Over the weekend, I listened to this podcast conversation between the psychologist & philosopher Alison Gopnik and writer Ted Chiang about using children’s learning as a model for developing AI systems. Around the 23-minute mark, Gopnik observes that care relationships (child care, elder care, etc.) are extremely important to people but is nearly invisible in economics. And then Chiang replies:
One of the ways that conventional economics sort of ignores care is that for every employee that you hire, there was an incredible amount of labor that went into that employee. That’s a person! And how do you make a person? Well, for one thing, you need several hundred thousand hours of effort to make a person. And every employee that any company hires is the product of hundreds of thousands of hours of effort. Which, companies… they don’t have to pay for that!
They are reaping the benefits of an incredible amount of labor. And if you imagine, in some weird kind of theoretical sense, if you had to actually pay for the raising of everyone that you would eventually employ, what would that look like?
It’s an interesting conversation throughout — recommended!
Chiang has written some of my favorite things on AI in recent months/years, including this line that’s become one of my guiding principles in thinking about AI: "I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism."
Title: Raising Artificial Intelligences Like Children
URL: https://kottke.org/24/01/raising-artificial-intelligences-like-children
Source: kottke.org
Source URL: http://kottke.org
Date: January 22, 2024 at 05:16PM
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