Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The buck (or the bubble) will stop somewhere. Why?
Every bubble in history has popped But if you disagree I have an NFT to sell you
Is internet a bubble? Has it stopped?
You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
151–160 of 251 posts
Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans Unless you're a few centuries old, you haven't. You've had the potential to be competing agaist industrial and computational technology your whole life. Go back further, and the prevalence of slaves served as a similar cost differential (free humans versus enslaved, human versus AI).
Yes, and even in prehistoric eras people could attempt to compete with the wind at blowing air, but I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted to the point where I couldn't hope to make a living. So I've written off the once-profitable career of "calculator" from the get-go. Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competit…
> I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted
Then you've constructed a tautology. Humans remain competitive in various applications of their labour, broadly defined, despite entire categories having become uncompetitive. If we exempt those categories then the historical record looks static. But only because we defined away the change.
> Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers
I believe there is evidence for this all over the place. By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans. This places a floor on the price of AI and thus human labour that competes with it. (Though that floor, as with pre-information age floors, is well below almost everyone on this forum.)
Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
#153Hard to take seriously from a guy who has Facebook, Google, and Twitter on his CV.
I fail to see your point. He's very well traveled is all.
My point is after you’ve worked at Facebook, Google, and Twitter, telling us you had a nightmare that you worked at Amazon is hard to swallow.
Ranting about how everyone else should opt-out after he’s filled his cup at the bosom of these behemoths is hard to swallow.
In his defence, he does say that he’s targeting folks who already work in big tech.
Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
#154This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this. It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email. It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
Well, you could say that the proposed alternative is: Consider not working there.
This means, work somewhere else, or even _do_ something else.
Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
#155An economics counter argument: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-... Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.
Maybe p(doom) without AGI is 1.0 in the long term, but I'll be dead by then. But AGI definitely increases the p(doom) within my lifetime.
I redefined p(doom) to mean your death rather than the demise of the species, which I probably should have clarified.
Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
#156Let's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass. Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
> Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
Historically, they did because everyone's capacity for violence was equal.
What about now that the best the average person can do is a firearm against coordinated, organized military with armoured vehicles, advanced weaponry, drones, and sooner than later, full access to mass surveillance?
Also, how will a revolution happen once somebody trains a ML model end-to-end to identify desire for revolution from your search and chat history and communication with like-minded others?
Assuming the intent isn't prevented altogether through algorithmic feeds showing only content that makes it seem less attractive.
Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
#157Tech needs to learn about collective action problems. Are any of geohot's shops unionized? Has he done any political work or advocacy? What I want to read is "geohot donates $5m to CWA", not some insipid, entirely useless blog post effectively calling me a coward, while its author does nothing.
If you raise the bar for being allowed to speak about a very real concern that high, nobody will be left to spread and debate the idea in the first place.
geohot's not a regular joe, he's founded multiple companies and is a leader in our community. This is like a general being like "why are you letting the enemy win?" while he sits comfortably in his study managing his cigar collection.
Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure you're literally just wrong on that one - no special knowledge of the weaving market but it seems people do still make a living from hand-weaving fabric. Eg, I found https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics - they claim to have a shop in New York. They can probably afford bread - bread is quite cheap. The issue is if bread becomes insanely cheap and cloth becomes insanely cheap, then a v…
Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West. You can still produce things like handwoven cloth, bespoke rocking chairs, and novelty birdhouses, but you market them primarily to an upscale clientele. It’s next to impossible to compete on price when the average consumer is basing their idea of what a thing is worth on products being assembled by machinery in countries where l…
> Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West.
Mass market handicrafts have never been a viable means of subsistence anywhere, ever, if we benchmark against what I think a reasonable lifestyle looks like. That is why we stopped doing things that way.
Nevertheless mass market handicrafts are still a theoretical option. It hasn't become a worse option over time, it is in fact a better option now than it ever was in the past. Today is the best day in history to be a weaver, even for those that do it by hand. A weaver in the 1700s would weep tears of joy at the opportunity to weave things by hand today at market rates. They would say things like "wow, I can afford a much better life than in the 1700s with my weaving skills", "what just happened to me? What was that time portal?" and "maybe I should learn to code, they earn even more money than I do".
Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are the first person I've seen try and say TSMC, Broadcom, etc aren't "big tech" lol
I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.
I think your argument is just a bunch of pedantry but OK: Western Electric produced commodities for the Bell system. So did a lot of other companies, selling into a market that was functionally a monopsony.
Yet the fact that this was necessary is tangential, the Bell system didn't exist to sell switches or phones. The phone network monopoly was AT&T's fief, the rent was the phone bill everyone had to pay!
If you aren't AMD, nVidia, Google, or Apple how much luck do you think you'll have putting in an order to TSMC for 2nm? Or Samsung? Or Micron? Or Hynix?
Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
#160I get the feeling behind the anti-AI sentiment, I just disagree with the conclusions. There’s a lot of fear around what will happen with AI, not so much of extinction but rather of two things: fear of losing income, and arguably more importantly, fear of losing identity. People often are invested in what they do to the point that it’s who they are. That being replaced or eliminated might be a bigger psychological thr…
> However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance. Benefits come to those who have the means to access it, and wealth is a measure of the ability to direct and influence huma…
Of course, and distribution and ownership of benefits is the real issue here, but I think I’ve addressed that.
Let me be clearer: I said “companies must commit to” where the stronger phrasing is “companies are forced to by legislation”. But to begin with this might be voluntarily done by some number of companies.
Also, in this vision of society the AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, google etc) are taxed heavily. The taxation is redistributed, there is UBI for some fraction of the population, maybe the majority. Others still work in companies mandated to keep employees as I outlined above.
Importantly, we as a society specifically aim to bring about these benefits of AI by using the redistributed funds in part to invest in them.
Part of this is the free market, part is planned government investment. If one fails, maybe the other succeeds. Either way, we try to spread the benefits and importantly to ensure the benefits are actually there in the first place.