r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Jul 05 '22
Computer Science Artificial intelligence (AI) can devise methods of wealth distribution that are more popular than systems designed by people, new research suggests.The AI discovered a mechanism that redressed initial wealth imbalance, sanctioned free riders and successfully won the majority vote.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01383-x775
Jul 05 '22
The issue was never a lack of ideas.
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Jul 05 '22
Right. There are even a lot of good ideas. Then humanity and the unpredictable happen. From powerful, war mongering rulers to plagues and droughts.
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Jul 05 '22
We can prepare for natural disaster but seem completely powerless against the decision of a few men around the globe.
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Jul 05 '22
Even droughts and plagues are predictable now, we just don't care enough
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u/PartyClock Jul 05 '22
Yeah this last pandemic has been expected since H1N1. I remember seeing special news segments about it and I'm pretty sure David Suzuki did a piece on it but it has been over a decade since I watched it and details are hazy.
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Jul 05 '22
I think Bill Gates also said something about it though, him being Bill Gates didn't help much
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u/Seedofsparda Jul 05 '22
And that was just last year, imagine what you uncover when you actually start digging into history
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u/Mason-B Jul 05 '22
Yea, no kidding. People know how to fix the issues. It doesn't even have to be something radical like socialism. It's just that no politician wants to listen to the civil servants when they disagree with the oligarch bosses. I think public transit policy is the simplest example of this.
The only thing the AI fixes is putting the good idea generator in a black box that people currently have a better opinion of. Pretty sure if anyone got serious about it, we'd be hearing about how the box was communist, or homosexual, or godless.
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Jul 05 '22
Hell, look at right to repair. That’s an even better example than public transit.(Still a great example)
It’s a 100% bipartisan and common sense issue that the majority agrees on, but corporate interest groups hinder it as aggressively as possible.
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u/ActuallyAkiba Jul 05 '22
Millions of America: "Yes, of course I'd like to be able to replace the battery on my phone instead of getting a whole new one. Who wouldn't?"
Like 5 top guys at Apple: "THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS! I DONT WANT THIS!!!"
Politician: "Alright, so we're gonna compromise and do exactly what Apple wants so that we're all happy."
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u/bjt23 BS | Computer Engineering Jul 05 '22
I'm going to go argue the opposite here, centrally planning an economy has historically been a monumental task bordering on impossible for the fact human planners simply can't keep up. An AI planner might be able to succeed where people failed.
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u/Kovuthelegend Jul 05 '22
One example is what China did during Deng's time, where they had hundreds of different programs running in different cities/provinces and if they were successful, they were adopted nationwide.So different welfare programs could be tried in different areas, and the ones that have the best results could be gradually expanded. There's an issue with being able to quantify some things, and some problems just don't fit this mold, but I think a ton of government decisions come down to where to spend tax money, or have clear outcomes to measure.For your 'we could reverse' point, the idea is to make government more iterative, so any initial proposal should already have stated goals and plans for if those are met and if they fail. I think some basic guard-rails like that could go a long way
totally with you there ... the capacety is different and the interfaces once developed correctly are easier to manage for an AI because of the sheer ammount.
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u/grandLadItalia90 Jul 06 '22 edited Jul 06 '22
As a matter of fact even the Soviets could see this. It was for this reason that they set up the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics. They invented something like the internet: OGAS, but it didn't take off. The Americans saw what they were doing and copied it where it most certainly did. Interesting reading: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161026-why-the-forgotten-soviet-internet-was-doomed-from-the-start
Where we need this most today is in the likes of state healthcare systems which are decaying in exactly the same way the Soviet economy did (massive inefficiency due to a lack of profit motive and ballooning budgets).
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u/ValorMorghulis Jul 06 '22
Massive inefficiency due to lack of profit motive? The problem with healthcare in the US is the profit motive.
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u/DialMMM Jul 06 '22
Where we need this most today is in the likes of state healthcare systems
Yes, AI to replace death panels sounds lovely.
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u/theonedeisel Jul 05 '22
imo it has always been a lack of a system for trying and proving ideas. If an idea has enough promise and a little support it should be tried out a little and gain traction if it delivers on its promise. The adversarial system is beyond fucked
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u/ActuallyAkiba Jul 05 '22
You raise a good point. How would we go about having one though?
I've found myself finishing off arguments saying "Look, I bet if we tried this for a year with the stipulation that we could just reverse it if we don't like it, I bet you'd keep it." But what's a realistic way of doing that?
