The trouble with some of these techs is that its good or bad depending on use. Flying drones are great for disaster aid, delivery of items in difficult regions, mapping your farm, etc. Mass surveillance, yes, thats unpleasant, but its a bit hard to see how for instance we can't also have advances in camera technology and not incentivize it happening anyway due to people just installing cameras of their own accord. AI trained to deny insurance claims, well, I'd put that on using AI as an excuse to launder the insurer's own wishes.

Pretty much anything Microsoft does, for example.

Big tech has provided me immense improvements in life. Governments are great at fumbling things at best, experts at killing millions at worst. How is tech worse than governments or other businesses? I am every day grateful to Google, Amazon, OpenAI etc for the wonderful services they provide for so cheap or free. The people who whine are precisely the problem people. Many shopkeepers used to be lazy, rude and think themselves kings. After amazon and home food delivery services, they have gotten whipped into shape. Many items were simply not available at all in one's city, and I can now easily have them at my doorstep.

"human first thoughts"

And what exactly do you define those as?

I like the idealism, but an important factor making this viable is that people (i.e. employers) must realise that this fundamental reasoning is scarce and pay enough for it to support life, and this must happen before AI takes over.

Ethics are irrelevant. They lack a believe in God and without God nothing but evil and chaos may exist.

Well, Plato was a fascist according to Popper, so... :P

I’ve been thinking lately how lots of tech people dunk on humanities and liberal arts, only to come to forums like this and discuss ethics, reality, and the nature of consciousness (at quite a shallow level)

“Engineer’s disease” and all that.

I don't think a humanities class is gonna change that.

I can't say without studying, but I feel Chinese people might be more sane about AI and not suffer from this psychotic "fear" of AI that causes them to lose all grip and regress back to things like dualism, false arguments, etc. They tend to be less religious or at least spiritually different from the West too, that might help.

I like the approach that the writer takes, emphasizing the importance of humanistic experience into technology. Language will be the deciding factor for what technology becomes, and on this point I have some critique of the language that the author uses.

Become the most flexible, underscore-shaped mind you can cultivate, the best-prepared proto-diplomat and translator of cultures, the family philosopher (because you no longer need someone to fix your printer).

In previous sentences, but here explicitely, the language used reflects that of the AI labs themselves. We do not need to find a metric to reduce our human experience to. We will not address systematic issues by pushing ourselves to become perfect. We need to start talking to our friends and families and question why we use the words we use in technology.

Then you're still young.

You needed the philosophy of science to give you that term "unfalsifiable".

Let me introduce you to medical ethics... Unlike in engineering, ethics is a mandatory subject for medical students. And while there's a long-winded explanation for why it is that way, the short and an immediate explanation is that if you don't understand ethics, you, and the hospital that employed you, and the insurance company that pays for you will be sued out of profession. Because people's health and ultimately lives are at stake, and people become very touchy when someone dies or loses a limb unnecessarily.

I don't know what the situation is with other (mechanical, electrical etc.) engineering students, but I'm very much certain that the legal fiction that software comes with no warranty whatsoever is going to expire. Perhaps sometime soon. And then users of the said software will be allowed to sue, and, what do you know, ethics will suddenly be factored into CS curriculum ;)

See for example 'philosophers' of consciousness who can't do thermodynamics, turing computability and information theory. One would expect these three fields are the basic and inexhaustive baseline requirements to put any theory on consciousness.

Tech was inhumane before AI. to come and suggest this now only when AI started hurting your butt means you are a fake liar

It's idealistic but I love it. I've been thinking a lot about this.

At my alma mater they forced all of us to take a couple of humanities courses. They were actually the highlight of my senior year. I do believe it's something that's quite lacking in an number/outcome-based education that should actually strive to produce well rounded individuals that will-not-do-evil.

https://catalog.caltech.edu/current/information-for-undergra...

Alas, I went on to write code for a living anyway.

Good luck selling this to the tech companies that are so hard-stuck to the other end of the spectrum right now.

The author is not wrong, but telling a group of tech bros, autists and weirdos who are worth 8-11 figures that they need to develop skills to "address real user needs" just isn't going to convince any of them.

My preferred or natural way to engage with the arts is through music. It doesn't make me change my philosophical views usually as most musicians, at least the ones I listen to are poor philosophers/mathematicians. Mathematics, I fully agree, its a foundational language of all structure and form. Equally important to what you call "tech" or "humanities" or any other human endeavor. Law, etc, obviously important. Philosophy, depends on the branch, but some of it is quite important to mathematics. I am not inclined toward literature (as in its just entertainment for me not a philosophical engagement) but I understand it can work great as so.