2024
Michigan
Kritik
Afro-Pessimism › AT: root cause
Bledsoe & Wright, 19 [The anti-Blackness of global capital. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(1), 8-26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818805102] //cia
We draw on the concept of “anti-Blackness” as it is defined by scholars who engage with Afro-Pessimism. These scholars argue that civil society as we understand and live it is (in)formed by the dehumanizing condition of chattel slavery. They claim that civil society, therefore, is inherently antithetical to all manifestations of Black social life, yet requires Blackness for its political, economic, ontological, epistemological, and—as we aim to show—spatial coherence (Hartman, 1997; Sexton, 2016; Sharpe, 2016; Wilderson, 2010). As demonstrated in the articles cited above, current expressions of anti-Blackness remain imbricated in prevailing and developing political economic practices. In this article, we attempt to more fully explicate not only how global capital and anti-Black violence exist simultaneously but also how various expressions of anti-Blackness around the world are necessary for the perpetuation of global capitalism. To do this, we first explore theories of global capital to flesh out some of its structural characteristics. Next, we turn to a discussion of theories of anti-Blackness to highlight how Black populations’ assumed spatial incapacity in the modern epoch is a condition that makes the perpetual accumulation of capital possible. The penultimate section explores how globalized capital expresses itself in the United States, with the St. Louis, Missouri metropolitan area as a case study. The final sections serve to demonstrate how an understanding of global capitalism’s reliance on anti-Blackness is already expressed in the discursive and material practices of Black grassroots political actors. Drawing on the discourses and actions of Black Lives Matter (BLM), the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), and the Afro-Brazilian community of Ilha de Mare´ in Bahia, Brazil, we argue that those facing anti-Black expressions of capital recognize the impossibility of separating Black death from capital accumulation. In drawing on examples from the Global North and Global South, we demonstrate some of the ways that global capital accumulation manifests differently around the world. Moreover, we highlight that, regardless of the particular expression of capitalism, antiBlackness conditions the possibility of capitalist reproduction across different global contexts. The critiques and actions of political movements clearly highlight how anti-Blackness is not a mere result of global capital but actually scaffolds the ground on which capitalism stands.
2024
Michigan
Kritik
Afro-Pessimism › Link – marxism
Wilderson, 3 -- assistant professor in the Department of Drama and the Program in African American Studies at UC Irvine [frank, Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?, Social Identities, 9:2, 225-240, DOI: 10.1080/1350463032000101579] //cia
Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And the invitation to participate in hegemony’s gestures of influence, leadership, and consent is not extended to the black subject. We live in the world, but exist outside of civil society. This structurally impossible position is a paradox because the black subject, the slave, is vital to civil society’s political economy: s/he kick-starts capital at its genesis and rescues it from its over-accumulation crisis at its end — black death is its condition of possibility. Civil society’s subaltern, the worker, is coded as waged, and wages are white. But marxism has no account of this phenomenal birth and life-saving role played by the black subject: in Gramsci we have consistent silence.
The black body in the US is that constant reminder that not only can work not be reformed but it cannot be transformed to accommodate all subjects: work is a white category. The fact that millions upon millions of black people work misses the point. The point is we were never meant to be workers; in other words, capital/white supremacy’s dream did not envision us as being incorporated or incorporative. From the very beginning, we were meant to be accumulated and die. Work (i.e. the French shipbuilding industry and bourgeois civil society which finally extended its progressive hegemony to workers and peasants to topple the aristocracy) was what grew up all around us — 20 to 60 million seeds planted at the bottom of the Atlantic, 5 million seeds planted in Dixie. Work sometimes registers as a historical component of blackness, but where whiteness is concerned, work registers as a constituent element. And the black body must be processed through a kind of civil death for this constituent element of whiteness to gain coherence. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, we are still not meant to be workers. We are meant to be warehoused and die.