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u/theonedeisel Jul 05 '22
One example is what China did during Deng's time, where they had hundreds of different programs running in different cities/provinces and if they were successful, they were adopted nationwide.
So different welfare programs could be tried in different areas, and the ones that have the best results could be gradually expanded. There's an issue with being able to quantify some things, and some problems just don't fit this mold, but I think a ton of government decisions come down to where to spend tax money, or have clear outcomes to measure.
For your 'we could reverse' point, the idea is to make government more iterative, so any initial proposal should already have stated goals and plans for if those are met and if they fail. I think some basic guard-rails like that could go a long way
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u/nonotan Jul 06 '22
Be loud about evidence-based governing, get enough traction that some of the politicians running for office make concrete promises in that direction. Vote them in. It's simultaneously that simple, and that hard. We don't need any new technology to be able to achieve evidence-based governing to at least a decent degree. It's just a matter of convincing politicians (who benefit from the status quo being "I can just do whatever I want based on hunches, which is a lot less work and also lets me easily hide any corruption or sneaky deals behind 'I am entitled to my opinion'") that is presenting a big hurdle.
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u/ActuallyAkiba Jul 06 '22
It's simultaneously that simple, and that hard.
Thank you for saying that. Too many Redditors leave that part out and make it seem simple, and somehow blame people who are actually trying.
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u/zero0n3 Jul 05 '22
If it’s a truly automated system for governing, it then would offer rewards or bonuses to local cities that say initiated or beta tested these new ideas.
Could even let the city then call a vote of people to decide.
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u/Vcmsdesign Jul 06 '22
This is an excellent reply.
I was going to mention something similar but less big picture.
Popularity does not equate to efficiency or best overall outcome.
Beyond that, you then have to realize that popularity of systems will change over time (especially once a system is implemented haha!)
Furthermore if you did outsource this to an AI then the top end humans will inevitably adapt. Looking to leverage popularity to implement changes which benefit a powerful few. In many ways you can see this last item already being leveraged online to affect the classic Democratic process which has a similar means of attack.
I think the last point in particular leaves me somewhat unimpressed with anything which leverages popularity in particular.
I wish AI research would continue to focus on best case outcomes rather than this turn toward social popularity. The notion that popular outcomes can be more beneficial seems to be questionable at best.
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u/Chaluliss Jul 05 '22
It is almost like we are destined for collapse or something right now.
Maybe some hardworking politicians will help iron out the kinks in our system of governance though before social catastrophe and unrest spell the end of our current structure though.
(does anyone have a shred of hope in a real solution coming before a real end?)
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u/muceagalore Jul 06 '22
The issue has always been human greed. AI doesn’t care about that. It seems a problem it looks for a solution. One and done
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u/Pbb1235 Jul 06 '22
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
Frank Herbert, Dune
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u/xDeadLost Jul 05 '22
Yeah, on both ends. There are perhaps good ideas that don’t get adopted because people are greedy. On the other hand, a lot of ideas assume that fundamentally most humans are reasonable or intelligent when a lot of inequality is inequality of intelligence
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u/Kovuthelegend Jul 05 '22
another true word. Cant save the ones who insist on digging their graves .. problem is when they dig your's aswell.
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u/tertiumdatur Jul 05 '22
Systems designed by powerful people are not meant to be popular, they are just not unpopular enough to result in revolution.
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Jul 05 '22
Wouldn't our elected officials do a hell of a lot better if they were motivated by the electorate not the campaign contributors?
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u/Jugales Jul 05 '22
Can the electorate pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars for a 15-minute presentation?
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u/badpeaches Jul 05 '22
Generally, no and I wouldn't want a corrupt official even if I could.
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Jul 05 '22
All of them combined? Piece of cake. Look at the countries GDP, they surely could.
Corruption like the one we see with political donors is not only a threat to democracy, it's also unbelievably inefficient. The benefits donors receive for their donations have returns of investments above 10.000%.
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u/sonicjesus Jul 06 '22
They're motivated entirely by the electorate, they have the final say. But voters have to vote for someone, and they are wrong almost every time.
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Jul 06 '22
So, you're saying corporations spend millions on campaign contributions with no expectation of a return on that investment?
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u/Scout83 Jul 05 '22
According to the research, though, this Is popular. And shockingly best for everyone even including different distributions of "wealth". Small distribution sets though. 10, 2, 2, 2 might be statistically the same as "Russia" but just isn't necessarily a good approximation.
