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AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

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Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#341

Post by gherkinnn »

fwipsy wrote: post #293
zkmon wrote: post #261

History has shown that an alien invasion can only happen because of the internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. Colonial empires proved it only a few centuries back. The invading alien powers are fuelled by the inviting natives. AI (and computing technology in general) is an alien as it defies all wordly norms. It can have exact identical copies, can replicate, can exist everywhere, communicate across hu…

> internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. What about diseases which killed up to 95% of the population? I think you are basically correct, except for the historical analogy.

The initial Spanish conquest of the Inca empire by 168! Spaniards was not a question of disease as much a war of succession the Incas fought amongst themselves that Pizarro knew to exploit. Throw in horses, steel, and gunpowder and you have a one-sided affair.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#344

Post by ryandrake »

tedivm wrote: post #321
falcor84 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of any period in time where it was so easy to go into business yourself and to generally have access to the same "means of production" as the biggest companies have. If you want to use LLMs, you can either use cloud resources at what I think are really reasonable per-token prices compared to the value, or to set up your own server with an open-weights model at a comparable level of quality (though gener…

I'm well aware of this: I bought a pretty beefy (consumer grade beefy) GPU machine and run all sorts of open weight models. I do think there is potential. But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses? That is a solution that doesn't scale. Consumer grade GPUs aren't going to scale all that much either, and the cost of the models are going up rather than down as vendors start seeking profits. We…

Also: A handful more of already well-off people going into business for themselves is not going to move the needle on inequality. When people say "It's never been a better time to start your own business" they still mean "the people who already have their needs met and have the capital to live off for a while while their business becomes viable: In other words, the people who have always started businesses: Already-Rich people.

It's never been a worse time for the poor or middle class to think about starting their own business. Prices on everything are rising, it's getting to be a struggle for even the middle class to continue to afford their homes. Healthcare is even more fraught than ever before, and if you're lucky enough to have a decent plan from your employer, aint no way you're going to give it up to go start a business.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#345

Post by fwipsy »

RugnirViking wrote: post #322
fwipsy wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. What about diseases which killed up to 95% of the population? I think you are basically correct, except for the historical analogy.

This is not true of everywhere that was colonized. See Africa, or India. It would not be possible, even with very great tech advantage, to sustain millitary campaigns so far from europe without a safe port to base supplies etc, not to mention the manpower etc. These were very much made possible by what was essentially a standard playbook of allying with some natives against others, and using trade imbalance, violence…

Right. I am not saying diseases were a factor in every conquest. Just refuting parent saying that conquest is "only possible" through infighting. It's not - overwhelming technological advantage or disease are also sufficient even against a united culture.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#346

Post by softwaredoug »

jonahx wrote: post #338
dd8601fn wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the start I think everyone thought the industrial revolution could be a useful historical reference. But what AI is selling is the obliteration of human knowledge work. It just isn’t informative for that.

This is the key point. It threatens nearly everything in the limit, not one particular industry. There will be no "leveling up" into higher-order jobs, because the machines will be better at those too.

They thought that too in the industrial revolution. You can look back and see the jobs that came out of it. But at the time, it wasn't obvious to the people effected that there would be jobs again.

We may have hindsight bias in evaluating something that happened, but to the people that it happened to it was terrifying.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#347

Post by stasomatic »

If the “billionaires” AI us out of our livelihoods will they need to learn how to pour a perfect espresso shot or use a voltage tester when they need to change a light bulb? Who’s gonna run the data centers and unclog toilets? They themselves? The thing is out of the bottle, regulations won’t help. What’s the end game like, some neo-feudalism with benevolent UBI serfdom and everyone on welfare?

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#348

Post by ryandrake »

jacquesm wrote: post #339
ryandrake wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand this "simping online for billionaires" hobby. Is there a signup I missed somewhere, where they pay $100 for every post one makes glazing and defending them as a class?

There was this silly 'weird nerd' meme about someone jumping in front of him every time someone fired a bullet at Elon Musk. This feels similar. Billionaires are apparently what we should all aspire to, even though it is extremely hard to find any that got to where they are without getting their at the expense of others.

We need to Make Billionaires Millionaires Again, as far as I'm concerned.

EDIT: Oh, no, you said HIS name. The Elon Justice League has been activated and downvoting this whole tree....

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#349

Post by Ray20 »

PontifexMinimus wrote: post #143
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living The two biggest labor displacements in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, both of which resulted in enormous gains in human living standards. Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.

AI is different. It promises to be able to do everything humans can, but better and more cheaply. When AIs can do every human job cheaper than the subsistence cost of employing a human, humans will be economically obsolete and worthless. Then there's the minor issue of AI deciding to just wipe us out because we're in the way. Taking everything together, AI more powerful than that which currently exists must not be cr…

> AI is different

Literally the same thing.

> humans will be economically obsolete and worthless

Only if we are talking about a socialist system (and they are making pretty small progress in the field of AI). A human's value under a capitalist system is equal to their ability to create goods and services. And AI cannot make this ability smaller in any way.

A people's well-being is literally the goods and services created by that people. How can it decrease if the people's ability to produce those goods and services is not hindered in any way?

So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits. The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes, taxation out of production, and other practices that would lead to people being declared economically obsolete and mass executed to optimize their carbon footprint or something.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#350

Post by tedivm »

Lerc wrote: post #327
yoyohello13 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The billionaires could start to earn trust by lobbying for laws and programs that help the poor and displaced. Put money in to retraining programs to help people who lose their jobs. So far they seem to be doing the opposite, CEOs are publicly declaring ‘fuck you, got mine’ and leaving it at that.

Nick Hanauer has lobbied for higher minimum wages. Michael Bloomberg has lobbied for healthcare. Pierre Omidyar has spent about a billion on economic advancement non-profits Gates Foundation - Bunch of stuff. Warren Buffet - Too much to count George Soros - For all the antisemitism, the kernel of truth in the lie is that he spends a lot of money trying to make the world better. Chuck Feeny gave away $8B I'm sure some…

>Why treat them as the enemy, when a dialog might cause them to reach common ground about what is the right thing.

People like Elon literally are the enemy. He used his wealth to literally change our government in his favor. The idea that we need to go and have polite discussions to maybe change his mind, while he gets to stomp all over us (his DOGE efforts literally resulted in people dying). If a dialog with them was going to work it would have happened a long time ago, but the more we learn about these people the more obvious it is that they believe themselves to be smarter and better than the rest of us. They aren't going to listen to others, and pretending that they will seems like deflecting and giving up in advance. Our best hope is that people can get enough power to regulate billionaires out of existence before a revolution does it instead.

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