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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#231

Post by Karrot_Kream »

lantry wrote: post #200
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those incentives are themselves the output of a variety of heuristics that we rely on only due to a lack of viable alternatives. I expect that eventually AI will make some alternatives viable because the bottleneck is so often an information processing one. Three examples: - Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be b…

> AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies. The thing that you, altman, and every other AI booster fail to explain is how AI will do this. Every argument is littered with "if"s and "could"s, and it's just taken for granted that AI will be smart enough to find a solution that solves all our problems. It's also taken for granted that we'll actually implement the solution! If AI sai…

So I think this piece by Altman is mostly hype smoke also but I really dislike your framing here. Somehow the "AI boosters" have to come up with a how but the "AI doomers" can just sit back, criticize, and not solution?

Let's be real here, US politics is fucked and none of us knows how to fix it.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#232

Post by auggierose »

imgabe wrote: post #224
biophysboy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these questions are easy to answer: 1) The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. 2) We don’t. USA’s foreign aid per capita is not that high (especially now). To mobilize private money for aid, you need a long-term, trusted infrastructure. 3) Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.

> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs. > Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments. Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.

So, which country is the US going to be absorbed by?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#233

Post by imgabe »

auggierose wrote: post #232
imgabe wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs. > Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments. Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.

So, which country is the US going to be absorbed by?

You're saying the US is simultaneously non-functional but also responsible for providing free healthcare to every other country?

If we're non-functional, where is all the foreign aid providing free stuff for us?

C'mon other countries, give us free stuff. It will be great for your soft power, and prevent us from doing terrorist attacks on you.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#234

Post by imgabe »

yablak wrote: post #225
imgabe wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought we weren't a Christian country? Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government col…

USAID is not just charity. It is a projection of soft power that keeps many countries and world citizens looking up to the USA. It reduces likelihood of terrorist attacks on US citizens.

Among people likely to consider a terrorist attack, USAID is widely considered a front for the CIA to meddle in other countries' governments (and this has been proven to be the case in some instances). Which, if true, makes it a bad front for the CIA, and if false, means it creates more resentment than anything else and does little to reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#235

Post by kulahan »

satvikpendem wrote: post #176
Avicebron wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough. This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some…

And yet I'd much rather self checkout than have a cashier do it for me.

It feels like “virtual stuck behind a bus”, then doing the company a favor for the experience.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#236

Post by absurdo »

decimalenough wrote: post #208

> There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. Yeah dawg imma need a citation for that. Or maybe by "the world" he means "Silicon Valley oligarchs", who certainly have been "entertaining" all sorts of "new policy ideas" over the past half y…

[flagged]

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#237

Post by biophysboy »

imgabe wrote: post #224
biophysboy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these questions are easy to answer: 1) The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. 2) We don’t. USA’s foreign aid per capita is not that high (especially now). To mobilize private money for aid, you need a long-term, trusted infrastructure. 3) Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.

> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs. > Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments. Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.

Market size affects revenue and thus investing decisions. Pharma is a high-risk world.

Do you think a dysfunctional gov has a higher chance of fixing itself with widespread disease?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#238

Post by imgabe »

biophysboy wrote: post #237
imgabe wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs. > Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments. Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.

Market size affects revenue and thus investing decisions. Pharma is a high-risk world. Do you think a dysfunctional gov has a higher chance of fixing itself with widespread disease?

We’ve been providing foreign aid for, what, like 70-80 years now? Have the dysfunctional governments fixed themselves yet? How long should it take? 100 years? 500 years?

Maybe providing aid is just propping up dysfunctional governments by doing their job for them and it would be better in the long run if they were allowed to collapse and be replaced with something that was forced to be functional.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#239

Post by arresin »

yablak wrote: post #225
imgabe wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought we weren't a Christian country? Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government col…

USAID is not just charity. It is a projection of soft power that keeps many countries and world citizens looking up to the USA. It reduces likelihood of terrorist attacks on US citizens.

No more soft power please.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#240

Post by pj_mukh »

JadeNB wrote: post #217
jonfromsf wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this plan. Won't you lose all the money you spent buying the houses and building the quadplexes?

I think that the plan isn't to make money, but to make real progress on solving housing availability.

Kind off and the potentially low marginal cost of everything housing construction related (due to AI and robotics) really creates a lot of space for creative business plans here.

The municipality can’t take away the land (most of the value here) and putting the house on top will be relatively cheap, given the low total labor costs.

If the whole affair is revenue neutral, that's a huge win.

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