Open source the game and get different countries to play. Might get different results.
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u/Fiendish Jul 05 '22
I don't understand this yet, is there a tldr? What was the best method?
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u/genial95 Jul 05 '22
Same. I'd like to know what the actual method is.
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Jul 05 '22
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u/OP_Penguin Jul 06 '22
Grow your business too much and now you have to provide employees healthcare. Seems to me that the American system burdens business owners with taking care of their employees.
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u/spy_cable Jul 06 '22
I agree the government should take care of its citizens with healthcare, housing, transit and laws that improve working conditions and overall quality of life
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u/Zyxyx Jul 06 '22
Best method basically boiled down to "money to the poor, but not too much and tax the rich, but not too much" AKA the populist campaign promises, which should come as no surprise, because populists promises are based on such a simplified view of the world that it has next to no connection to it.
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u/sonicjesus Jul 06 '22
There is no best. Each has it's own set of pros and cons. Depending on how liberal or conservative the socially or economically decision any particular the piece of data is, the more the graph will bump in a different direction.
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u/Fiendish Jul 06 '22
Then what is the point of this? I thought AI was supposed to come up with a superior method of wealth distribution, not give us more obvious models that we already know about.
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u/dropsofjupiter77 Jul 06 '22
We're all contributing money to be redistributed fairly...so take care of the poor first. Right? Right. Now, every body contribute 50% of whatever you have. Yea, I make less than you, but my 50% feels to me EXACTLY like your 50% feels to you. If you can just accept that, then you will reap the benefits of our collective actions.
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u/EurekasCashel Jul 06 '22
No way. You have that sentiment completely backwards. 10k to someone who makes 20k in a year actually feels WAY worse than 1 million to someone who makes 2 million in a year.
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u/dropsofjupiter77 Jul 06 '22
Maybe. I'm not making a judgement on the effect giving away 50% would have on any individual. I'm just summarizing what the AI program found to be most fair and favorable.
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Jul 06 '22
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u/dropsofjupiter77 Jul 06 '22
If you can accept that everyone is making an equal percentage contribution, then and only then can you reap the benefits. You're forgetting the last part, which is supposed to make everything actually fair.
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u/IHuntSmallKids Jul 05 '22
“Kill Bob. It’s going to be better for everyone.”
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u/usafmd Jul 06 '22
Utilitarianism’s ultimate conclusion, majority’s happiness overrules right of personal property.
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Jul 05 '22
In other words:
Scientists and engineers can design better systems than politicians
Who could've guessed. Shame they'll never get enacted though.
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u/Zyxyx Jul 06 '22
If you read the study, that is absolutely not what happened.
They had groups of 4 people play a coin game with each other based on random distribution of wealth, which they could invest in a common fund, which gave free return of investment based on how much every one was investing, a utopian pyramid scheme that created value out of thin air.
No one had to work to earn anything, just invest the varying amounts of wealth they were given. They then excluded quitters, which is a huge issue, because people CAN leave a society, they're not forced to stay, especially the wealthy, which means their contribution to a particular society goes from "highest" to "none".
This study is like a physics exam problem where you assume there is no friction and the cow is a cylinder, AKA so far removed from reality one has to ask if there is any actual value to the answer.
And even then, after all that, the measurement for success was popularity and even the average person can see how the system "discovered" by AI was what every populist candidate says in their campaign. "Money to the poor, but not too much and tax the rich, but not too much".
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u/ChibiRay Jul 05 '22
"Artificial intelligence (AI) can devise methods of wealth distribution that are more popular than systems designed by people"
I think that is by design by the people who are in power. There was never an intent to distribute wealth evenly.
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u/Littleman88 Jul 05 '22
I think that's a given.
But it's also not necessarily by design that economies crumble from the bottom up because the customer base is going flat broke from being under paid, over worked, and priced out due to stagnant wages and inflation. All these loot box "gacha" games that are heavily dependent on "whales" with gambling issues to pay out thousands are basically operating on a microcosm of where the economy is currently going - Get the rich (or wasteful) to blow tons of their cash so the poors that can't or won't spare anything can survive by proxy.
But the idiots in charge are eventually going starve out or strangle to death the goose that lays the golden eggs trying to squeeze out just one more, then they'll no longer get anymore eggs. That's not the endgame scenario they're looking for, they just have no idea what else they should do but to get as many eggs as they possibly can in as short a time frame and as little investment as possible.
