AI: Friend or Foe?
AI, the shorthand symbol for artificial intelligence, is not merely a technological development that enhances productivity. It is also an attack on the viability of most of humanity. Elon Musk, who knows something about the subject, said recently that AI’s ability to be programmed to replace so many human jobs is leading us into communism in which everyone would be given the same income with which to purchase the goods and services produced by AI.
Policymakers and economists are unaware of the real threat of AI. Instead, they worry about a dystopian world in which machines superior to humans have taken over. This concern is a red herring. Machines are inanimate matter. They are not alive. They don’t have sentience. Geeks confuse computation ability with the ability to think. AI is programmed. It can do tasks that humans can program it to do. AI cannot program itself, because AI cannot think or create. There is no spectrum at which at some point computational ability becomes thought.
A friend who is a software engineer told me recently, as I reported, that his employer told the engineers that they would be replaced in 3 years by AI. This announcement gave them time to find a different kind of employment.
The announcement could be premature and wrong. The employer could easily be carried along by false beliefs in AI’s potency. But it is plausible that if software engineering procedures can be programed into machines, the machines can use the p
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
