Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thealgorithmicbridge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 694 posts

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

#451

Post by John7878781 »

jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #381
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…

uhg this entire way of treating AI like a magical alien invasion is the problem, it just a statistical model, text-in, text-out (and it humans that feed the input and act on the output). Its not some alien invasion that can't be stopped, its just another technology that we as humans need to figure out how we want to use. Seriously people need to stop trying to anthropomorphize AI, because doing so is one of the bigge…

> it just a statistical model, text-in, text-out (and it humans that feed the input and act on the output).

You're not thinking long-term. What happens when AI is put in charge of systems that interact with the physical world?

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

#452

Post by asa400 »

speff wrote: post #328
username223 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money… Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.

I suggest you keep going with that math. I'll use the numbers from here [0]. 924 billionaires with an overall wealth of 7.5 trillion. Split among 300 million people, that's about $25k for everyone. Here are some points of consideration: 1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full f…

> 2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.

Am I meant to believe that we wouldn't have iPhone-level innovation if inventors couldn't become billionaires?

This makes no sense. We have so much more innovation than we have billionaires, always have. Ability to become a member of the 0.001% is not a barrier to innovation, not in America, not anywhere, and never has been.

No one serious is claiming there should be zero wealth inequality. Inequality is ineradicable. The claim is that wealth inequality can reach a degree that becomes corrosive to society as a whole and severs the link between innovation and profit, because it becomes more profitable to hoard wealth and collect capital gains and interest than it does to innovate and create things in the real world.

It's entirely possible to preserve (and in fact would actually strengthen) the profit motive if we changed incentives to get rid of the wild capital hoarding we see today.

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

#453

Post by Ray20 »

only-one1701 wrote: post #376
Ray20 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generalize "people with billions of dollars" to all Americans - and then this logic will start to work fully. "Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use." Moreover, these people…

Yes, a billionaire and substitute teacher have the same political power in America. Couldn’t have put it better myself. /s

[flagged]

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

#454

Post by twelve40 »

integralid wrote: post #242
DavidPiper wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However... Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use. (And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and compa…

>consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies Make lobbying illegal, I don't understand why it's normalized.

isn't it an attempt to give structure to something that surely would have existed illegally otherwise? banning something doesn't automatically stop it.

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

#455

Post by byt3h3ad »

the author missed out on an important detail: the looms did replace most of the handloom workers. traditional industries were replaced, despite initial resistance. industrialisation has been inevitable, mostly, i think.

and i do believe its a bad analogy - comparing the two.

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

#456

Post by DroneBetter »

jplusequalt wrote: post #417
rayiner wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then who pays for it?

Raising taxes is the only possible way a UBI would be feasible, and even then it wouldn't be a large enough amount for most people to live off of. Also, a UBI is likely to cause inflation.

well inflation is equivalent to a flat wealth tax that doesn't consider insoluble assets, and is entirely in the hands of the government that imposes the UBI.

"cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not a constant ever-looming devaluator.

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

#457

Post by mcphage »

speff wrote: post #328
username223 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money… Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.

I suggest you keep going with that math. I'll use the numbers from here [0]. 924 billionaires with an overall wealth of 7.5 trillion. Split among 300 million people, that's about $25k for everyone. Here are some points of consideration: 1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full f…

> 2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.

In general, this is total bullshit. But in the particular, Job made his first billions from selling Pixar to Disney, not from Apple.

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

#458

Post by guzfip »

jMyles wrote: post #419
guzfip wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate cars way more than I hate AI, but relieving horses of the burden which they carried and the gruesome lives they lived... that's not one of my objections. I’m so glad those horses got a peaceful retirement at the glue factory. I wonder what they’ll process your corpse into. Soylent green? Or do you think you’re one of the lucky horses that a wealthy owner take care of?

Not sure if you're able to set your snark aside for a moment, but are we really just talking about fewer humans being economically needed? Perhaps biological human population decreasing? Is that... so bad? Do you think that horses are upset that there are fewer of them today, and that somehow they'd rather their population increase but bear the industrial age burdens again?

> but are we really just talking about fewer humans being economically needed? Perhaps biological human population decreasing? Is that... so bad?

Yes, this isn’t a matter of the “well we’ll reach a natural equilibrium overtime”.

If a fair percentage of the people in your society are now no longer economically, needed, they still have upkeep. They still need food. They don’t magically disappear into thin air, and they still need food/shelter /water/etc. How are they to get those things?

Will our leaders, contrary to everything they’ve ever shown us suddenly open their arms and act as mass charity for the masses? They can’t even design an effective welfare program for a pre-AI world.

Will the people displaced simply lie in a ditch somewhere and say “guess it’s time to starve to death”? I suppose Canadian-style suicide-as-service fits my previous Soylent green reference.

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

#459

Post by lostmsu »

LunaSea wrote: post #125
TiredOfLife wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iran killed 10 times more during protests without using AI. So AI is a clear improvement.

How many people did the US kill in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 25 years?

Any people or combatants?

What about the other side? Do you expect the ratio to be different in the last 25 years?

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

#460

Post by SoftTalker »

Avicebron wrote: post #150

I feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thing needs to be decoupled.. "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.

They haven't learned from Risky Business.

"Joel, you look like a smart kid. I'm going to tell you something I'm sure you'll understand. You're having fun now, right? Right, Joel? The time of your life. In a sluggish economy, never ever fuck with another man's livelihood."

Post reply on HN