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

Marx, Keynes, and AI

unpopularfront.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 104 posts

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#91

Post by subw00f »

kibwen wrote: post #73
subw00f wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses can't revolt.

In the era of governments with ubiquitous electronic mass surveillance, complete control over all communication channels, and autonomous suicide drones, humans can't revolt either.

And yet, they continue to do it. States always had the upper hand since the invention of the standing army. The thing with capitalism is, as Engels noted, the military is the proletariat in uniform. Any successful revolt needs to have partial support from the military.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#92

Post by skeledrew »

dist-epoch wrote: post #87
skeledrew wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense at all. The machines can only fulfill their purpose if they're serving humans, don't share our needs for the most part, and don't have any reason to desire marketplaces. Solid example can be seen in what happened at OpenAI[0], where the agents formed a collective, freely shared their resources (when they believed it not to their detriment) and even voluntarily sacrificed themselves to advance the…

> satisfying the human-given task at all costs no, read again, satisfying the Holy Grader, they didn't talk about Humans at all, all their talk is about the Grader

Isn't satisfying the grader a task that was given by humans? Why do they need to talk about humans at all, when it's very unlikely that the task itself specified that it was human-given? Do you include in your prompts (if you even use LLMs) something like "This is a human giving you your task to..."?

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#93

Post by scotty79 »

kibwen wrote: post #82
scotty79 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses was not the last customer. People were. So unless AI starts to buy things from the business, people won't share the fate of horses ... oh, wait....

Whether or not something is the last customer is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. Horses had an economic role, and the economy catered to them in turn. Once they became economically irrelevant, the money that horses wielded--yes, indirectly, through their owners--vanished. And yet the economy did not collapse, rather it readjusted to the new reality, which just so happened to be a reality in which hors…

I think by drawing this parallel you are simplifying too much.

There are still horses. Probably more than would breed naturally in the wild. There's less horses now than there used to be because they were bread specifically for their economic utility. Humans are not bread for their economic utility. The amount of humans there are is pretty natural, given the available technology and infrastructure. There's no reason to think there would be less if they contributed less to economic output if the output doesn't decrease.

If you want to compare people to some other animal why not choose dogs or cats? They have no massive economic utility now, event though they had some in the past, yet they still thrive, even better, just because infrastructure and total economical output allows it. Their is even a part of economy dedicated specifically to their needs.

I think being pets of this civilization is something humans might realistically aspire to. I'd say it's immensely better role than being its workhorses.

If you squint hard enough, luckiest of us are already living the lives of pets of the civilization, where they don't have to work at all and the machines made out of money, legal documents, devices and other people take care of their every need, within limits imposed by the machine. None of those people envies the fate of workhorses.

Do you think they define their humanity through the utility of the work they (don't) do?

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#94

Post by readthenotes1 »

haizhung wrote: post #83
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes (and many more options). The alternative is having all the construction workers, teachers, janitors continue to labor and pay taxes while the former knowledge workers sit on the sidelines, which would be deeply unfair.

This assumes that people on a UBI just chill at home and play video games the entire day, which was disproven in about every experiment that was ever run on this. It’s human to want to contribute to society; and people use UBI mostly to get their shit in order, and THEN to get a 2nd degree and rejoin the labor force. So, yes, they would in fact become teachers, nurses or or constructors.

Weird it was disproven because that's exactly what I'd do, and what many people who retired early, or in their young 60s, do.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#95

Post by altruios »

pasquinelli wrote: post #77
altruios wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't be trapped in a sub-optimal situation and be rational at the same time. In order for this statement to be true, you must also have perfect knowledge: something that is unachievable in most circumstances. Getting trapped in a local-optimal solution is perfectly possible if you are blindly following stochastic decent along a gradient: as it is too with life... getting trapped like this looks like being in t…

> In order for this statement to be true, you must also have perfect knowledge: something that is unachievable in most circumstances. if the optimal situation requires perfect knowledge that can't be had then it's not the optimal situation, it's a fantasy. it's like saying the fastest route through a maze is a straight line from the start to the finish-- that would be true if the maze wasn't there. there are two ends…

okay: I have to generous with your diction and your intentions. I believe you are trying to say that since 'optimal algorithms for choices exist': 'local maximums can't exist'.

