The robots who predict the future

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• In an optimization-driven reality, every life decision is posed as if it were a round at an imaginary casino, and every argument can be reduced to costs and benefits, means and ends

  80% confidence

• Predictive algorithms represent the system working as intended, not unintended consequences; if an algorithm promotes outrage to maximize engagement and ad clicks, that is because promoting outrage is good for profits from ad sales

  80% confidence

• The only way to counter harmful predictive AI is through broad democratic control over the means of prediction: data, computational infrastructure, technical expertise, and energy

  80% confidence

• The ubiquitous, mostly invisible predictive layer grafted onto daily life by profit-hungry corporations is leading to a crueler, blander, more instrumentalized world where life's possibilities are foreclosed, age-old prejudices are entrenched

  80% confidence

• Societies that rely most heavily on prediction tend toward oppression and authoritarianism

  80% confidence

• Humans made major scientific and societal advances — clean water, antibiotics, public health improvements, physics breakthroughs, cars, airplanes, modern democracy — without formal systems of rationality or optimal decision theory

  80% confidence

• Mathematical rationality — the narrow statistical conception of optimal decision-making — took firm hold at the tail end of World War II, when mathematical models proved useful against the Axis powers and convinced scientists they could be the basis for designing the first computers

  80% confidence

• Predictions are veiled prescriptive assertions that tell us how to act; they are speech acts, and when we believe a prediction and act in accordance with it, it is akin to obeying an order

  80% confidence

• Working to create less biased, more equitable algorithms will not fix the harms of predictive AI because the algorithms rely on past data that is often racist, sexist, and flawed, and profit incentives will always trump attempts to eliminate harm

  80% confidence

• The core algorithms developed in the post-WWII period drive the automated decisions of the modern world, whether managing supply chains, scheduling flight times, or placing advertisements on social media feeds

  80% confidence

• A prediction is a magnet that bends reality toward itself; when the force of the magnet is strong enough, the prediction becomes the cause of its becoming true

  80% confidence

• Technology is not destiny; humans make it and choose how to use it, and defying uninvited daily predictions may be the most appropriate human response

  80% confidence

• Predictions can distract us from the challenges of the present; AI promises of artificial general intelligence shift attention away from very real and pressing problems that AI is currently causing

  80% confidence

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