JohnT
February 27, 2023, 2:12pm
76
To me, the fact that 20-30% of the population are actively trying to train AI’s to hate the same people they hate is just as worrisome, if not more so, than the “overproduction via bad code” issue:
I read a lot of science fiction in my life. Most of it positive, of course, even the dystopian stuff for it all implied we had a future. But there is a reason why Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was such a shocking trendsetter that it is famous today, in ways his other masterworks (like Jeffty Is Five ) are not. Commonly anthologized, it would not surprise me to have made Norton’s.
I think about that story whenever I read of attempts like the above, for Ellison never explained… from memory, and we all know how reliable that is… how the AI came to hate, or if it did, it was vague as befits a short story which doesn’t care about the details of the dead civilization which built the Damned thing.
But I wonder if Ellison would have ever thought that the reason why the AI in his story became so full of hate was because 30% of the population worked on making sure it could be tribal and hateful, and complained when it wasn’t.
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