171–180 of 830 posts
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This kind of black and white moral thinking is corrosive to one's intelligence. You're allowed to talk about who benefits from massive society change and who suffers. You are allowed to talk about the ways that technology is implemented and how that leads to pros and cons. An attitude of "if we ever stop moving forward and think then the evil bad people win" is deeply anti-intellectual.
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I fear that outside of cataclysmic global warfare or some sort of butlerian jihad (which amounts to the same) this genie is not going back into the bottle. This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it, and almost all of the negatives cited by Kyle and likeminded (such as myself) are in fact positives for them in context of massive population reduction to eliminate "useless eaters" an…
> This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it If AI is smart enough to replace the 99.999% it's also smart enough to replace the 0.001%.
But that doesn't really matter when we talk about "replacement" because these people don't "do" they simply "own".
They're not concerned about being outpaced at some skill they perform in exchange for money...they just need the productive output of their capital invested in servers/models/etc to go up.
> "Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act. Now might be a good time to call your representatives." Having the "call your representatives" link be to your website as well isn't particularly helpful... I already can't get to it
I love it when Americans take the moral high ground
Two years ago, I was enjoying a drink with my wife, her friend, a very senior female VC partner, and another friend. Somehow we talked AI in some depth, and the VC at one point said (about AI): “I don’t know what our kids are going to do for work. I don’t know what jobs there will be to do.” That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well. I think about that exchange all…
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> You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.
Respectfully, without judgement, your perspective may be wildly skewed because you’re American (going by your post history). I suspect the negative externalities in a society built around cars don’t register with you because to you it is the normal state of the world. As a Dutchman, I grew up in a built world that is based around the human scale and to me your parent’s claim comes across as astonishingly obvious.
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I never want to live in a society that views individualism as toxic
Society in itself is the act of exchanging some of ones individualism and freedom for a group identity.
Alligators don't have what we call a society, and they do things that we'd consider anti-social like eat the young of our own kind. The individual has ultimate freedom to do whatever they want. Humans consider these freedoms anti-social and harmful to others and restrict your behaviors in these manners by ever increasing punishment including death.
Effectively your statement boils down to a childs tantrum of "I want to do whatever I want to do and damn everyone else"
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> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.
I think it's most obvious in hindsight, probably it was a long time (some decades) before cars were understood to have much of a negative effect at all. Nobody* thought much about air pollution (even adding lead to the gasoline) or climate effects, or what would happen when cities were built enough that they were then dependent on cars, or what happens when gas or cars gets expensive. All they saw was that trips taki…
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> You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.
Respectfully, without judgement, your perspective may be wildly skewed because you’re American (going by your post history). I suspect the negative externalities in a society built around cars don’t register with you because to you it is the normal state of the world. As a Dutchman, I grew up in a built world that is based around the human scale and to me your parent’s claim comes across as astonishingly obvious.
You might be only talking about personal cars, but you've got to remember that trucks share the same infrastructure cars use. Modern city wealth wouldn't be possible without engined vehicles driving on roads (maybe if you went really crazy with rail that could be exception). You take away personal cars and either the infrastructure stays or your city wouldn't be possible anymore either.
But even beyond that - personal cars provide a level of freedom and capability to the general population that no other technology can match. Trains suck, buses suck, passenger ships suck, planes are uncomfortable (but otherwise pretty good). Bikes don't work with long distances, multiple people, the infirm, winter (riding in the winter is a great way to get injured, two-wheeled vehicles don't do well with ice), bad weather, if you need to be presentable when you arrive. Oh, and bikes get stolen. Constantly.
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It's fine if people choose it. It's not fine if that choice denies other people the choice not to. And there seems to be a lot of the latter. For example, when shopping facilities or hospitals are built so as to be, de-facto, only accessible by automobile, that locks people out of the choice to say no thanks.
I don't follow, are people then not able to choose to live somewhere that has shopping facilities or hospitals that are built so as not to be only accessible by automobile?
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We pretty much did with aviation.
Our civilization does not depend on aviation very much, it's a specialized service. If all planes disappeared tomorrow, we will weather it pretty well. Cars are a completely different animal: they are ubiquitous and don't really have an alternative in many cases.
There's no quick fix at this point, it'd be a century-long project to undo the damage now, but a hypothetical world where we'd harnessed only the good parts of cars and not let them completely reshape the places we live down to the neighborhood level would sure be a lot nicer.