2024
Michigan
Kritik
Afro-Pessimism › Link – marxism
Barchiesi, 17 -- Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American and African Studies at the Ohio State University [Franco, "On the (R)uses of "Precarity": Neoliberalism, Time, and the Fact of (Anti)Blackness"] //cia
Mashinini’s words center blackness as a condition that simultaneously defines suffering in incomparable experiential terms and ontologically transcends not only precariousness, but labor and its injuries. In the former sense, she articulates a critique of wage labor that questions class and gender as vehicles of universal human claims. Her point is strikingly congruent with the critique expressed in generations of Black radical feminism in the U.S., marked by the publication of The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, the statement of the Combahee River Collective (1977), and the earlier elaborations, in the 1980s, of intersectionality as a critique specifically grounded in the multiplicity of oppressions facing Black women. Sharply felt in Mashinini’s words is the perception that, contrary to white workers and white women, labor and its family-sustaining properties would bring to Black men and women neither citizenship nor inclusion in civil society. They would rather solidify social dereliction through the vectors of kin, but in the interdiction of actual families, and “flesh” as “theft of the body” (Spillers 1987), or the mark of the Black body’s continuous violability. Ontologically, Mashinini--an official of the retail workers’ union CCAWUSA, which was in her time influenced by Black Consciousness and panafrican ideologies—grounds Black suffering not in the machinations of political economy and a grammar of exploitation and alienation, but in the awareness of Black inhumanity in an antiblack world. Her feeling that black workers are not “seen as human beings” recalls Cesaire’s (1950) and Fanon’s (1952: 88) definitions of Blackness as, respectively, “thingified” and constantly “close to disgrace”. It is a suffering structured by a grammar Saidiya Hartman (1997) and Frank Wilderson (2010) define in the terms of “accumulation” and “fungibility”, which for Hartman sustains the “afterlife” of racial slavery in the Western hemisphere. The colonization of Africa was fully part of such afterlife, both in its perpetuation of Black captivity and in the ethical pretenses of abolition and “free labor” with which it justified captivity. Mashinini was a union organizer, thus her critique eventually sought in working-class relationality an anchor to, again in Fanon’s terms, “ontologically resist” white antiblackness, domination, and violence. As I show in Precarious Liberation, however, Black critique of labor ontology persistently called to task the erasure of Blackness both in the universalism of class struggle as the harbinger of Human emancipation and in the way white activists and left intellectuals caricatured Black critique itself, by presenting it as one polarity in a “race-class” debate that configured racial blackness in terms of culture and identity, thereby expunging from it any structural or ontological salience. Within the labor movement itself, Black voices targeted the dominance of “new left” white union leaders, which, having risen to positions of power and influence also thanks to their racialized educational privilege, deployed working-class agency and “nonracial” imagination to defuse the “fact of blackness” and its world-shattering negativity (Barchiesi 2011: 49-50). Steven Biko (1978: 50) himself, as a theorist of Black Consciousness, warned on the effects of “class theory” and calls for a “common humanity”, which he saw as integral to liberal racism working through socioeconomic proximity and interdependence to relativize the antiblackness of white workers supporting the apartheid system. Segregationist South Africa was indeed a laboratory, attended by scholars and experts funded by giant Western philanthropies, for policies and imaginaries that turned the moral and existential elevation of “poor whites” into a touchstone of coherence for “global whiteness” (Willoughby-Herard 2015), a condition to be protected from descent into the abjection and dereliction of blackness.
2024
Michigan
Kritik
Afro-Pessimism › Link – marxism
Barber, 16 -- Researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin [Daniel Colucciello, Rhizomes Issue 29: Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, blackness and the discourses of Modernity, “The Creation of Non-Being,” http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/barber.html] //cia
[28] This is to name the essential limit of Lazzarato's account as the failure to analyze the ways in which the domination of capitalism is constituted by the domination of anti-blackness. In making this claim, I am following Wilderson's argument that "the privileged subject of Marxist discourse is a subaltern who is approached by variable capital—a wage. In other words, Marxism assumes a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy" (Wilderson 2003: 225). The essential limit of Marxism, he argues, is its theorization of capitalism in terms of "exploitation (rather than accumulation and death)" (Wilderson 2003: 234). Marxism thus begins from and stays within the being of whiteness, a being whose coherence is premised on the denial of the fact that capital "was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a Black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a White body with variable capital" (Wilderson 2003: 230).
