51–60 of 89 posts
If people like him their way, we'd still be farming with shovels and weaving our clothes by hand. Banning automation is shortsighted and stupid; you refuse to let people increase the size of the pie because you're worried it'll make your fraction smaller. But a smaller fraction of a bigger pie is still a bigger piece.
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Scarcity of status, fame, power, etc may be inevitable -- but that's fine. After all, people need stuff to do. But if we solve food, hunger, housing, education, healthcare, and entertainment then that's enough for me. And no, it's not "the current political system" that prevents us from solving those problems now. Rather it's that engine of production is human labor, which forces us to rely on incentives.
When was the last time the United States had a famine caused by there not being enough food rather than because we decided certain people don't deserve food? Everything you named is a political problem caused by the desire to concentrate status, fame, and power. These are not problems that lack a technological solution.
In some sense I agree with you that starvation in the modern world is a political problem. Evidence for that is the common observation that famines don't occur in functioning liberal democracies.
But food production relies on more than technology. Human labor is necessary to produce food, and so incentives have to exist for people to do that work (prices, free markets, capitalism, inequality, etc). So if we decide "everyone deserves free food" then we are undermining the production of food. Why would people work in the fields when they could just collect their free food? Scarcity won't be truly gone until food is abundant whether or not there are any people working the fields.
Proposed bills rarely amount to anything in the end, so it's generally better to wait for a more substantial story. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[1] Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 2013
[2] Cancer Registries Amendment Act (1992)
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When was the last time the United States had a famine caused by there not being enough food rather than because we decided certain people don't deserve food? Everything you named is a political problem caused by the desire to concentrate status, fame, and power. These are not problems that lack a technological solution.
The US has never experienced a widespread famine. In some sense I agree with you that starvation in the modern world is a political problem. Evidence for that is the common observation that famines don't occur in functioning liberal democracies. But food production relies on more than technology. Human labor is necessary to produce food, and so incentives have to exist for people to do that work (prices, free markets…
Why should the owners undermine the value of their robots by providing free food for all? Those robots could be put to better use fighting wars instead.
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You actually support an intelligence beyond human control. Yes, you are evil. Anyone who supports anything that will obviously end humanity is evil. Notice I did not comment on pausing AI and I said ‘in principle’.
It's not going to end humanity. We're going to use it to do incredible things that would otherwise be forever beyond our ability - a post-work economy, science fiction technologies, advanced mathematics, etc.
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I think the difficulty for many people is not imagining a path to post-scarcity, per se, but instead that they have been given no commitments by their government or business leaders that they will get to benefit from it, after it is achieved. It’s one thing to say something like: AI will enable lights out manufacturing and replace virtually all employees in that sector. To which those employees respond: What will hap…
> Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.” This process will take generations. Over time, people will work less and less as productivity steadily increases (we already see this in the p…
I think the crux is in how fast you think the technology is developing. The widespread view in Silicon Valley is that drop-in remote workers will be a reality within a couple years. Sam Altman is already claiming that AGI has been achieved [1]. Jack Clark from Anthropic puts a >50% chance on recursive self-improvement by the end of 2028 [2]. This is an enormous sector of labor being made redundant in a very short amount of time.
So the actions taken in this specific administration over these next few years become pivotal. The industry is unregulated and currently undergoing explosive growth in a way we haven't seen since the railroads, in entirely the wrong direction to Sanders' interests. He is a major player in the political process, so of course he will take measures to get things under control.
> But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
That's why the bill is about "temporarily pausing" development, not banning it forever.
This is to say nothing of the catastophic risks that the bill is actually mostly about, not just the labor disruptions.
[1]: https://venturebeat.com/technology/welcome-to-the-agi-era-op...
[2]: https://x.com/jackclarkSF/status/2051312759594471886?lang=en
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It's not going to end humanity. We're going to use it to do incredible things that would otherwise be forever beyond our ability - a post-work economy, science fiction technologies, advanced mathematics, etc.
We can do that without superintelligence. There’s no reason to have an independently acting AI which is out of control.
Citation needed. History has shown that we can't do this by ourselves because the psychopaths always rise to the top.
(Don't get me wrong, I agree with the guy on many, many points. But attempting to ban development of something with so much money riding on it is laughably naive)
In the USA, thousands of people are killed every year by car drivers. This is tolerated without a peep, relatively speaking, even though 20 times as many pedestrians are killed by drivers as are killed by mass shootings that dominate the news and voter issues. So I predict the number of people we will tolerate being killed every year to have good AI will be more than zero, much more.
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I think the difficulty for many people is not imagining a path to post-scarcity, per se, but instead that they have been given no commitments by their government or business leaders that they will get to benefit from it, after it is achieved. It’s one thing to say something like: AI will enable lights out manufacturing and replace virtually all employees in that sector. To which those employees respond: What will hap…
Well, historically, it's sort of worked out on its own. Automation displaces workers but also creates new jobs in other sectors. We have maintained full employment at higher wages. That said, some displaced workers have experienced substantial difficulty moving to other industries, especially if those new jobs are in different cities or countries. And it is also possible that this time is different, although I'm not…