fall into place.
Funny, more than once, I've said to my wife (who won't go near TikTok): "But it's so good at showing me things I'm actually interested in!" Which I recently noticed wasn't the case anymore. Now I have a plausible explanation as to why; what a shame.
Cory's been "kind of a big deal" for decades. Boing Boing was as relevant as you could get back in the early 2000's. It had consistently good and interesting stuff on it.
I'm glad the enshittification article became widely read: it's remarkably astute.
You could sell movies for one price in one country, and another price in another, and so on, and so on; the fantasies of those days were a little like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament book of Numbers, a kind of tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information and the ways we could charge them for it.
Lol, what a burn.
in short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them.
When a law can't be enforced, it's because it's either at this extreme, or the other one where it's easily circumvented or can be broken invisibly.
In fact, there's that heuristic that we can apply here -- special-purpose technologies are complex. And you can remove features from them without doing fundamental disfiguring violence to their underlying utility. This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network -- the PC and the Internet.
This is so true. The information age is bigger than we even realise, because for the first time in millions of years we stopped making tools and started making layers of abstraction. When my grandma's computer doesn't work as intended, she asks if she should buy a new one, which has seemed odd to me but makes total sense in this light. She thinks it's just a tool; it's not a tool, not a special-purpose one anyway.
I'm surprised he didn't mention the possibility of whitelisting at the hardware level, which is what would be really scary. You could do it, make a chip that resets under conditions that can only be avoided with a secret key. Thankfully nobody is doing that yet, and the legislative winds are actually blowing the other way right now, with right to repair in serious consideration.
Funny enough, a lot of the nerds out there like me are actually begging to lock down tech now, because we're nervous about what motives a seemingly inevitable GAI is going to have. I still maintain it wouldn't work, because there's no such a thing as a trusted authority, not long-term anyway. Maybe there's a benefit to locking advancement down temporarily, but that's it.
Funny enough, a lot of the nerds out there like me are actually begging to lock down tech now, because we’re nervous about what motives a seemingly inevitable GAI is going to have. I still maintain it wouldn’t work, because there’s no such a thing as a trusted authority, not long-term anyway. Maybe there’s a benefit to locking advancement down temporarily, but that’s it.
All that'll do is make sure that some other country—probably a hostile one—makes AGI before yours does.
Anyway, I'm not overly worried about the motives of AGI itself. I'm more worried about what its owners will use it for, namely to replace human labor and exterminate everyone who isn't a billionaire.
“Machines aren't capable of evil. Humans make them that way.”
"Evil" can mean a pretty broad array of things, though. There's a lot of actions it could take that at least some people would call evil, even if causing distress or breaking deontological rules isn't the end goal.
The way I see it there's 3 possible AGIs: a paperclip optimiser, an AI that obeys somebody, and a somewhat-benevolent AI. The second one is the worst, that's where the exterminism you mentioned is pretty inevitable (although the elites might keep a few people as sex slaves or some such fucked-up thing). Then comes the paperclip optimiser, which doesn't worry about the bullshit that drives human atrocities but doesn't have a very inspiring actual goal, and then the attempt at benevolence. I suspect the set of ethical theories most people always agree with is the empty set, but a utilitarian AI would be much preferable to the other two even if it does forced organ donation sometimes.
People talk about an AI that obeys everyone somehow, but if you think about it for a moment that doesn't really make sense. We can barely vote on a single dollar figure for something successfully.
“Machines aren’t capable of evil. Humans make them that way.”
I agree, but only for existing technologies.
One thing Doctorow is exceedingly good at (there are many) is writing and giving presentations that are relevant when penned and remain relevant for years. Despite SOPA being in the distant past, this was still a fascinating read.
Here's the video:
uhh this is dark. I'll have to follow up on this. brr