What Should the Rules of AI be?

While companies like OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. have done great with developing this technology for the rest of the world to use, AI needs to be open for as many people in the world to use. When a single company has control over an AI used by millions or even billions of people around the world (I'm looking at you, ChatGPT, GPT3, and GPT4), they can call the shots. They get to decide what the model can or can't be used for. Now some people may have some less than noble or malicious intentions with AI but I can safely trust that they're in the minority and the rest of the human population, armed with their democratic access to AI (in the world I envision) should be able to neutralize the relatively few malicious users.

A single entity or a big conglomerate of big tech companies presiding over AI also makes censorship inevitable. Even if they don't have an agenda to push their values onto their users, the fear of being sued also lends to more censorship. If you're tired of ChatGPT telling you "As an AI model, I can't do ____" ad nauseum, I hear ya.

For those of you who follow the Stable Diffusion world, it's kinda playing out in a direction I'd like to see: you have the big and powerful premium AI's like Dall-E and Midjourney that are run by big companies and people can pay a premium to generate high quality art. You also have the open-source Stable Diffusion models that can run on Google Colab or a computer with a moderate-level GPU locally which isn't as powerful as Dall-E and Midjourney but can be customized and are free of censorship.

First, watch this video. Yes, I know it's 8 years old but this guy was predicting how machines and automation will take off to the present and will continue to do so, freeing more and more humans from needing to work.

But what about the economy? The economy will crash when robots take our jobs, right?

First of all, a job exists because someone else out there has a want that they can't meet without having another human do something to meet that need. And to offer an incentive for another human to meet that need, they pay that human money which that human can use to exchange for some other thing or service that they can't do or get themselves. At least that's how things are supposed to work in theory (though there's a whole other school of thought where a lot of supposedly "useless" jobs have been created simply to prop up the economy and the status quo created by the current corporate world order.)

Now imagine a machine exists that can pretty much meet every need I have at the push of a button and I have it. It takes care of all of my needs for free, whether it's food, housing, medical needs, entertainment, therapy, etc. I'm certainly not gonna spend money to fulfill these needs when my machine can do it for free. And I won't have any incentive to work anymore either since I'd rather save that time and effort to enjoy life and I can now because my machine is meeting all of those needs for me for free. An economy is created when people have unmet needs, and if it's possible for everyone to meet their needs, there's no need for an economy anymore.

Some people have even pushed for laws banning companies from replacing workers with machines. As much as I usually like to speak out against the supposedly "greedy" corporations, I urge you to put this in perspective as well: would you be happy if the machine that could meet all of your needs in the previous example suddenly becomes illegal to own and use and you must hire humans to do the work needed to meet your needs instead?

However, back to reality now. We're still not sure if AI is eventually capable of solving all of our problems to the point where an economy doesn't exist anymore. If we're moving in that direction, there will certainly be a lot of growing pains due to the uneven progress of this tech. In other words, some jobs will get automated away before others since AI, in general, is better equipped to handle them. Those people automated out of a job will need to find another way to survive since AI doesn't know how to solve their jobless problem yet. Unfortunately, I don't have a solution to this and it'll probably take many smart people from all over the world in many different disciplines to come up with a reasonable solution in the meantime. The bottom line is, I do not wish for progress on AI and the making of a world where nobody has to work be held hostage in favor of protecting jobs, akin to the Luddite movement two centuries ago. Would you be happy if textile factories were banned and clothing had to be woven by hand by human tailors today?

Hate me all you want but this point really needs to be made and to put the perspective of "AI taking all of our jobs" in the grand scheme of things, especially the upside of AI doing most/all of our work so we no longer have to. Maybe AI will make the Four Work Work Week possible for virtually everyone in the world if it's allowed to flourish.