[29] The position of the worker, in virtue of its raced difference from the position of the slave, asserts a capacity for analogical relation—even amidst exploitation—with the exploiter. The exploited and the exploiter, despite their asymmetry, share a being that is made through the denial of blackness, which is positioned as the slave; the worker possesses an analogical relation to the owner that the slave does not. To presume that the slave position can be analogized with the worker position is thus to attribute the latter's analogical capacity to the former, which is without analogy. It is to presume an analogy between what is capable of being analogous with what is not: "the ruse of analogy" (Wilderson 2010: 37).
2024
Michigan
Kritik
Afro-Pessimism › Link – performance as resistance
Wilderson, 9 -- assistant professor in the Department of Drama and the Program in African American Studies at UC Irvine [Frank, “GRAMMAR & GHOSTS: THE PERFORMATIVE LIMITS OF AFRICAN FREEDOM,” Theatre Survey 50:1] //cia *edited for gendered language
A major conceptual framework that underwrote the conference was “diaspora,” so much so that a plenary panel and a roundtable were devoted to it. The conviction with which the concepts of diaspora and performance were sutured evinced a collective belief in the analytic integrity of this suture and a collective faith in the promise it holds for social change. A related theme of the conference was the impact of specific performances as sites of and strategies for local resistance. This included papers on the AIDS pandemic and community- based theatre; the politics of contemporary African performance in the United Kingdom; theatre as a mode of intervention in postelection, violence-torn Nairobi; dance and the representation of intra-African genocide; performers who refused to play Sun City during apartheid; and the transformative power of graffiti in the slums of Dakar.¶ The conference was seeking, not always explicitly, not always consciously, the grammar with which to address the ghosts that haunted it. But all too often it was seduced by an overvaluation of performance art’s sociopolitical effectiveness. Having delineated the methods, syntax, and social context of a given performance or performance practice, a speaker would make a leap of faith and assert a causal link between the performance and the emancipation of the black people who produced and consumed it—as though art was the very essence of, rather than an accompaniment to, structural change. Such assertions were typically hobbled by a mix of rhetorical registers, one analytic, the other sentimental—with the sentimental register going unacknowledged as such, and often hastily tagged on at the end of a paper or conversation. This substitution of sentiment for analysis mystifies instead of clarifies the grammar and ghosts of Africa’s structural violence, a structural violence that is not analogous to that of Asians, working-class Europeans, or Latinos. Attention to it problematizes the articulation between performance and emancipation. This easy, largely intuitive articulation of performance and emancipation was also manifest in the declarations of performers themselves. On several occasions, artists declared that they wanted to be known simply as artists and not as Africans or black artists. As with any demand that is charged with high emotion, this one was not always made with rhetorical scaffolding and extended explanation—in part, because such statements were often made during Q & A sessions or in the buzz between sessions. As a critical theorist, it would be easy for me to deconstruct these cries and demonstrate their dependency on outdated notions of a unitary self. Freud and Marx, to name but two, have long ago compelled us to come to grips with the partitioned “nature” of our existence. And Lacan pushed the prospects of self-knowing beyond hope of retrieval with his assertion that “the wall of language” guarantees our capacity for relationality while simultaneously severing us from the Real. There is no self to be known; hence, there is no artist whose status is free of the “taint” of race and place.