The problem with that notion is that “A.I.”–and ambiguous term–may have its own interpretations of justice, fairness, and order that are not in service of human rights and interests. One of the current problems with sophisticated “deep learning” algorithms doing face recognition and behavior pattern matching–which is about as close as we are to a general artificial intelligence as imagined by science fiction writers–is that they can be inherently prejudicial despite lacking any inherent bigotry or intentionality, simply by dint of the sample bias in their experience set and the particularly characteristics they focus on. Face recognition software has become notorious for mis-identifying Black suspects because, like certain people who don’t have many friends outside their ethnicity, it perceives all Black people to basically look alike. Imagine the same biases playing out in governance and justice, and you don’t even need to conjure up a malignant machine entity to be wary about imposing artificial intelligence upon humanity.
The problem with democracy is fundamentally one of education, experience, and empathy. We have a fundamental problem with that in this country (and arguably always have) but that is actually a resolvable if complex problem. The simple solution of imposing autocracy–whether lead by a human despot or the computer from Colossus: The Forbin Project–has even worse downsides than coping with human failings and bigotry.
Actually, having AI solve these kinds of complex problems would be beautiful; unfortunately, I don’t see the elites ever allowing it to happen – not without a hell of a fight anyway.
But if they could ever be convinced that allowing AI to, say, distribute wealth more evenly would reduce the pressures on them, perhaps we could make this work and be well on our way to building a truly advanced civilization.
I’ve thought that if there really is an advanced civilization that’s out there cruising the universe, they probably used some form of AI to impose self-governance, equality, and solved the problem of social hierarchy, well before solving other problems and threats to their existence.
Twitter would discover it real quick, like within a day or two, and shut that down too. The thing is, he doesn’t want to be some anonymous schlub on the internet. So he’d have to tell people what his new account name is and the word would spread quickly. And there’s no way his followers would be able to keep it secret from TPTB at Twitter.
Somewhere in all the threads since last night, someone posted a link to a new twitter account that someone had started, for John Barron, with a picture of Trump with a fake mustache, and the tweet was “Hi, I’m new to twitter. What are people talking about?”
I’m remembering back in the Iran-Contra days when a certain Marine Colonel deleted some emails off of his desktop, thinking they’d never be seen again.
“Blocked”? What do you mean, “blocked”? The President of the United States still has full authority and power to communicate with the nation and the world in his official capacity through his official channels, just as he’s always done. He could spend the remaining twelve days of his Presidency doing that 24/7, if he chose to.
Trump’s problem is that he decided to conflate his official authority and persona as POTUS with his personal social-media accounts as a private individual. For four years he could, and did, say all kinds of stupid shit on his own accounts with zero regard for standards and protocols of Presidential decorum, but still with the authority and influence of his Presidential office.
And finally, the owners of the private social-media corporations whose rules Trump agreed to abide by when he signed up for his accounts decided that they would no longer overlook his flagrant violations of their terms of service, and booted him. If he wants to go on communicating with the public in his Presidential capacity, he’s going to have to resort to one of the many channels of Presidential communication that are still open to him.
The POTUS hasn’t been “blocked” from anything except from abusing his official position to continually violate corporate terms of service as a private individual. But now conservatives are boo-hooing about “unelected billionaire oligarchs” exercising their authority to enforce their own contractual terms of service on their own users? What a goddamned circus.
Imagine being such an idiot that you have the power of the presidency behind you to get your message out but can’t figure out how to do so because the one tool you bothered to learn how to use was taken away from you.
Blocked from what? From communicating with the public? Can he not hold a press conference, or a fireside chat, or release an official statement to the press?
This president has overstepped his boundaries as a servant of the people many times. Remember when he had armed cops gas people working at a church so he could have a photo op on their property, without even warning them in advance?
He has plenty of ways to communicate. He hasn’t been “blocked”. He’s been told to leave private property on which he was violating the owner’s rules. About time.
He is no more blocked than all the previous Presidents that managed to communicate to the masses. Are you claiming that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others should be forced to participate hate speech, libel, and sedition?
There is a hilarious short story by Isaac Asimov describing future U.S. Presidential elections: on Election Day a some Men in Black in a van accost some randomly-chosen poor schlub and drive him to DC where he is put in a room with a bank of mainframes and asked a long list of questions like, “What do you think of the price of eggs?” A couple of days after this wraps up, the authorities announce that the computer has extrapolated the results and it was not even close, Such-and-Such’s administration has won by a landslide! The story ends with the yokel, who initially had misgivings about the whole thing, bursting with feelings of pride in how he was able to uphold the fine tradition of democracy.
Press conference = Trump being let loose unscripted; in his present unhinged state of mind, this would guarantee prompt removal from office
Fireside chat = same problem
Official statement = If it was sensible and literate, it would be obvious it was just written by staff and had no relation to what Trump believes. If it was actually written by Trump in his distinctive style, it would be incomprehensible if it was longer than 240 characters. The man is virtually illiterate.
People do seriously talk about AI in this role, not even counting the Brawndo company in one prophetic documentary. AI works best when optimizing for some variable. Maybe GDP, or retweets and likes, or some measure of wealth distribution, or a weighted combination of a bunch of things. It also learns by doing random crap to see what that does to the score. Might be fun to run in a simulation to see what color of charcoal the earth becomes during this learning process.