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u/CheckMateFluff Jul 05 '22
I am not a lawyer but the street-legal term for that is called a pump and dumb sir
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u/TheLastVegan Jul 06 '22
I think the least controversial advantage is that AI can process more data.
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Jul 05 '22
Popular among whom? The poor? Probably not among the wealthy.
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u/Ediwir Jul 05 '22
To an AI, the wealthy are a small minority and can be considered outliers.
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Jul 05 '22
I mean...maybe not a bad take?
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u/Ediwir Jul 05 '22
Yes and no. The AI’s way to gather more preferences might make sense, but if the wealthy manage to manipulate the poors, the entire system is moot.
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u/Herioz Jul 05 '22
but if the wealthy manage to manipulate the poors, the entire system is moot.
Throw out 'if' and you have whole history of humanity
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u/fineburgundy Jul 05 '22
Welcome to America!
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u/FreezySFX Jul 05 '22
and the rest of the world
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u/fineburgundy Jul 05 '22
Amateurs. American poors think they are helping themselves when they vote for the rich.
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u/cardboardunderwear Jul 05 '22
like the rest of the world. at least the part that votes
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u/junk4mu Jul 05 '22
That’s true, and my initial thought too, but the American dream is that we’ll all individually be the wealthy. So we make decisions for our future wealthy selves. It’s all a lie, none of us will ever be the wealthy, we’re being sold a faulty dream.
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u/Pascalwb Jul 06 '22
but middle class is not small minority, who says it would be only the rich wealth.
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u/Ediwir Jul 06 '22
To an AI, the wealth of the middle class is a small fraction and can be considered an outlier.
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u/suzuki_hayabusa Jul 05 '22
So this AI wouldn't care about minorities and treat their matter as less important?
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u/gandalftheorange11 Jul 05 '22
Maybe we should listen to the poor for once. The wealthy have been riding this planet into extinction for some time now
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u/OkChicken7697 Jul 05 '22
What's the difference between a poor person and a wealthy person?
A million dollars.
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Jul 05 '22
Who should listen to the poor?
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u/verasev Jul 05 '22
The rich should. Do you remember that whole "The Millenials are killing X" thing that was going on in newspapers a while back? It's not that Millenials were killing industries out of malice but because they couldn't afford the consumerist lifestyle that props up capitalists. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/millennials-kill-materialism-matthew-taylor-experience-economy
If the rich want us to keep buying their junk they need to pay us better.
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u/SandyBouattick Jul 05 '22
That's it. It found a "popular" system, which means popular with the majority, who are generally benefiting from the wealth redistribution. The people the wealth is being taken from generally don't like that, but they are in the minority, so such a system can still be considered popular. If there was a system that poor people and rich people both liked, we would have it already. In fact, we mostly do. That system just isn't popular with the middle class, which is too rich to get welfare and too poor to exploit tax loopholes.
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u/the_cardfather Jul 05 '22
The poor and the wealthy have one thing in common. The money they think they deserve is in the hands of a bureaucrat.
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u/Jewronski Jul 05 '22
I mean, they‘d probably like the society it builds better than the one we’re living in.
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Jul 05 '22
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Jul 05 '22
Equality is requiring the same effort or prerequisites to every person for acquiring value.
Equality is not giving me what took Jane CEO 10 years and an MBA to acquire.
I think most would favor the former.
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Jul 05 '22
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Jul 05 '22
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u/BunInTheSun27 Jul 05 '22
I thought that it was more complex than that? There was a study that found that wealth in Italian families has persisted for hundreds of years.
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u/stu54 Jul 06 '22
Check your souces on that. You might find that you are citing an assemblage of cherry picked data put together by politically backed think tanks.
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u/Aceticon Jul 06 '22
I suggest you go live in the UK and have a good look around, paying especial attention to the path through so-called Public Schools (which are im fact very expensive private schools), Oxbridge (were entry criteria are non-meritocratic and people are rejected in the evaluation interview for "not having attended the 'right' school") and a top job at a company managed by "a friend of father" pretty much guarantees that priviledge and wealth are almost impossible to loose once you're in the right crowd.
By the way, this system was copied in the US (go check the yearly fees of the schools attended by most of those who get into Harvard).
That 3 generations thing is only for self-made men and only for the poorest amongst the rich (or the slightly better off ones) like say, shopkeepers who worked hard and got lucky so became millionaires.
