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The Software Revolution

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Software Revolution

#91

Post by api »

smacktoward wrote: post #68
abtinf wrote: post #51

The last few posts from Sam Altman have been deeply troubling and make me worried for the future of YC. He presents leftist ideas as fact without evidence of serious critical thought or even basic economic education. "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a tho…

You have a curious definition of "leftist." This essay more or less boils down to "technology is awesome, except for the part where it makes the proles restless, someone really ought to figure out some way to fix that." Which is pretty bog-standard 21st century Davos-über-alles capitalist thinking.

We've gotten to the point that even admitting the existence of possible negative consequences of current economic trends is "leftist."

It's so very ironically Soviet. Collectivized farming is boosting crop yields! What? There are people starving? How would that be possible, because collectivized farming is boosting crop yields!

Re: The Software Revolution

#93

Post by hueving »

frandroid wrote: post #38
Balgair wrote: post #35

Nitpicking: Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely than a 'bad-actor' getting their hands on enough uranium for a dirty bomb. Nukes are relatively easy to understand and make, get enough U238 together and it pretty much goes boom. Little Boy just shot 1 half at the other sub critical half. Blammo. Viruses are not that easy, as the cell is complicated beyond all measure. It's as if we dug up…

If nukes are so easy, how come Iran, with all its oil wealth, is still not there? It remains a difficult state actor play.

They are easy from an 'intelligence required' perspective. They are difficult from a logistics perspective.

Re: The Software Revolution

#94

Post by aggronn »

markbnj wrote: post #24

I don't necessarily buy the "AI can end humanity" thing. As a cliche that's become very easy to repeat, but I've yet to see a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF. The ending of human life would not be so easy for computers to accomplish. But on the subject of concentration of power and the wide-scale elimination of low- and middle-range jobs I think he is dead on. I fear that the…

How is the assumption that "ending of human life would not be so easy" any better than the opposite? If they're equally valid, then its rather fair to take the opposite view because it is more cautious.

Re: The Software Revolution

#95

Post by geoffbrown2014 »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #14
shit_parade wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is implementation, do you really trust the US government to give it even more power over its people by allowing to hand out 'basic incomes' to everyone? I'm sure it will only become yet another tool to oppress dissent.

I don't think your fears are well grounded, and I'm not aware of significant efforts by the US government to "oppress dissent" in other recent cases.

The federal government has a terrible record of trying and succeeding in ruining people they perceive as a threat to the status quo, including people like MLK Jr., a Senate confirmed target of the FBI. These tactics continue today, they are currently being directed towards investigative journalists and whistle blowers. The threats are so great as to create a very real chill among conventional journalists to keep on approved topics and messages.

Re: The Software Revolution

#96

Post by tormeh »

gaius wrote: post #81
brandonmenc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job It's more dignifying to give someone a living wage, freeing their time so they can pursue useful work, than it is to waste their time by assigning them a dirt-shoveling make-work job that, in the end, grinds everything around them to a halt.

What useful work could a manual labourer do, if you automated his job away tomorrow? It sounds harsh but not everyone can be a Javascript developer or whatever the current fashionable thing is. And what's to stop that useful thing being automated away next?

The Free Market has been faced with this problem countless times, and each time the answer has been "the service sector". First we moved from agriculture to industry until agriculture, previously humanity's main occupation, became a small part of the economy. Now we move from manufacturing to services. It's not even a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a couple of decades now.

Re: The Software Revolution

#97

Post by jqm »

Balgair wrote: post #35

Nitpicking: Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely than a 'bad-actor' getting their hands on enough uranium for a dirty bomb. Nukes are relatively easy to understand and make, get enough U238 together and it pretty much goes boom. Little Boy just shot 1 half at the other sub critical half. Blammo. Viruses are not that easy, as the cell is complicated beyond all measure. It's as if we dug up…

How would a virus immediately lethal to 100% of it's hosts ever survive long enough to be selected for?

There is a natural limit on selection like this. A lab doesn't have the limit because it's product is not constrained by natural selection.

Re: The Software Revolution

#98

Post by dnautics »

girmad wrote: post #2

> Technology provides leverage on ability and luck, and in the process concentrates wealth and drives inequality. I think that drastic wealth inequality is likely to be one of the biggest social problems of the next 20 years. [2] We can—and we will—redistribute wealth, but it still doesn’t solve the real problem of people needing something fulfilling to do. What's the best case realistic scenario for redistributing w…

I am puzzled by this. There is also this first order decrease in cost of living that technology drives, that really is the 'rising tide that lifts all boats', in effect, a 'natural' progressive redistribution[0]. It would be hard to argue that inequality increased between, say, 1700 and 1900 because of the increase in technology.

[0] This 'natural' redistribution tends to be counteracted by authorities that debase the money system. Currently we have an explicit anti-deflationist policy on the grounds that lowering prices are believed to inherently have a socially destabilizing effect. Monetary policy tends to be regressive redistribution, because the primary executors of these policies are connected to banks, and the secondary effects are to create upward market indexes that beat inflation (but are eventually corrected downward, hurting middle-class 'slow movers' like pension funds and disproportionately helping upper-class 'fast moving' investment classes).

Re: The Software Revolution

#99

Post by mtviewdave »

abtinf wrote: post #51

The last few posts from Sam Altman have been deeply troubling and make me worried for the future of YC. He presents leftist ideas as fact without evidence of serious critical thought or even basic economic education. "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a tho…

>But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.

I hear this a lot in discussions about technology (and about free trade) but it contains a fallacy: just because a group is collectively better off it does not mean that all persons in that group are better off. It's quite possible for a society to become wealthier at the same time that many members of that society become poorer. Indeed, there are large parts of the U.S. for which this has been true for the last 30 years.

That doesn't mean that we should retard technological progress, but it's disingenuous to paper over the real suffering it causes real persons by talking only about society collectively.

Re: The Software Revolution

#100

Post by bgentry »

frandroid wrote: post #38
Balgair wrote: post #35

Nitpicking: Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely than a 'bad-actor' getting their hands on enough uranium for a dirty bomb. Nukes are relatively easy to understand and make, get enough U238 together and it pretty much goes boom. Little Boy just shot 1 half at the other sub critical half. Blammo. Viruses are not that easy, as the cell is complicated beyond all measure. It's as if we dug up…

If nukes are so easy, how come Iran, with all its oil wealth, is still not there? It remains a difficult state actor play.

The hard part is not in knowing how to construct the actual bomb. The hard part is enriching the requisite quantity of a fissile material.

That's why the US and Israel went after Iran's enrichment facilities with Stuxnet.

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