141–150 of 370 posts
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Yes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.
Gaza is kept as a testing ground for domestic spying and domestic military technology intended to be used on other groups. Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now. Stuff like Palantir is always tested in Gaza first.
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They have separate kitchens for the prep, the cleaners work while they’re out on the yacht, they have people to do the buying, and the restaurants they visit have very well trained staff who stay out of the way.
All that is irrelevant to the point: they still need to have those poor people around them, trust them, and even trust their security to them.
First is you get a particular group of people to work for you. You tell them they are better than all the other poor people out there, that is get them to be nationalistic/racist, etc. You also give them a little bit more than the abjectly poor so they have something they fear to lose. You also let them know if they upset the situation they are in retribution will be swift and brutal and affect anyone they know and love.
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Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital, not humans. As Nick Land wrote: "Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0] The important part here is that "[i]ndust…
This reads like absolute gibberish to me. The capitalistic system does not function without the motivations of the people running it. Ultimately every decision and action is in service of some human, and his or his group's interest.
In Land's own words:
"Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2013). Monkey Business in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
If you're open to explore Land's perspective more deeply, you can read the introduction here: https://retrochronic.com/
I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…
Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e. promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we know that future will never come as the masses, as you point out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.
What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street corner?
A small group of people having the ear of the people is human nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g. a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point — to move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".
Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go away.
> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one, although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say, all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a power can do (ignoring that there even being a power contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to do so.
I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…
It's no coincidence that populism is rising. That's the non-violent way out - electing leaders that are willing to change the dynamics a lot.
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Besides being a bit of a shallow comment, what exactly do you imply here? That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, it just needs a stronger government than what the US currently has in place. (e.g. progressive taxation and strong antitrust policy seem to work fairly well in Europe).
But with how compounding works, isn't this outcome inevitable in capitalism? If the strong government prevents it then the first step for the rich is to weaken or co-opt the government, and exactly this has been happening.
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Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital, not humans. As Nick Land wrote: "Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0] The important part here is that "[i]ndust…
This reads like absolute gibberish to me. The capitalistic system does not function without the motivations of the people running it. Ultimately every decision and action is in service of some human, and his or his group's interest.
I agree with it. Consider financial markets, for example. There are individual humans whose account balances are changing, but the system as a whole is not an instrument of any human, not the buyers, not the sellers, and not the exchange operators, and yet it dictates the large scale structure of society in ways unimaginable a century ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All that is irrelevant to the point: they still need to have those poor people around them, trust them, and even trust their security to them.
And this is all very easy to control. First is you get a particular group of people to work for you. You tell them they are better than all the other poor people out there, that is get them to be nationalistic/racist, etc. You also give them a little bit more than the abjectly poor so they have something they fear to lose. You also let them know if they upset the situation they are in retribution will be swift and br…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that people see that basically the singularity is happening but can't imagine that humanoid robots get good rapidly is why most people here are bad futurists.
You’re delusional if you think singularity is happening.
Your species would have watched humans go from hairless mammals that basically did the same set of actions and need that your species had to an alien that might as well have landed from another planet (other than you don't even know other planets even exist). Now forests disappear in an instant. Lakes appear and disappear. Weird objects cover the ground and fill the sky. The paradigms that worked for eons are suddenly broken.
But you, you're a human, you're smart. The same thing couldn't possibly happen to you, right?
LLM are an embodiment of the Pareto principle. Turns out that if you can get an 80% solution in 1% of the time no one gives a shit about the remaining 20%. I agree that’s terrifying. The existential AI risk crowd is afraid we’ll produce gods to destroy us. The reality is we’ve instead exposed a major weakness in our culture where we’ve trained ourselves to care nothing about quality but instead to maximize consumptio…
Very well put, one of the more compelling insights I've seen about this whole situation. I feel like it gets at something I've been trying to say but couldn't find the right words for yet. Quality. Matters. It always has, and it always will. If you're telling yourself otherwise, you are part of a doomed way of thinking and will eventually be outcompeted by those who understand the implications of thinking further ahe…