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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

#461

Post by lostmsu »

DrProtic wrote: post #204
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there 0 evidence that it happened? or just arguing over 20K,30K,50k? Just want to clarify. Since some people argue Covid never happened, and some just argue the total deaths wasn't really that high. There is a sliding scale between "I sound like a raving crazy person", and "i'm just splitting hairs."

We have many videos of protests in Iran even though they shut down internet, but somehow we have no videos of mass killings or even small scale murders.

Wouldn't they shut down the Internet for me but not for thee?

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

#462

Post by Ray20 »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #400
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…

Ownership of the economy is split roughly 30/30/30 between the top 10%/1%/.1% with the bottom 90% of people making an entrance as the rounding error. If you picture "the owners" by drawing a representative sample of 10 people: 1 Normal person 3 Doctors / Lawyers / Engineers ($1M+ net worth) 3 Successful Entrepreneurs ($10M+ net worth) 3 Ultrawealthy ($50M+ net worth) It's worth putting these through the fundamental t…

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

#463

Post by jplusequalt »

DroneBetter wrote: post #456
jplusequalt wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True, but again, the other points are more damning.

We're talking about an increased federal budget in the hundreds of billions/trillions to support such a UBI. That will cause a massive increase in taxation on the people who can still find jobs.

To make matters worst, the government in 10-15 years will likely be spending ~25% of it's budget on interest payments alone. Hiking the federal budget up even more sounds like a hard sell.

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

#464

Post by WarmWash »

kylecazar wrote: post #369
WarmWash wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wealthiest group in the US is the 70-95%, they have over double the wealth of "the billionaires". But we can't talk about this because it includes a large tract of the white collar everyday man workforce. This is why the focus is so heavy on billionaires, so heavy on increasing minimum wage, so heavy on protecting immigrants. Those are all virtuous values that also bolster the value of the 70-95%, while piling al…

The top 5% of the country have around 60% of its wealth. It is logical to bring that number down.

It's only logical when you view that wealth as a Scrooge Mcduck style vault of gold to raid, and are ignorant to the fact that it's almost entirely mark-to-market assets that have zero ability to buy food or pay for housing.

The middle class has the gold vault (well the closest thing), and that's where the redistribution would happen.

If you don't believe me, look at Europe. You can be a baker and make $35k yr, an SWE and make $65k yr, or a doctor and make $100k/yr.

You may say "Yeah, that's great, they live happy lives!"

But then convince American engineers they need to take a $140k paycut and the doctors a $220k paycut so that we can pay bakers $10k more a year. They'll just tell you the billionaires are the problem, and you'll believe them.

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

#465

Post by beepbooptheory »

freeone3000 wrote: post #200
beepbooptheory wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen I know this is a crazy thought around here, but what if creativity was "worth it" just for its own sake? Do you stop being creative when its not needed? Are the only options here being a good and "useful" worker/consumer, or a violent, irrational thug? Is there nothing else you can imagine?

People need to be physically sustained. Currently, this means working a job for money to buy (food/housing/medical). People also need their lives to have value. We are social animals. As a generalization, there is a strong desire to be (viewed as/able to view themselves as) a contributor to the community. These don’t have to be linked: we have (significantly!) stay-at-home-parents and philanthropists and retired comm…

I don't see why you need to armchair philosophize about what people are or what they need "in general." How could we know such things? What we know is we find ourselves in certain historical circumstances, and we navigate. Right now we are, with exceptions like you mention, free only to be a worker or to be, essentialy, a homeless criminal.

This whole prescriptive thing this response and others have where its like "ah surely it is up to us to find some meaning for the masses of plebs in our brave new world" is, IMO, presumptuous at best.

Like literally just give people an actual chance to find their own meaning, and I promise you they will find it. If it seems hard to you or "full of turmoil", that suggests a poverty of inspiration on your end, not everyone elses. Meaning is not intrinsic to our particular mode of production at the moment, in fact, individuals find meaning despite this mode!

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

#466

Post by AtlasBarfed »

moosedev wrote: post #295
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PC revolution in the 1990s is one of the core drivers of inequality, where the rich took almost all of the dividends from the vast productivity gains from personal computers as the prime development of Moore's law rocketed computers from 66 MHz to over 8 gigahertz. Judging by the gleeful texts of CEOs, collapsed hiring, internal policy changes and pushes, and the additional decades of centralized political contro…

I must have missed the 8GHz CPU era.

It was supposed to be "a" gigahertz, Google transcription fail.

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

#467

Post by lotsofpulp »

UltraSane wrote: post #432
lotsofpulp wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck taking away the detached single family homes, pickup trucks, SUVs, commercial flights, out of season fruits/vegetables, and imported manufactured goods. The people that expect those things are the “ small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth”, and there are quite a few of them (probably 1B+ worldwide).

Comparing those people to the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe is very disingenuous.

My comment did not compare those enjoying detached single family homes and large vehicles and flying to vacations with the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe.

Avicebron brought up inequality as the root cause.

DavidPiper indicated only the few thousand richest as the root cause.

Rayiner questioned if those few thousand richest have the means or capacity to reduce inequality.

estimator7292 responded that everyone has to help reduce inequality.

To which I wanted to point out exactly what would need to be sacrificed, because it would involve sacrifices among the top 10% to 20% of the world (constituting many on this forum) which those 10% to 20% would not even consider a "luxury". It is easy to claim a billionaire's private jet is an expendable luxury exacerbating inequality, but the reality is the bar is far lower than that (see statistics on energy used per capita, which can serve as a good proxy for which side of the inequality the lifestyle you might expect is).

That is why we are all mostly talk and no walk, because push comes to shove, we can't even get a sufficient fossil fuel tax passed to slow climate change for our own descendants, much less voluntarily decrease our standard of living solely for the benefit of others in the world.

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

#468

Post by lumost »

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.

So far, AI is a "unique" technology in that the main use case is "work replacement." Consumer applications have only existed to "destroy human creative media with low quality slop".

The vast majority of individuals derive no value from AI, they are instead told to do their jobs faster and own the mistakes of the AI for flat/declining pay. It's a bad deal for most people.

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

#469

Post by rossjudson »

falcor84 wrote: post #245
tedivm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.

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…

Seems like you've just agreed with "concentrated in the hands of a few" -- it's just a different "few" than before AI.

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

#470

Post by ithkuil »

fwipsy wrote: post #345
RugnirViking wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. Basically conquest is possible when the victim is weakened. There are many ways to become weakened. Infighting and disease are common causes of weakening.
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