RE: Would You Be Comfortable Being Ruled By An AI Government?
"... AI will increasingly become a tool used by governments and many other things."
Most of those other things will be individuals, IMHO. Government and the most powerful corporations in the world cannot keep us from just sharing silly songs. They sure can't keep us from doing the same thing with AI - which is just another kind of data, after all. AI may be the best example of how technology increases the power of individuals relative to institutions. The power of an institution is that many people contribute some of their power to one endeavor. Many AIs cannot be wielded by an institution or it will lose it's institutional advantage completely over individuals, each of which can employ an AI, or some several, just like an institution.
For this reason, I expect AI to contribute far more to human freedom than the technical tyranny fearmongers prattle about.
Most of what people call AI today, I consider to actually just be what are known as Expert Systems. I've been a student of AI since the mid-1980s. I've watched a lot change. (especially the meaning of words)
What I'd call true AI doesn't exist yet.
We have some amazing Expert Systems though. Systems designed to handle specific tasks, or solve very specific problems. They are amazing at it. As such they are useful tools. Though I don't consider that intelligence.
We have simulations that mimic tasks that we do with our intelligence. Yet they lack the awareness to go outside of the task, and in reality are quite limited.
Though that doesn't mean they are without danger. They can potentially be even more dangerous if one considers they are not able to see without the constraints of the task they have been assigned to.
These are all reasons I expect AI to be most useful to people individually, rather than suddenly able to control us due to it's superior abilities. Expert systems are really useful for specific tasks, like managing logistics, feeding schedules for agriculture, or any other dronelike task, but have practically zero relevance to intuitively managing concatenations of systems in diverse cultural milieus.
Institutions fund the development of technologies, and as technology advances, the specific advantage of the given technology is of reduced effect in extent and duration, and also disperses throughout the population of individuals at ever increasing rates, where the increase in power the new technology avails increases the power of individuals relative to institutions. The more tech advances, the more this power differential decreases, and the faster it does so. AI is liable to be extraordinarily potent, and since it is just data, to disperse faster than physical gadgets.
The benefits to individuals AI brings is enormous compared to the degree of benefits it brings institutions. Institutions have traditionally been able to concatenate the efforts of multiple individuals, and this has delivered to them power that individuals could not match. Since AI enables automation to multiply the efforts of individuals, it is particularly empowering of individuals while relatively far less so to institutions.