Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
December 9, 2019
Artificial Intelligence is generally seen as a great advance and benefit for mankind. Smart humans, however, see it as our undoing and even possibly our extermination. Much of modern technology has far more prospect for harm than for good. Consider nuclear weapons. Consider Monsanto’s glyphosate. Consider 5G. There are a large number of technologies that impose massive costs on life on Earth.
The article below from Crime & Power, “A Hard Look At Artificial intelligence” by Jerry Day, sounds like a horror science fiction story.
https://www.crimeandpower.com/2019/12/07/a-hard-look-at-artificial-intelligence/
I don’t think AI is sentient or has consciousness and do not see how it can think and make decisions in a human sense. I think the author, Jerry Day, is influenced by a false concept of mind, as is philosophy in general.
On the other hand, if this is a real possibility, we should bring a halt to AI, execute the AI geeks, and go back to a paper and analog system of operating. I don’t like the digital revolution. One reason is that it makes it so easy for information to disappear. In effect, the digital revolution is Big Brother’s Memory Hole. Look at how much information is wiped out because controllers regard it as offensive to the ever growing array of “victim groups” or contrary to the interest of ruling elites. Another reason is that it makes it so easy to violate privacy and steal identity. Another reason is that it has eliminated jobs that can be performed by people of average and below intelligence. In effect, the digital revolution is making people superfluous.
The notion that the Internet brings freedom and freedom of information is, I believe, a great delusion.
This passage from Jerry Day sounds like China’s Social Credit System https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cGB8dCDf3c :
“Once the state is able to put out trillions of bits of personal data together with millions of legal codes, we will all be exposed as criminals, every last one of us. We will all be subject to the control and penalty by the state. It is AI that will make that possible. Suddenly one day, we will find that what people used to do to us, machines will be doing to us. Automation can find you, automation can send you notice on your cell phone, or computer, automation can exercise liens and levies of your property, automation can take possession of your property, bank accounts, your investments, automation can terminate your employment, automation can prosecute you, convict you, and penalize you as the IRS does, without due process.
“All of that can be done to you without any human involvement at all. The only reason we will need police is to clean up those few belligerent souls who try to resist what the automation is doing to them. There will be only one crime: resisting the automation, and there will be no humans left to help you sort out any misunderstanding, just like Google, YouTube, Facebook. Soon there will be no humans anywhere to help you fix a problem.”
Here is Day’s article. Make up your own mind:
https://www.crimeandpower.com/2019/12/07/a-hard-look-at-artificial-intelligence/
See also: https://aicontagion.com/2019/12/08/the-greatest-shift-since-the-dawn-of-humankind/
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (Website: PaulCraigRoberts.org) was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and confirmed to the office by the U.S. Senate. He also served as consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Dr. Roberts was associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service. He was a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States. He has held academic appointments at Virginia Tech, Tulane University, University of New Mexico, Stanford University where he was Senior Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution, George Mason University where he had a joint appointment as professor of economics and professor of business administration, and Georgetown University where he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy in the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is one of the most influential minds in the truth media today.