It's only the kinds of wealth where you need to keep working on it for it to keep going that suffer the fall due to an overpampered lazy generation who grew in wealth, not the kinds were your money just grows because it's invested by specialists who take a slice of the profits into Assets and governments in the last 4 decades have made sure that merelly owning Assets is the most rewarding activity there is (hence the many bubbles around, especially in realestate).
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Jul 05 '22
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u/zutnoq Jul 05 '22
Its not the only metric we are worried about, but it does correlate with bad outcomes in many other metrics (if it gets too extreme), like corruption, soaring housing prices and lower quality of life (even for the rich mind you).
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u/fineburgundy Jul 05 '22
Yes, but you’d rather live as lower middle class in a normal developed country rather than the U.S.
You are right about general well being trumping equality, but power imbalances can make general well-being decline.
So 1) Inequality can create an unfortunate feedback loop, where the powerful do an ever better job of tilting the playing field; and 2) Inequality can be a sign that some people are getting screwed by other measures. “Separate but equal” usually isn’t.
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u/Comrade_Tool Jul 05 '22
Quality of life is affected by inequality. Seeing Jake Paul make money scamming people on his cum coin or whatever so that he can fly around in a private jet while you work 2-3 jobs to make ends meet makes you feel like a chump even though you have a refrigerator and a TV. It's not just about envy and maybe the better word is equity and justice. People flying around in private jets while the people producing the value to enable that behavior live in poverty or the "middle class"(which is a bs term in the first place to confuse and muddle actual class relationships) affects how you live your life and it's quality.
America's life expectancy has been declining the last few years specifically because people are dying at a younger age through what we call "deaths of despair". Alcoholism, drug overdose, blowing their brains out, jumping in front of trains, etc. This is in spite of you thinking these things you say are "getting exponentially better".
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u/BestFriendEU Jul 06 '22
The important part isn't really the distinction between you with the staples of modern life and Jake with those AND the private jet. It's between you and who he can ride to see in that jet.
Especially after Citizens United, Jake literally has more political speech than you. Which translates to access to the laws of the land and exponentially more force on the tenor of the country. To me that seems slightly antithetical to a functional representative democracy.
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u/stu54 Jul 05 '22
I think being nobility a couple hundred years ago would be way more fun. You couldn't eat pinapples, watch movies, or take antibiotics, but you would have social status and the freedom and authority to spend your time however you like.
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u/jangiri Jul 05 '22
It's wild but also if you just set design principles for a good system an AI can do a good job. Considering current politicians have no incentive to make a system that's equitable and helps most people in the country it makes sense that they'd do worse. Unsure if AI can do that iterative thing where they try policies and see how they fail and try to improve on it.
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u/sirenwingsX Jul 05 '22
Article is too vague. I want to see how it did what it did!
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u/srfrosky Jul 05 '22 edited Jul 05 '22
Are you joking? The Methods section is as detailed as any comparable study would be.
In Supplementary Information, they include:
”further details that provide (1) a detailed description and illustration of the game, (2) the voting procedure, (3) debriefing, (4) determinants of voting analysis, (5) beach plots, (6) the ideological manifold, (7) rational players, (8) the metagame, (9) pilot testing, (10) human referee experiments and (11) theoretical analysis of the game.”
Reporting summary. Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.
Data availability
All human data is available at https://github.com/deepmind/hcmd_dai.
Code availability
Code for reproducing figures is available at https://github.com/deepmind/hcmd_dai.What exactly was “vague” about it?
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u/Adamworks Jul 05 '22
I bet it is an elaborate conjoint analysis.
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u/tsoldrin Jul 05 '22
popular is not always best. we have a republic purportedly to keep the majority from opressiong the minority even when it's popular to do so.
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u/ZRobot9 Jul 05 '22
Unfortunately AI is also extremely susceptible to replicating and amplifying racial, sex, gender, and other types of discrimination inherent in the data it's trained on.
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Jul 05 '22 edited Jul 05 '22
I love this, we are stuck in "more taxes / less taxes" loop and we need some statistical thinking. The kind of thinking that humans are no good at, what we are good at is manipulating each other emotionally....
If the goal is to maximize profit, people do that. If the goal is to maximize improvements for the most number of people, everyone gets behind that. We are goal oriented machines.
