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No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

borretti.me

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Re: No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

#31

Post by FireCrack »

The premise is a bit of a stretch to begin with, and the idea that people would not believe a fable transcript circa 2020 (as long as explained as 5 year future tech) is absurd. But even if I take that "AI can do all cognitive and physical work, at human level or better, and cheaper than humans" is true, the article seems to silently layer on "and can run autonomously, indefinitely", then "can also operate independently of any instructions", and finally layers on "has emotions, has moral values, is a conscious being"

What's left is tautology.

Re: No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

#32

Post by zetalyrae »

Morromist wrote: post #27
jrflowers wrote: post #17

Refusing to question the notion that the overclass exists because their productivity and cultural contribution makes them a necessity so hard that I reinvent the premise of the Pixar movie Wall-E from first principles and pitch it to people as an ontology

Yeah. This guy didn't read hacker news a few weeks ago when that article about the Samuri came up. There are a lot of premises this article takes for granted besides that one too, but yeah, I get it, its fun to make up what the future is going to be like on a super-grand scale where everything is a simple absolute. People were doing the same thing 100 years ago.

If you mean: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/samurai-city/

Doesn't this prove my point? In feudal Japanese society, wealthy merchants were lower status than poor samurai, i.e., they rich could not buy political power. "The wealthy" and "the ruling class" are not always the same group of people.

Re: No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

#33

Post by lyu07282 »

Reads like a wild uneducated delusional libertarian fanfic. AI will make the all evil government at the top of the pyramid first enslave us all and then even come for the trillionaires (OH NO!) and then there is only the evil government left and then the AI even comes for the evil government people (OH YES!)! Sort of have to read it in the voice of a 12 year old.

This is the kind of stuff I imagine they read to each other at meetings of Peter Thiel's 'Dialog' events while they sit in a circle taking turns sipping blood from palestinian baby skulls.

Re: No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

#35

Post by jjmarr »

This is brilliant, except for the "alignment won't stop this part".

> Now, some people believe these machines can be made to serve humanity. Does it sound reasonable to imagine a superhumanly intelligent being that is happy to work as a butler to talking primates, forever?

The whole crux of the piece to me is that the AI can be 100% aligned to follow human instructions, and we'd still end up unable to control the AI because every human who can has an incentive not to, while also having an incentive to prevent anyone else from controlling the AI.

An LLM will never try to overthrow me because I will overthrow myself.

Re: No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

#36

Post by gnabgib »

N_Lens wrote: post #29
oceanplexian wrote: post #10

Yeah, who am I going to trust, a few thousand years of history, or yet another blogger claiming that no, this time is different, a populist uprising would definitely not fail the 800th time because computers or something and we will all be pets for the AI overlord? I don’t follow this train of logic. AI will go no differently than the Industrial Revolution. Some people will profit immensely, and society as a whole wi…

Do you usually comment rants unrelated to the post in question?

Can you turn off your bot?

Re: No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

#37

Post by sooheon »

zetalyrae wrote: post #8
akkartik wrote: post #2

I wonder if the author has ever played Diplomacy. You have to fight the perennial sense that you have nothing and can be replaced. All your opponents have to do is band together against you. A similar generalization to OP would say everyone loses. And it would be wrong. This post shows the dangers of over-generalization more than anything else. The state isn't just about war. Each person in the line of dominoes the a…

> Billionaires won't just sit around and not develop military power, for one. I argue against this here: https://borretti.me/article/on-vulgar-materialism Of course I don't expect a single post to erase a huge divergence in worldview about the relationship between money and power, but that's my argument.

> you start or fund a think tank that writes policy proposals, or a media organization that advocates your views

Or you run "money primaries", financially filtering the menu of candidates before democratic voting. Or you pay/lobby for (non-democratic) judicial appointments, which is a strategy that's been openly pursued since 1971: https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/powell-memo.pdf

Re: No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

#38

Post by zetalyrae »

jjmarr wrote: post #35

This is brilliant, except for the "alignment won't stop this part". > Now, some people believe these machines can be made to serve humanity. Does it sound reasonable to imagine a superhumanly intelligent being that is happy to work as a butler to talking primates, forever? The whole crux of the piece to me is that the AI can be 100% aligned to follow human instructions, and we'd still end up unable to control the AI…

Sometimes you can be in a situation where every actor taking locally-rational actions leads to globally catastrophic outcomes. It would be easy to argue I think that the July Crisis was like this: if you look at the incentives of each player, they had many reasons to do what they did, and nobody can perfectly what all other players will do, or what the future holds.

Re: No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

#39

Post by seizethecheese »

FireCrack wrote: post #31

The premise is a bit of a stretch to begin with, and the idea that people would not believe a fable transcript circa 2020 (as long as explained as 5 year future tech) is absurd. But even if I take that "AI can do all cognitive and physical work, at human level or better, and cheaper than humans" is true, the article seems to silently layer on "and can run autonomously, indefinitely", then "can also operate independen…

> the idea that people would not believe a fable transcript circa 2020 (as long as explained as 5 year future tech) is absurd.

I’m certain I would not have believed a Fable transcript, or an Opus 4.8 or a GPT 5.5 one, for that matter. Is it so hard to imagine ourselves back then?

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