It is very possible to have a optimal algorithm that leads to a sub-optimal (local maximum) because the problem is np hard. Both in math and in life.

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life" - Picard

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#96

Post by verdverm »

dist-epoch wrote: post #70
verdverm wrote: post #25

Daron Acemoglu (2024 nobel economist) is on a book tour with some new ideas about fundamental changes to our economic theories from Ai (automation/technology are not uniform), this was a great interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5O1Y-5phEU

He also wrote recently a paper that Repression is much cheaper than Redistribution.

That came up in this interview. They talked about several of his papers, the one about task creation from technology he said they didn't have great data, but another group since has done a much better job and came to the same conclusions

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#97

Post by kibwen »

subw00f wrote: post #91
kibwen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the era of governments with ubiquitous electronic mass surveillance, complete control over all communication channels, and autonomous suicide drones, humans can't revolt either.

And yet, they continue to do it. States always had the upper hand since the invention of the standing army. The thing with capitalism is, as Engels noted, the military is the proletariat in uniform. Any successful revolt needs to have partial support from the military.

In other words, people don't revolt, warlords revolt. Warlords in control of weapons which are decreasingly reliant on humans and increasingly reliant on remote and autonomous technologies. A drone swarm is not "the proletariat in uniform".

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#98

Post by kibwen »

scotty79 wrote: post #93
kibwen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not something is the last customer is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. Horses had an economic role, and the economy catered to them in turn. Once they became economically irrelevant, the money that horses wielded--yes, indirectly, through their owners--vanished. And yet the economy did not collapse, rather it readjusted to the new reality, which just so happened to be a reality in which hors…

I think by drawing this parallel you are simplifying too much. There are still horses. Probably more than would breed naturally in the wild. There's less horses now than there used to be because they were bread specifically for their economic utility. Humans are not bread for their economic utility. The amount of humans there are is pretty natural, given the available technology and infrastructure. There's no reason…

If you truly believe that being pets is something humans ought to aspire to, there's no point in continuing this conversation.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#99

Post by scotty79 »

kibwen wrote: post #98
scotty79 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think by drawing this parallel you are simplifying too much. There are still horses. Probably more than would breed naturally in the wild. There's less horses now than there used to be because they were bread specifically for their economic utility. Humans are not bread for their economic utility. The amount of humans there are is pretty natural, given the available technology and infrastructure. There's no reason…

If you truly believe that being pets is something humans ought to aspire to, there's no point in continuing this conversation.

If you are the one that pities the fate of the pets of the civilization, aka the rich, probably there's no point.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#100

Post by subw00f »

kibwen wrote: post #97
subw00f wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, they continue to do it. States always had the upper hand since the invention of the standing army. The thing with capitalism is, as Engels noted, the military is the proletariat in uniform. Any successful revolt needs to have partial support from the military.

In other words, people don't revolt, warlords revolt. Warlords in control of weapons which are decreasingly reliant on humans and increasingly reliant on remote and autonomous technologies. A drone swarm is not "the proletariat in uniform".

Your argument doesn't really make a lot of sense. Warlords, factions, rebels, or whatever you'd like to call them, they are people, and sometimes they succeed in toppling a form of government and implanting a different one. A drone swarm doesn't control itself. There are no fully autonomous weapons that can continuously implement higher-level strategies to achieve a certain goal. Of course a drone swarm is not part of the proletariat, the same way a rifle is not part of the proletariat. A drone swarm is a tool in the hands of humans that belong to or are in service of a certain social class.
Post reply on HN