¶ But if we think of this demand not as a wish to disavow relationality, but as a wish to be imbued with relationality, then something else emerges. Freud, Marx, and Lacan’s subjects don’t suffer from the violence of enslavement, which is an explicit interdiction against relationality; they suffer from having imbibed the mystifications of the ruling class (Marx), the ego (Freud), or the Imaginary (Lacan). There was something in the force of the performance artists’ cry just to be artists that resonated with the force that first turned subjects into cargo. Lest we think that this force is merely the grammar and ghosts of blacks in the “New” World, that somehow Africans of the twentieth and twenty-first century have an altogether different rebar of ontology, we should note Achille Mbembe’s argument that, once Hegel (as a placeholder for all the punishing discourse of the Maafa, or African Holocaust) renders Africa “territorium nullius,” “the land of motionless substance and of the blinding, joyful, and tragic disorder of creation,” even the African who was not captured was a slave in relation to the rest of the world, his or her freedom from chains and distance from the Middle Passage notwithstanding.3 Though this “free” African may know him/herself [themselves] through coherent cultural accoutrements unavailable to the black American or black Caribbean, s/he is [they are] positioned, paradigmatically, as someone unable to “attain[ ] to immanent differentiation or to the clarity of self-knowledge.”4 S/he is [they are] recast as an object in a world of subjects. “Even the status of free blacks,” Saidiya Hartman argues, is “shaped and compromised by . . . slavery.”5¶ Here, the prohibition against attaining differentiation or self-knowledge rests, in the first ontological instance, with a structural violence that removes black “people” from the world. The cry to be known and appreciated as an artist and not as an “African” or “black” artist operates on several levels, but the most profound recognizes (if only intuitively or unconsciously) the damage of being marked as such, not in the sense of a compromised artistic status, but a compromised existential status. The cry is not the effect of a neurotic complex that refuses to live in a deconstructive relation to the ego; it is a narrative strategy hoping to slip the noose of a life shaped and compromised by slavery. No other gathering of artists and critics is overdetermined by this dilemma. No slavery, no diaspora. No diaspora, no conference. Such gatherings are always haunted by a shared sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture. This is where performance meets ontology. But all too often, such meetings take place not on a well-lit stage, but in a fog.
2024
Michigan
Kritik
Afro-Pessimism › Link – queer theory
Warren, 14 -- Assistant Professor of American Studies @ The George Washington University [Calvin, “Onticide: Afropessimism, Queer Theory, & Ethics,” p. 19-21] //cia
The term “black queer” is a philosophical conundrum, or problem space, precisely because it carries this antagonism, the ethical dilemma of humanism, within its discursive structure. It brings two crises into juxtaposition creating somewhat of a theoretical fatality, a devastating crime scene. At the site of this fatality lies a mutilated, supine black body we cannot quite place within the symbolics of identity, politics, history, sociology, or law. In cases like these, we put “theory” and “philosophy” into service to figure out who did “it,” what was the murder weapon, and what was the injury—if we can even call it an injury. This situation frustrates the researcher (researcher as detective, philosopher, and medical examiner all at once) in that he lacks a coherent grammar to make this suffering legible, the assaulting party is more like a structural phenomenon, and the fatality is a precondition of the world itself. In this sense, the fatality is rendered banal, diurnal, and quotidian, as it sustains the very field of existence.
The theoretical and philosophical instruments that we have to examine and explain this scenario—which I will call “queer theory” and “Afro-pessimism”—fracture around the “black queer,” endlessly encircling it, but never able to approach it. In fact, queer theory and Afro- pessimism are located in different philosophical registers, which are incompatible and irreconcilable. These discourses collide, or crash, at the site of the “black queer”—the black queer becomes a blind spot distorting the field of vision for both discourses, and the result is fatal. The desire to find synthesis and common ground between the two enterprises often results in theoretical misrecognition, false analogies, and impoverished ethics. The “black queer,” then, is theoretically homeless and vulnerable to the impact of discourses traveling at high velocity. Perhaps we ask too much of theory and philosophy. This essay meditates on this itinerancy.
