Not a chance. See: all of human history and in particular, the Internet and software.
Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
41–50 of 132 posts
Re: Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
If, and it is an IF, this does turn out the way he is imagining, the transitional period to the AI from the economic PoV will be disastrous for people. That's the scariest part I think.
Absolutely it will. And it will be a pure plain dystopia, as clear as in the times of Dickens or Dostoyevsky. We need to start being honest. We live in Dickensian times.
definately a bunch of Dicks in these times.
Re: Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
#43it's interesting to see the initial sections on all these amazeballs health benefits and then cuts to the disparity between rich and poor.
like, does spending TRILLIONs on AI to find some new biological cure or brain enhancement REALLY help, when over 2 BILLION people right now don't even have access to clean drinking water, and MOST of the US population can't even afford basic health care.
but yea, AI will bring all this scientific advancement to EVERYONE. right. AI is a ploy for RICH PEOPLE to get RICHER and poor people to become EVEN MORE dependent on BROKEN economic systems.
Re: Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is an important distinction. Yes, humans have some inbuilt weaknesses and proclivities, but humans are not required to live in or develop systems in which those weaknesses and proclivities are constantly exploited for the benefit/power of a few others. Throughout human history, there have been practices of contemplation, recognition of interdependence, and ways of increasing our capacity for compassion a…
> Throughout human history, there have been practices of contemplation, recognition of interdependence, and ways of increasing our capacity for compassion and thoughful response. has this ever been widespread in society? I think such people have always been few and far between?
you are living in it.
The default state is to have extremely poor hard working people and extremely rich not working ones.
No one would have dared to dream of the luxury working people enjoy today. It took some doing! We use to sell people not to long ago. Kids in coal mines. The work week was 6-7 days 12-14 hours. One coin per day etc
The fight isn't over, the owner class won the last few rounds but there remains much to take for either side.
Re: Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
#45One of the sad things about tech is that nobody really looks at history. The same kinds of essays were written about trains, planes and nuclear power. Before lindbergh went off the deepend, he was convinced that "airmen" were gentlemen and could sort out the world's ills. The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature. AI will be used to make things cheaper. That is, lots of j…
We are entering a dystopia and people are still writing these wonderful essays about how AI will help us. Microtargeted psychometrics (Cambridge Analytica, AggregateIQ) have already made politics in the West an unending barrage of information warfare. Now we'll have millions of autonomous agents. At some point soon in the future, our entire feed will be AI content or upvoted by AI or AI manipulating the algorithm. It…
Your looking at it from a narrow perspective.
There are millions of middle class households living pretty comfortable lives in Africa, India, China, ASEAN, and Central Asia that were living hand-to-mouth 20 years ago.
And I don’t mean middle class by developing country standards, I mean middle class by London, UK, standards.
So it pretty much is a ‘utopia’ for them, assuming they can keep it.
Of course that’s cold comfort for households in London regressing to the global average, but that’s the inherent nature of rising above and falling towards averages.
Re: Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
#46One of the sad things about tech is that nobody really looks at history. The same kinds of essays were written about trains, planes and nuclear power. Before lindbergh went off the deepend, he was convinced that "airmen" were gentlemen and could sort out the world's ills. The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature. AI will be used to make things cheaper. That is, lots of j…
I do not agree with the following:
> But those profits will not be shared. Human productivity has exploded in the last 120 years, yet we are working longer hours for less pay.
I am, however, criticizing this in isolation — that is, my goal is not to invalidate (nor validate, for that matter) the rest of your text; only this specific point.
So, I do not agree. We are clearly working a lot less hours than 120 or even 60 years ago, and we are getting a lot more back for it.
The problem I have with this is that the framing is often wrong — whether some number on a paycheck goes up or down is completely irrelevant at the end of the day.
The only relevant question boils down to this: how many hours of hardship do I have to put in, in order to get X?
And X can be many different things. Like, say, a steak, or a refill at the gas station, or a bread.
Now, I do not have very good data at hand right here and right now, but if my memory and my gut feeling serves me right, the difference is significant, often even dramatic.
For example, for one kilogram of beef, the average German worker needs to toil about 36 minutes nowadays.
In 1970, it was twice as much time that needed to be worked before the same amount of beef could be afforded.
