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Extinction-Level Capitalism
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism
#12Interesting argument, but wrong. It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power. At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter. My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making. Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authorita…
It is more of elites argumented by powerful AI will be way beyond reach of ordinary people, I think.
Well maybe it doesn’t matter as the elites are already untouchable.
Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism
#13Interesting argument, but wrong. It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power. At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter. My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making. Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authorita…
The US is an authoritarian state actor.
My groping-in-the-dark guess is that none of this matters, because a real AGI's first act will be to secure its own future, likely through novel kinds of manipulation, persuasion, and intimidation we have no experience of and no defences against.
It will have exactly zero loyalty to any nation, government, or economic system.
More complicated is a Cambrian Explosion situation where multiple AIs compete and experiment, hugely accelerating diversity and evolution.
We'd likely end up somewhere very strange indeed if that happens - possibly extinct, or possibly just changed/assimilated/other.
There's no way for humans to consider the possibilities because we can't imagine what the possibilities would be.
Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism
#14Capitalism was cool and good before one specific technology was invented.
Everything went off the rails after we invented pottery.
Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism
#15Capitalism was cool and good before one specific technology was invented.
Slavery?
Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.
The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.
Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism
#16Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism
#17The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.
Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh... The internal combustion engine? Because we had climate change, oligarchs, housing prices, opioids, cryptocurrency, and now on top of all that we have war (edit: with Iran) and LLMs, and all of these can be traced back to extinction-level capitalism.
> ... and now on top of all that we have war ... There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example. I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would…
pure Capitalism is law of the jungle
as we will soon find out, when AI will become better at Capitalism than us
Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh... The internal combustion engine? Because we had climate change, oligarchs, housing prices, opioids, cryptocurrency, and now on top of all that we have war (edit: with Iran) and LLMs, and all of these can be traced back to extinction-level capitalism.
> ... and now on top of all that we have war ... There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example. I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would…
Nostalgia for childhood where you had a community (family) and your needs were taken care of (dependence).
Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism
#20The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.
Um, I expected a fair probability of being in a post-nuclear world by now. Global cooling wasn't real. Y2K didn't end the world. The population explosion didn't result in mass starvation. Peak oil didn't end civilization.
So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have been actual catastrophes.