Every time I hear concerns regarding the dangers of AI and its “too rapid” adoption I can’t help thinking about the history of cybernetics adoption in the USSR.
Having lived most of my life in the USSR/Russia and being involved in the field of IT I strongly believe that the technological gap was the major, if not the sole contributing factor to its collapse. The gap had a visible impact on practically all aspects of life.
The gap originated in the form of concerns regarding cybernetics, which was labeled as pseudoscience in late forties. “Cybernetics vividly expresses one of the fundamental traits of bourgeois ideology – its inhumanity, the desire to turn laborers into appendages of the machine, into instruments of production and instruments of war. Furthermore, cybernetics is characterized by an imperialistic utopia – replacing the living, thinking human who fights for their interests with a machine, both in production and in war.”
That politically motivated labeling lasted for about a decade, and that was enough to put the country in the backseat of progress and to become western tech copycat.
Hopefully AI in the US is not going to follow the same route and we will find a way to adopt it both rapidly and safely.
Fun cartoon back from those days, still valid today if you remove political propaganda aspect from it:
- Robots at “The New York Times” churn out commissioned articles. A robot that wrote the truth is being repaired
- Robots with raised hands always vote as required
- Military robots holding canisters with typhus and plague
- Tech support restores the machine of fascism
- Clan robot hangs and burns
- And of course an FBI robot with a robodog (Boston Dynamics?) hunts down communist resistance to cybernetics
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