Archelaos

The answer is easy: The others did the work. Until the party was over and the money spent. The more interesting question is: why has so much from the Victorian era survived in Britain to this day, whilst it disappeared in most other countries?

Isn’t there a simple explanation for the discrepancy in mortality rates: if someone is seriously ill, they typically don’t participate in the first place.

> What do you need help with today?

Greenland

> ...

> I did not find an executive order that officially renamed Greenland.

> ...

A major school of German sociology places this at the core of its theory. According to this theory, modern societies are characterised in particular by the fact that individual subsystems of society reduce the complexity of their own (sub)system to the other systems to enable them to act at all; they fulfil what is called an "Entlastungsfunktion" (relief function). Prominent representatives of this school of thought are Max Weber, Arnold Gehlen and Niklas Luhmann.

In their view, it is modern institutions (public and private) which, as supra-individual entities, have long since become autonomous systems. The fact that the individual office-holders are human beings, meanwhile, is of little significance.

Hannah Arendt, in her theory of totalitarianism, attributed the effectiveness of both Nazi and Stalinist policies of extermination to the largly moral indifference of bureaucracy as a system.

In this sense, the task of controlling AI is a variation on the problem of harnessing a complex society consisting mainly of autonomous subsystems. This is a problem which has increasingly challenged humanity already for quite a long time. And it has been very difficult so far, even without AI ...

> The classic picture of AIs doing things in the world is robots, but I think a more realistic picture of the near future is computers telling people what to do.

As a purely qualitative description, this does not strike me as anything particularly new. Machines had been doing something like this long before the computer age. For example, as early as the late Middle Ages, mechanical wheel-driven clocks with striking mechanisms were used to call people to prayer.

Any process in which a person reacts to a machine can be characterised in this way. Every till that calculates how much one has to pay, every traffic light, every other machine-generated signal. When a warning light comes on in the car, we are prompted to do something: release the handbrake properly, fasten our seatbelt, visit a garage, ...

We are already so deeply embedded in such cycles that AI seems to be merely a new variation on them than a fundamental change.

The deep sense of unease regarding AI does not stem from a machine telling us what to do, but from the risk of losing control over the situation as a whole.

Yep. Poisoning the planet with nuclear wast for a million years. 40,000 generations of our children will be happy and thankful.