Sergi Santos was pissed. The Barcelona based inventor had travelled to the Ars Electronica Festival in 2017 to promote his prototype interactive sex doll named Samantha when she was gang raped by drunken attendees.
"The people mounted Samantha's breasts, her legs, and arms. Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled," the outraged Santos complained to Britain's Metro. "People can be bad. Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it, they treated the doll like barbarians."
What do you do when your simulated human female is treated like an object? Suffice it to say that the tech sector has some credibility problems with gender issues (and irony). That there is a lucrative market for interactive sex dolls indicates that many so-called tech bros consider sexual consent an inconvenience that is best overcome by additional tech.
The overarching issue with AI safety is ensuring value alignment. But whose human values? Some computer enthusiasts disparagingly characterize everything outside the internet as the meat world. Self-described singularians look forward to the day when then can augment their brains with computer implants or upload their consciousness to achieve immortality – an outcome termed the rapture of the geeks by those less enamored by the idea. Are we rushing toward an online fantasyland because a cohort of coders can't get laid?
Since the drive towards birthing AI is happening in the absence of any outside regulation or oversight, let's have a closer look at tech culture and see if there is credible evidence of parenting skills.
In her 2018 book Brotopia, Emily Chang documented how Silicon Valley apparently has an even worse record of gender equity than Wall Street. Less than one quarter of employees in tech companies are women and they earn half what men do. Women led companies attract only two percent of venture capital. Chang and others describe how attending sex parties or afternoon outings to a strip club are an expected and routine part of the work day.
Sexual harassment in the valley seems so pervasive it makes Mad Men look woke. And if female employees don't like being hit on in the workplace, they might want to find another career. Almost 1,000 publicly traded Silicon Valley companies require employees to sign away their legal rights to sue for harassment. Problem solved.
Creating an environment where female employees are treated with respect is not merely moral, it would also foster innovations to better meet the needs of half of humanity. However gender issues are not the only place where tech leaders seem uninterested in the collateral damage from their pervasive products or how they are used.
The chaotic Presidency of Donald Trump was in large part due to Facebook being weaponized by Russia in the 2016 election to target 126 million Americans in a staggeringly successful effort to destabilize the United States. Facebook stubbornly refused to release internal company data on how this happened even as the US approached the 2020 election. And to be clear, decisions made by Facebook are those of Mark Zuckerberg since he controls sixty percent of the voting shares.
Whether or not Zuckerberg likes Donald Trump is not the point. As detailed in his insider exposé Zucked, tech consultant Roger McNamee describes how in 2011 Facebook discovered it was much more profitable to promote content causing fear or outrage than things that make people happy. Manipulating peoples attention for monetary benefit naturally leads to adversarial value silos, creating a society where opportunistic populists leaders like Donald Trump might flourish. This was not an intentional goal, just an accidental side effect of maximizing users of an intentionally addictive platform.
Stuart Russell recounts in this podcast from the Future of Life Institute how algorithms designed by Facebook and others to maximize click throughs do not serve up content that users want as much as they train users to become more predictable clickers by providing provocative posts. This mass behavior modification by a relatively simple piece of code is what Russel terms the "click through catastrophe".
Has Facebook or their executives had a moment of moral clarity? This recent testimony before Congress shows how little has apparently been learned from the Cambridge Analytica and other scandals. Mark Zuckerberg is worth about $65 billion and personally controls the largest news distribution outlet in the world. How much wealth and agency is enough? Apparently more than that.
I don’t mean to denigrate the entire tech sector but this is not my top candidate group to exercise restraint or to philosophically interrogate the implications of their clever creations. Picture a group of brainy bros hopped up on Red Bull briefly elated by being first to reach a boundary aptly referred to as the singularity, uncaring that all possible future human outcomes have been pulled across an event horizon into their newly created vortex of events.
Never in history has a cloistered group had such outsized agency to affect all future outcomes, or been more unqualified to reflect on that responsibility.