Is the Goal of Artificial Intelligence to Sell Sugar Water?
Maybe to change the world.
Steve Jobs famously said he once convinced the then CEO of PepsiCo to join Apple: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
Jobs reveals the truth about how many businesses survive today. Their primary purpose is to drive demand by making resources scarce. This is known as “scarcity economics,” a business strategy whose purpose is to create artificial scarcity.
An example of artificial scarcity is “planned obsolescence.” Apple is a master at this. Did you know that Apple doesn’t sell accessories so how can you possibly fix a broken device? Did you know that since 2012 Apple has used glue (instead of screws) to assemble its computers, making them unrepairable? Did you know that Apple intentionally degrades the performance of iPhones by reducing battery life?
The laptop I use today is a 2011 Macbook Pro. This is the last Apple laptop that you can upgrade yourself. I have an i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, which is twice as much as the latest laptops. This is more than enough for most tasks and is comparable to the latest laptops. The extra RAM really helps because I like to open so many browsers.
Bitcoin is another example of artificial scarcity. Bitcoin is designed to limit the number of coins created to 21 million. Bitcoin cannot be printed like national currencies (i.e. USD), it can only be 'mined' (solved complex cryptographic calculation problems) - which consumes energy. Bitcoin mining takes too much energy - more than half of Iceland's production capacity is provided by cryptocurrency mining. Bitcoin mining becomes more difficult over time, and the number of coins that can be mined halves every four years. So, if you're wondering why Bitcoin is scarcer and more expensive than gold, it's because of artificial scarcity. It's like a painting by a dead artist. The price goes up when it's scarce. It doesn't have to be real, it just takes imagination!
Let's look at the world's largest AI companies, Google and Facebook. How do they make money? These two companies are primarily in the advertising business. Advertising is about commercializing attention. If you can't sell content to customers, then you might as well sell your customers to advertisers. Both companies are deep learning AI, with the goal of enabling advertisers to sell sugar water to customers - through advanced AI technology, predicting your behavior and thus manipulating your behavior.
There are at least three types of intelligence: computational ability, self-awareness, and social intelligence. The first type can be used to discover the properties of the universe or drugs. The second type promotes automation, that is, acting and making decisions without human intervention. The last type is what everyone wants, that is, a money-printing machine that predicts human behavior.
So if we can predict human behavior, should we use it now? Research shows that AI can be misused (paper title: The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation). The 100-page paper is about ways in which artificial intelligence technology will cause harm.
The article is structured around security-related AI features, including:
- Its efficient and scalable capabilities
- It exceeds human capabilities
- Its ability to enhance anonymity and psychological distance
- Its ability to spread rapidly
The characteristics that make AI dangerous are the same characteristics that make sugar water valuable. Basically, we want customers to believe that the sugar water we sell is valuable, and we are not responsible for the after-sales service. We want to convince the world to buy a rugged SUV or truck, but we don’t want to be responsible for the environmental and footprint impacts it causes. We want to convince the world that guns will keep us safe, but we don’t want to be responsible for the destruction guns cause. We want to convince people in pain that opioids are the best pain relief medication, but we don’t want to be responsible for drug addiction. Scarcity generates money, and if scarcity is not necessarily beneficial to humans, then scarcity is useless.
We all want to believe that our work in artificial intelligence will lead to human good. We all want to, as Steve Jobs put it, “change the world” for the greater good. But what is better? Is happiness better? If so, maybe we’ll pump ourselves with psychedelics and permanently connect to virtual reality.
That's what I'm proposing, maybe we look at people who are unusually long-lived. The blue areas identify the lifestyles and environments of the people who lived the longest. What they found is that people in Okinawa, Japan, have a concept called Ikigai (生き甲斐):
The reason we get up in the morning should be because we need to do something that (1) we enjoy, (2) we are good at, (3) the world needs, and (4) provides income.
The biggest problem is the last one. Most of the things we pay for are scarce things. Only a very small number of people are lucky enough to have all four reasons (I think that's the case for people who hold university positions). Most of us waste our lives on meaningless things. Maybe this should be the real goal of AI - to change the world so that we have a "reason for existence" and don't waste our lives selling sugar water to children.
Compiled from: Carlos E. Perez https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/is-the-purpose-of-ai-to-sell-sugar-water-e6466d574ec0