2024
Michigan
Kritik
Afro-Pessimism › Link – queer theory
Warren, 14 -- Assistant Professor of American Studies @ The George Washington University [Calvin, “Onticide: Afropessimism, Queer Theory, & Ethics,” p. 19-21] //cia
My analysis is predicated on the belief that ‘queerness’ is an experience of unfreedom and not an ontological position. Jackson rightfully critiques identity and argues, instead, for a rigorous examination of ‘identification.’ She argues that “queerness” exceeds identity and that queerness could be thought “as the ontology of blackness” (361). We might ask how anything could serve as the ontology of blackness? Queerness becomes a synonym for ontology itself (we might also ask, given this synonymity, what is not queer?). It is equated with the object-position of blackness and not the liminal form of humanity within the antagonism. Liminality and object- status are not interchangeable, equivalent, or synonymous. Frank Wilderson insightfully notes that any rider that we attach to blackness is a conceptual fallacy and results in nothing more than a “structural adjustment”—the attempt to incorporate blacks into the fold of humanity through the grammar of another’s suffering. The queer subject is constructed as degenerate and transgressive, but the fundamental distinction between the ‘degenerate queer’ and the ‘derelict black-as-object’ is that one possesses a grammar to express unfreedom and the other lacks communicability altogether.
We can approach this from a different angle: A person understood as “queer” could purchase a black-object from the auction block like his/her hetero-normative counterpart. In those rare instances where the black-asobject was able to participate in this economy and purchase a black-object as well, the black purchaser could, at any moment, become another commodity—if found without freedom papers or validation from a white guardian—the system of fungible blackness made any black interchangeable and substitutional. This movement between object and subject is not a problem for queerness, but is an unresolvable problem for blackness. This is the important difference between the two. Queerness does not inhabit the position of the object—which is the ontology of blackness. Blackness is much more than deviance; it is the object that allows the distinction between deviance and normativity to have any meaning at all. To equate blackness with queerness because of shared discourses of deviance, transgression, and perversity misses the “existential negation” of blackness. While we can talk about the non-normativity of liminal subjects, blackness does not travel within the Symbolic the way queerness does and must be conceptualized with different terms.
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: Ban AI CP---2AC
Mueller 24, [Milton Mueller (Professor and Program Director of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy), "The Myth of AGI: How the illusion of Artificial General Intelligence distorts and distracts digital governance," Internet Governance Project, Georgia Tech, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/MythofAGI.pdf, accessed 7-2-2024, 5/24] Mr.Mr.
The first option, a “pause AI” agreement, is obviously not feasible. It would require every government, every firm in the computer industry, and everyone in the world with access to ICTs, to agree to abide by the ban. Even defining what activities are and are not banned would be a complex undertaking. Getting all of industry to follow this ban would require overwhelming support from the business community combined with very strict, comprehensive enforcement from all governments. But none of businesses or governments really want to stop, and even if they did the U.S., British, Chinese, European, Russian and Indian governments will not trust each other to stop unilaterally, and hence there would be no enforcement. Given the (alleged) military and business advantages of being the leader in AI technology, each state would have a strong incentive (payoffs for our game theorists) to defect from a pause agreement. There would be no reliable way to detect noncompliance, and if noncompliance was detected, there would be no way for one government or group of governments to enforce the agreement upon another. Unless there is a Hobbesian Leviathan able to wave his scepter over the entire world and command obedience, “pause AI” doesn’t work.
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: S-Risks O/W
Torres 17 – Phil Torres, Phil Torres is an author, Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and founder of the X-Risks Institute. [An Emerging Field, Chapter 1 of Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks Risks, Pitchstone Publishing]//BPS
This leads Bostrom to argue that “the loss in expected value resulting from an existential catastrophe is so enormous that the objective of reducing existential risks should be a dominant consideration whenever we act out of an impersonal concern for humankind as a whole.” In other words, we should behave according to the following “rule of thumb for such impersonal moral action,” dubbed Maxipok:
Maximize the probability of an “OK outcome,” where an OK outcome is any outcome that avoids existential catastrophe.64
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: S-Risks O/W
Daniel 17, is Research Scholars Project Manager at the Future of Humanity Institute. Previously he was a Senior Research Scholar at FHI, where his research focused on macrostrategy and AI governance. He holds a master’s in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Heidelberg University. Before joining FHI, he led the research wing of the Effective Altruism Foundation. (Max, 6-20-2017, “S-risks: Why they are the worst existential risks, and how to prevent them,” Center on Long-Term Risk, https://longtermrisk.org/s-risks-talk-eag-boston-2017/)
Next, I’d like to talk about why and how to prevent s-risks.
