AI in general is meant to do what we cannot do—else we would have done it, already, without AI—but to “make things better”, that we could very readily have done, already.
Strong disagree, for two related reasons:
AI in general is meant to do what we cannot do
Why must AI only be used for things we cannot do at all? e.g. the internet has made it much easier to converse with friends and family around the world; we could already do that beforehand in inferior or expensive ways (voice-only calls, prohibitively-frequent travel) but now we can also do it with easy video calling, which I think pretty clearly counts as “make things better”. It would be silly to say “the internet is meant to do what we cannot do, and we could very readily have already been calling home more often without the internet, so the internet can’t make things better”.
to “make things better”, that we could very readily have done… we certainly had many opportunities to create such a civilization… [etc]
Imagine a trade between two strangers in a setting without atomic swaps. What is the “upside” of a trusted third-party escrow agent? After all, whichever trader must hand over their goods first could ‘very readily’ just decide to trust the second trader instead of mistrusting them. And then that second trader could ‘very readily’ honestly hand over their goods afterward instead of running away with everything. Clearly since they didn’t come up with that obvious solution, they don’t really want to trade, and so this new (social) technology of escrow that would allow them to do so isn’t actually providing a real “upside”.
Strong disagree, for two related reasons:
Why must AI only be used for things we cannot do at all? e.g. the internet has made it much easier to converse with friends and family around the world; we could already do that beforehand in inferior or expensive ways (voice-only calls, prohibitively-frequent travel) but now we can also do it with easy video calling, which I think pretty clearly counts as “make things better”. It would be silly to say “the internet is meant to do what we cannot do, and we could very readily have already been calling home more often without the internet, so the internet can’t make things better”.
Imagine a trade between two strangers in a setting without atomic swaps. What is the “upside” of a trusted third-party escrow agent? After all, whichever trader must hand over their goods first could ‘very readily’ just decide to trust the second trader instead of mistrusting them. And then that second trader could ‘very readily’ honestly hand over their goods afterward instead of running away with everything. Clearly since they didn’t come up with that obvious solution, they don’t really want to trade, and so this new (social) technology of escrow that would allow them to do so isn’t actually providing a real “upside”.