Essay by Brian J. A. Boyd: “…How could stewardship of artificially living AI be pursued on a broader, even global, level? Here, the concept of “integral ecology” is helpful. Pope Francis uses the phrase to highlight the ways in which everything is connected, both through the web of life and in that social, political, and environmental challenges cannot be solved in isolation. The immediate need for stewardship over AI is to ensure that its demands for power and industrial production are addressed in a way that benefits those most in need, rather than de-prioritizing them further. For example, the energy requirements to develop tomorrow’s AI should spur research into small modular nuclear reactors and updated distribution systems, making energy abundant rather than causing regressive harms by driving up prices on an already overtaxed grid. More broadly, we will need to find the right institutional arrangements and incentive structures to make AI Amistics possible.
We are having a painfully overdue conversation about the nature and purpose of social media, and tech whistleblowers like Tristan Harris have offered grave warnings about how the “race to the bottom of the brain stem” is underway in AI as well. The AI equivalent of the addictive “infinite scroll” design feature of social media will likely be engagement with simulated friends — but we need not resign ourselves to it becoming part of our lives as did social media. And as there are proposals to switch from privately held Big Data to a public Data Commons, so perhaps could there be space for AI that is governed not for maximizing profit but for being sustainable as a common-pool resource, with applications and protocols ordered toward long-run benefit as defined by local communities…(More)”.