All plausible value systems agree that suffering, all else being equal, is undesirable. That is, everyone agrees that we have reasons to avoid suffering. S-risks are risks of massive suffering, so I hope you agree that it’s good to prevent s-risks.
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: AGI---Machine Evolution---1AR
Mueller 24, [Milton Mueller (Professor and Program Director of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy), "The Myth of AGI: How the illusion of Artificial General Intelligence distorts and distracts digital governance," Internet Governance Project, Georgia Tech, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/MythofAGI.pdf, accessed 7-2-2024, 5/24] Mr.Mr.
The machine evolution argument can be readily dismissed. Machines do not evolve. Of course, technology does change over time in ways that superficially resemble “evolution,” but a proper application of evolutionary concepts corrects that perception. The machine itself isn’t evolving – the changes in technology are produced by humans responding to markets and other human social systems. Evolution in the Darwinian sense requires self-replication, mutation and natural selection over many generational cycles. The replication of machines comes from human manufacturing processes, not from self-replication. Nor does mutation – changes in the design of machines – come from the machines. They come from human decisions in response to societal pressures for efficiency, innovation and safety. The selection process – that is, which machines continue to be produced and which become obsolete – is also governed by human decisions. The choices are made by people in competitive markets and/or political institutions. Hence, the machines themselves do not evolve, industries and sociotechnical systems do. Human decisions, by individuals or in aggregate, control each step of the process. If this is true, we cannot speak of “machine evolution.” For machines to evolve, they would first have to become alive, which means they would gain the ability to self-support and self-replicate, which they currently cannot do.
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: AGI---Off-Switch Problem---2AC/1AR
Mueller 24, [Milton Mueller (Professor and Program Director of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy), "The Myth of AGI: How the illusion of Artificial General Intelligence distorts and distracts digital governance," Internet Governance Project, Georgia Tech, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/MythofAGI.pdf, accessed 7-2-2024, 5/24] Mr.Mr.
If an AGI is going to win a fight with humans over the off switch, it must have effectors. An effector in cybernetics is a mechanism capable of acting on the physical world in response to instructions from a controller. An AGI capable of threatening humans with extinction must be capable of much more than calculation, information processing and messaging. It must be a cyber-physical system (CPS) with physical appendages or weapons, and sufficient energy resources to operate them. To pose a credible threat to all of humanity, in fact, an autonomous AGI cannot just be a single, isolated CPS like a Reaper drone. Its physical effector systems would require massive scale, huge force multipliers, almost unlimited physical inputs, and control of the many social systems (money, power sources, weapons, communications) required to deliver the required inputs and impose its will.
Here we find the deepest flaw in the AGI autonomy argument. Even supposing that one or more machines managed to generate internally developed goals not controlled by humans, the existential threat imaginary must go on to assume that the AGI is ultra-powerful and unchecked by any social and physical constraints. Super intelligence somehow allows a digital information system to consume unlimited quantities of electrical power and other scarce resources to muscle out all its competitors. Its effectors are assumed to have the power to prevent humans – whether individuals or organized armies – from disconnecting its power source, turning it off, improving or correcting its algorithms or utility functions, or destroying it. It can steal or pay for all the inputs it needs.
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: AGI---Off-Switch Problem---2AC/1AR
---Double turns misalignment. That’s the last line or so of the card.