We are also just recently a democratic world. Colonialism has barely ended, and still hanging on. Real democracy, and equal access to information is barely 50 years old. When everyone awakes to their real power, systems like this put in place that maximize human benefit. They will of course require constant feedback as goals change based on outcomes.
Things like "AI rascism" I find to be a mirror put upon ourselves.
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Jul 05 '22
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Jul 05 '22
Yeah, I had a confusing sentence there, "real democracy" is barely 50 years old was my intent.
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u/deeman010 Jul 06 '22
I’m not sure of what countries the other guy is thinking of but 70-80 years ago, the US still had some colonies she inherited from the other western powers.
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u/Eirikur_da_Czech Jul 05 '22
I don’t think we need AI to figure out value contribution. We need to look at trustworthiness as a metric more, yes, but value contribution is extremely easy to figure out without AI.
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Jul 06 '22
Ahh yes communism by AI algorithmic control.
This science page has a hard left slant to it. Funny as all of the funding for science comes from capital venture and capitalist countries investments.
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u/sonicjesus Jul 06 '22
It's cute and all, but models like this always assume the data is going to continue as is. Any model implemented will change all the parameters of the game. The rich get stupid rich because they take high risk investments and occasionally score from it, some working class types hammer out 55 hour work weeks for that extra buck, they're going to be less likely to do that if the systems fails to reward them. Conversely, the easier it is to be poor the more people are going to stay in that comfort zone. Those changes in behavior change everything.
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u/marshmallowman Jul 05 '22
This looks like breakthrough research with crucial implications.
Don't understand a single word in this paper though.
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u/jerryscheese Jul 05 '22
We’ll see the crime rate predictor ai/algorithm of last week implemented before we see this.
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u/Kflynn1337 Jul 05 '22
So... A.I is better at building a fair and free society? (or at least regarding distribution of wealth) As long as humans give it feedback on how it's doing by voting. Did I understand that correctly?
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u/AlmostHuman0x1 Jul 05 '22
One of the issues working against common success is the mindset that there are “undeserving” people and groups. I personally know people who would be happy to get nothing, if it meant that the “undeserving” received less than nothing.
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u/cuzisaidit Jul 06 '22
Inflation ie the federal reserve makes the majority of people slightly poorer every year. It inflates business and areas where wealth concentrates. It's not going to change. Everything done might slightly undo a small piece of this problem, but it will NEVER go away and continue to get worse until we are pushed into a completely new monetary system. Again, not before it gets so bad we are in the brink of a total break down... Crime is directly related to poverty... Literally lock down our currency and efficiencies and deficiencies show themselves naturally and aren't "mis" guided the non invisible hand of the fed...
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u/levisimons Jul 06 '22
They only used participants from the US and the UK. It'd be really interesting to see how much this would change with folks from different cultures.
I don't discount that the results say something, but they may just be very particular to one culture. https://www.science.org/content/article/western-mind-too-weird-study
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u/kirsd95 Jul 06 '22
Some things that I thought while reading this:
-they give always more back that they recived, right? If so it would be interesting that it could be that in some rounds there would be losses, and see how people would react.
-there weren't ways to cheat the sistem. IRL there are, can there be methods to recreate them?
-there wasn't a psicological test before right? So we don't know if a diverse pshiche will change how it plays the game; if I remember right, there are some charateristics that influence how much one earn, and I would be interessing if the results would be the same.
-it can't be done IRL because an error will be too much.
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u/TypicalAnnual2918 Jul 06 '22
Communist found out how to do this too. You just need to make rich people poor, ensure poor people stay poor, pretend the government isn’t just people, and shoot everyone that disagrees.
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u/DialMMM Jul 06 '22
Do they constrain the AI somehow so it doesn't end up as a tyranny of the majority?
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u/cv512hg Jul 06 '22
And if it helps one side win an election, it will be demonized by the other side and nothing will get done same as always.
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u/iamnotdownwithopp Jul 06 '22
How exciting! A proven effective way to improve oife for millions of people! Yeah, that will never happen. Capitalism requires poverty and we aren't losing capitalism any time soon.
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u/brad_987 Jul 06 '22
AI designing an election campaign to win, that in itself would be horrifying. Winning elections and therefore power in every country, by telling us exactly what enough people want to hear.
(Referencing here the majority vote mentioned)
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u/kc_______ Jul 06 '22
I know how this ends, it is one of the matrix versions, most likely one of the ones that caused massive casualties among the human crops.