In the seventies, Germans needed to work 145 hours to be able to afford a washing machine.
Today, it’s less than 20 hours!
And that’s not even taking into account the amount of „more progress“ we can afford today, with less toil.
While one can imagine that in 1970, I could theoretically have something resembling a smartphone or a lane- and distance-keeping car getting produced for me (by NASA, probably), I can’t even begin to imagine how many hours, if not millennia, I would have needed to work in order to receive a paycheck that would have paid for it.
We get SO much more for our monthly paycheck today, and so many more people do (billions actually), it’s not even funny.
Re: Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature. > AI isn't the problem, we are. I think when we frame it as human _nature_, then yes, _we_ look like the problem. But what if we frame it as human _culture_? Then _we_ aren't the problem, but rather our _behaviors/beliefs/knowledge/etc_ are. If we focus on the former, we might just be essentially screwed. If we focus on the lat…
Sure. But why do you think changing human nurture is any easier than changing human nature? I suspect that as your set of humans in consideration tends to include the set of all humans, the gap between changeability of human nature vs changeability of human nurture reduces to zero. Perhaps you are implying that we sign up for a global ( truly global, not global by the standards of Western journalists) campaign of com…
Arguably, human nature hasn't changed much in thousands of years. But there has been plenty of change in human culture/nurture on a much smaller timescale. E.g., look at a graph of world literacy rates since 1800. A lot of human culture is an attempt to productively subvert or attenuate the worse parts of human nature.
Now, maybe the changes in this case would need to happen even quicker than that, and as you point out there's a history of bad attempts to change cultures abruptly. But it's nowhere near correct to say that the difficulty is equal.
Re: Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
#48One of the sad things about tech is that nobody really looks at history. The same kinds of essays were written about trains, planes and nuclear power. Before lindbergh went off the deepend, he was convinced that "airmen" were gentlemen and could sort out the world's ills. The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature. AI will be used to make things cheaper. That is, lots of j…
> AI will be used to make things cheaper. That is, lots of job losses. must of us are up for the chop if/when competent AI agents become possible.
> But those profits will not be shared. Human productivity has exploded in the last 120 years, yet we are working longer hours for less pay.
Don't you have to pick one? It seems a bit disjointed to simultaneously complain that we are all losing our jobs and that we are working too many hours. What type of future are we looking for here?
If machines get so productive that we don't need to work, everyone losing their jobs isn't a long-term problem and may not even be a particularly damaging short-term one. It isn't like we have less stuff or more people who need it. There are lots of good equilibriums to find. If AI becomes a jobs wrecking ball I'd like to see the tax system adjusted so employers are incentivised to employ large numbers of people for small numbers of hours instead of small numbers of people for large numbers of hours - but that seems like a relatively minor change and probably not an especially controversial one.
Re: Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
#49One of the sad things about tech is that nobody really looks at history. The same kinds of essays were written about trains, planes and nuclear power. Before lindbergh went off the deepend, he was convinced that "airmen" were gentlemen and could sort out the world's ills. The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature. AI will be used to make things cheaper. That is, lots of j…
History tells us that humans will not tolerate any "creature" to exist that is smarter than them, so that is where the story will end.
Re: Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature. > AI isn't the problem, we are. I think when we frame it as human _nature_, then yes, _we_ look like the problem. But what if we frame it as human _culture_? Then _we_ aren't the problem, but rather our _behaviors/beliefs/knowledge/etc_ are. If we focus on the former, we might just be essentially screwed. If we focus on the lat…
Sure. But why do you think changing human nurture is any easier than changing human nature? I suspect that as your set of humans in consideration tends to include the set of all humans, the gap between changeability of human nature vs changeability of human nurture reduces to zero. Perhaps you are implying that we sign up for a global ( truly global, not global by the standards of Western journalists) campaign of com…
In general I think concepts like politics, art, community, etc try to capture certain discrete ways we are all nurtured. Like I am not even sure you're point here, there is nothing more totalitarian than reducing people to their "nature", it is arguably its precise conceit if it has one, that such a thing is possible. And the fact that totalitarianism is constantly accompanied by force and violence seems to be the biggest critique you can make of all sorts of "human nature" reductions.
And like what is even the alternative here? What's your freedom of belief worth when your essentially just a behaviorist anyway?