Mueller 24, [Milton Mueller (Professor and Program Director of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy), "The Myth of AGI: How the illusion of Artificial General Intelligence distorts and distracts digital governance," Internet Governance Project, Georgia Tech, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/MythofAGI.pdf, accessed 7-2-2024, 5/24] Mr.Mr.
3. The Off-Switch Problem
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: AGI---Off-Switch Problem---2AC/1AR
Mueller 24, [Milton Mueller (Professor and Program Director of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy), "The Myth of AGI: How the illusion of Artificial General Intelligence distorts and distracts digital governance," Internet Governance Project, Georgia Tech, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/MythofAGI.pdf, accessed 7-2-2024, 5/24] Mr.Mr.
Once again, the doomers have to make a fantastic leap of reasoning. They say the AGI would be able to overpower all other agents to pursue its objective. The machine would be able to steal or appropriate whatever it needs – because its utility function told it to. Appealing to economic theory, Sotala and Yampolskiy, 2015 say:
“AGI systems which follow rational economic theory will then exhibit tendencies toward behaviors such as self-replicating, breaking into other machines and acquiring resources without regard for anyone else’s safety."
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: AGI---Misalignment---1AR
Mueller 24, [Milton Mueller (Professor and Program Director of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy), "The Myth of AGI: How the illusion of Artificial General Intelligence distorts and distracts digital governance," Internet Governance Project, Georgia Tech, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/MythofAGI.pdf, accessed 7-2-2024, 5/24] Mr.Mr.
It is possible for alignment gaps to develop, persist and perhaps even widen to some degree over time. It depends on how the system is governed. To conclude that advanced AI applications might at some point threaten human life, however, the AI doomers must also assume that humans will not be able to see the gaps happening and make any corrections at any time. In other words, humans are assumed to be unable to intervene in the cybernetic process (or the process of machine evolution).
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: AGI---Misalignment---1AR
Mueller 24, [Milton Mueller (Professor and Program Director of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy), "The Myth of AGI: How the illusion of Artificial General Intelligence distorts and distracts digital governance," Internet Governance Project, Georgia Tech, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/MythofAGI.pdf, accessed 7-2-2024, 5/24] Mr.Mr.
The alignment problem literature starts by making a plausible case that there can be gaps between the objectives that humans hope to reinforce with their AI models and training, and the actual behavior the machine learns. This moderately interesting fact about AI models is then twisted into two unwarranted conclusions: 1) that these gaps will progressively enlarge until the machine develops internally defined objectives that are unrelated to the objectives programmed by their trainers, and 2) that humans will not notice these gaps and/or will be unable to correct them.
Because of their unfamiliarity with social studies, AI doomers in computer science fail to realize that an alignment problem is not unique to AI training. Similar uncertainties and misspecifications characterize all education, legislation, and contract negotiations. We may think we are training children to behave in a certain way in schools and families, but they may draw different conclusions and behave very differently.8 We may think that a law structures human behavior in ways that the government wants, but there are often unintended or even perverse effects as humans, who really are intelligent and autonomous agents, find ways to exploit the new rules. We may think that a contract sets out an agreement that satisfies both parties, but contingencies and problems may arise that are not clearly covered by the contract.9 An alignment problem exists in all forms of human-human and machine-human interactions, because humans cannot always specify with perfect clarity the objectives they want an external party, whether human or machine, to pursue. Generally, we overcome this problem through ongoing adjustments based on trial and error, theory and learning; i.e., through deviation-reducing feedback. We also address it through institutionalization – by adopting rules and conventions designed to narrow the gap between expectations and behavior.
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: AGI---Extra---2AC
---Not quite a strawman, but you should be wary of the parts that say things like ‘at least not yet,’ though I still think warrants apply.
Joshi 22, [Naveen Joshi (Director of Allerin Tech Pvt Ltd, Former Research Analyst at Bosch Research, Forbes Contributor), "Chasing The Myth: Why Achieving Artificial General Intelligence May Be A Pipe Dream," Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/naveenjoshi/2022/03/25/chasing-the-myth-why-achieving-artificial-general-intelligence-may-be-a-pipe-dream/, accessed 7-2-2024, 3/28/22] Mr.Mr.