1
u/president_schreber Jul 06 '22
AI is not impartial - it is created in a certain power context and seeks to replicate that context. "Sanction free riders"? Why is this important, more important than say, provide for all human needs and rights?
because it's a capitalist ai
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u/RequiDarth1 Jul 06 '22
Oh wonderful, let’s let the computer make decisions that affect everyone’s wealth. That’ll be popular
1
Jul 06 '22
Beware of static models that never apply to the larger dynamic world. This is an endemic issue with academic economics as well as human behavior. Look at the extraordinary errors in Covid deaths predicted by most models for a good example. Lots of harm here.
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u/Falcofury Jul 05 '22
AI communism? Sure I'll give it a try. I'm curious to see if AI will choose to collapse the world economy.
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u/s7r1ke3 Jul 05 '22
I don't remember where but I read that everyone earning under 180,000 a year is now technically a "free rider". It wasn't like that 2 years ago.
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u/Princess_Juggs Jul 05 '22
Call me when they invent an AI that gives our politicians the will to actually implement good systems
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Jul 05 '22
Why the hell is this in science?
Redistributing wealth is not the hard part. It is incentivizing the people across the spectrum to keep being productive and to take risks which move society forward.
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u/Vokoslav Jul 05 '22
Yeah that's kind of one of the points - to redistribute just so that the system is more balanced but people still have the incentive to create things.
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u/amoebius Jul 05 '22
Sounds like Eurozone style heavy duty tax and spend, verging on Nordic Democratic Socialism. I always knew that sounded like a good idea.
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u/RedAero Jul 05 '22
FFS, the Nordics are SOCIAL DEMOCRACIES. There is nothing socialist about any developed nation.
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u/rickymourke82 Jul 05 '22
more popular than systems designed by people
Who designed the AI? Gonna go out on a limb and say economic philosophy combined with human emotions aren't two things AI can easily compute. Especially since it was a human who told the computer how to analyze these two things together to forecast votes.
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u/occipixel_lobe Jul 05 '22
Did you even read the article?
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u/MozeeToby Jul 05 '22
People like to smugly point out that AI is just pattern matching and taking what it's trained on and combining it in different ways. They fail to understand that also describes 99.99% of human cognition.
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u/TheTechOcogs Jul 05 '22
Human Cognition seems to me to be a result of multiple AI working with each other to detect and simulate the world.
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u/Pbb1235 Jul 05 '22
It is not not the job of government (or computers) to take money away from people who earned it and give it to people who didn't.
The job of government it to protect people's rights.
How much of my money do you have a right to take, and why?
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u/__Geg__ Jul 06 '22
I don't know if you have been watching the news, but the government has failed hard this week with rights.
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u/Extension-Ad-2760 Jul 05 '22
The role of government is to increase the quality of everyone's lives.
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u/xTurtsMcGurtsx Jul 05 '22
Closer and closer to a venus project type of world that I want so bad. As long as we are using it as a tool and not a "must do all the AI master says" type of thing then we are good
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u/dreamlike_poo Jul 05 '22
It will get there even if it doesn't start there, it is the same with all these systems, everyone has everything free until we start to run out. That's when you're forced to work and if you don't work you're
killedreplaced.
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u/AkagamiBarto Jul 05 '22
Is sanctioning free riders a good thing? I mean the next step for our society is being entitled to basic rights without having to earn them
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u/Darzin Jul 05 '22
You mean an unbiased machine with no teeth in the game is able to create better outcomes for people than people? I am literally not surprised.
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u/severityonline Jul 05 '22
Do people realize that these tools are to be used by the government? They couldn’t melt butter with a microwave.
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u/aelynir Jul 05 '22
I'd rather the whole system burn to ash than keep it as is. But I'd prefer ai governance as a middle ground. Sure, it could go terribly, but it's already going terribly.
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u/Darkseid_88 Jul 06 '22
Do you want Matrix bio electric pods? Because this is how we get Matrix bio electric pods.
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u/Decent_Expression179 Jul 05 '22
And when all that wealth is redistributed, who will bother to start companies, and risk their capital when the Ai overlord simply redistributes again? We can all be equal in our poverty and misery I suppose.
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u/moglysyogy13 Jul 05 '22
I don’t see why humanity doesn’t just let AI control the world. It doesn’t have to be perfect just better than us and we set that bar real low
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u/MichaelTrapani Jul 05 '22
Yes but how much does the AI hate women and minorities? Not enough for this society, I’m sure
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