At the moment, there are certain factors that may prevent the creation and development of AGI, not least the fear in people’s minds that it will leave them unemployed, which makes the technology seem like a distant dream.
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: AGI---2AC
---Might be too ambivalent
Mueller 24, [Milton Mueller (Professor and Program Director of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy), "The Myth of AGI: How the illusion of Artificial General Intelligence distorts and distracts digital governance," Internet Governance Project, Georgia Tech, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/MythofAGI.pdf, accessed 7-2-2024, 5/24] Mr.Mr.
We also need to be more realistic about where major societal risks come from. If Artificial Intelligence ever becomes a systemic threat to human life, it will not be because a new race of cyber-terminators emerges spontaneously from a computer science lab. It most likely will come from an arms race prompted by military conflicts among nation-states, in which one state actor’s pursuit of supremacy makes it indifferent to damage to the citizens of the other state actor. Some threats will certainly arise from poor implementations and poor designs, and some from criminal exploitation of its capabilities. But whatever the risks are, in all cases humans, not AI, generate the threat. None of these threats pose a risk of human extinction, unless humans themselves are pursuing the goal of human extinction. War is the only scenario in which that is a plausible outcome.
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › AFF › AT: AGI---2AC
Mueller 24, [Milton Mueller (Professor and Program Director of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy), "The Myth of AGI: How the illusion of Artificial General Intelligence distorts and distracts digital governance," Internet Governance Project, Georgia Tech, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/MythofAGI.pdf, accessed 7-2-2024, 5/24] Mr.Mr.
Aside from being a highly stretched analogy, the use of human intelligence as the “archetype of general intelligence,” contains a massive oversight. The “generality” of human cognition is rooted in our status as a living organism whose survival strategies involve tool use, language and social cooperation. In other words, it is life – the human being’s imperative for survival, sustenance, shelter and reproduction - that provides human intelligence with its objectives and its evolutionary trajectory. Humans have learned to adapt to novel situations because it enhances their survival as a species. Intelligence serves life, not the other way around.
Yet computers are not alive. Giving them more computing power, building more complex neural networks, and feeding them more data will not by itself make them living beings. Life requires the ability to act autonomously to find the resources needed to sustain operations, and the ability to self-replicate. Computers cannot do that yet.3 No existing computing machines can solve problems they have not been given. They must be told what objectives to pursue and must be trained to pursue them. (I will address the question of whether AGI will develop its own goals later.) In other words, humans make computing machines "more intelligent" by improving their ability to pursue specific objectives defined by their human creators. Ergo, a "general intelligence" attributed to a man-made computing machine is really an oxymoron.
2024
Michigan
Evidence
INNOVATION GOOD/BAD - AGI › NEG › 2NC---AT: Killswitches
Scott Pelley interviewing Geoffrey Hinton 10-8, 10-8-2023; The English Canadian Geoffrey Hinton — together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun — are referred to as the “Godfathers of AI”. Those three researchers have won the 2018 Turing Award, known as the ‘Nobel Prize of computing,’ for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Hinton is now Chief Scientific Adviser of The Vector Institute and a University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. Hinton received a Bachelor’s degree in experimental psychology from Cambridge University and a Doctoral degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Scott Pelley is a correspondent of “60 Minutes”. ; ""Godfather of Artificial Intelligence" Geoffrey Hinton on the promise, risks of advanced AI", Cbs News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/geoffrey-hinton-ai-dangers-60-minutes-transcript/, Accessed 10-9-2023 AQ
Scott Pelley: What do you say to someone who might argue, "If the systems become malevolent, just turn them off"?
Geoffrey Hinton: They will be able to manipulate people, right? And these will be very good at convincing people 'cause they'll have learned from all the novels that were ever written, all the books by Machiavelli, all the political connivances, they'll know all that stuff. They'll know how to do it.