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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#301

Post by motorest »

juniperus wrote: post #287
motorest wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere. Utter nonsense. Do you believe the European countries that provides higher education for free are manning tenure positions with slaves or robbing people at gunpoint? How come do you see public transportation services in some major urban centers being provided free of charge…

You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery. It used to be called corvée. But the words being used have a connotation of something much more brutal and unrewarding. This isn't a political statement, I'm not a libertarian who believes all taxation is evil robbery and needs to be abolished. I'm just p…

> You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery.

You're letting your irrational biases show.

To start off, social security contributions are not a tax.

But putting that detail aside, do you believe that paying a private health insurance also represents slavery and robbery? Are you a slave to a private pension fund?

Are you one of those guys who believes unions exploit workers whereas corporations are just innocent bystanders that have a neutral or even positive impact on workers lives and well being?

Re: AI is different

#302

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

dsign wrote: post #227
ares623 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pisses me off so much. So many engineers are so excited to work on and with these systems, opening 20 prs per day to make their employers happy going “yes boss!” They think their $300k total compensation will give them a seat at the table for what they’re cheering on to come. I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises. Unless you have y…

Big fan of your argument and don't disagree. If AI makes a virus to get rid of humanity, well we are screwed. But if all we have to fear from AI is unprecedented economic disruption, I will point out that some parts of the world may survive relatively unscathed. Let's talk Samoa, for example. There, people will continue fishing and living their day-to-day. If industrialized economies collapse, Samoans may find it ver…

The issue is there isn't enough of those small environmental economies to support everyone that exists today without the technology, logistics and trades that are in place today.

You can farm and fish the entire undeveloped areas of NYC, but it won't be enough to feed or support the humans that live there.

You can say that for any metro area. Density will have to reduce immediately if there is economic collapse, and historically, when disaster strikes, that doesn't tend to happen immediately.

Also humans (especially large groups of them) need more than food: shelter, clothes, medicine, entertainment, education, religion, justice, law, etc.

Re: AI is different

#303

Post by globular-toast »

yard2010 wrote: post #265

I think so too - the latest AI changes mark the new "automate everything" era. When everything is automated, everything costs basically zero, as this will eliminate the most expensive part of every business - human labor. No one will make money from all the automated stuff, but no one would need the money anyway. This will create a society in which money is not the only value pursued. Instead of trying to chase paper…

You are forgetting that there is actually scarcity built into the planet. We are already very from being sustainable, we're eating into reserves that will never come back. There are only so many nice places to go on holiday. Only so much space to grow food etc. Economics isn't about money, it's about scarcity.

Re: AI is different

#304

Post by CER10TY »

essnine wrote: post #271
juniperus wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The taxes will be most burdensome for the wealthiest and most productive of institutions, which is generally why these arrangements collapse economies and nations. UBI is hard to implement because it incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity. This creates economic crisis, taxes are basically a smaller scale version of this, UBI is like a more comprehensive wealth redistribution sche…

The assumption here that UBI "incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity" is the part that doesn't make sense. What do you think universal means? How does it disincentivize productive activity if it is provided to everyone regardless of their income/productivity/employment/whatever?

I guess the thinking goes like this: Why start a business, get a higher paying job etc if you're getting ~2k€/mo in UBI and can live off of that? Since more people will decide against starting a business or increasing their income, productive activity decreases.

Re: AI is different

#305

Post by fmbb »

jrvarela56 wrote: post #278

This whole ‘what are we going to do’ I think is way out of proportion even if we do end up with agi. Let’s say whatever the machines do better than humans, gets done by machines. Suddenly the bottleneck is going to shift to those things where humans are better. We’ll do that and the machines will try to replace that labor too. And then again, and again. Throughout this process society becomes wealthier, TVs get cheap…

> Throughout this process society becomes wealthier, TVs get cheaper, we colonize Mars, etc. The force that keeps this going is human insatisfaction: once we get these things we’ll want whatever it is we don’t have.

What makes you think the machines will both be smarter and better than us but also be our slaves to make human society better.

Is equine society better now than before they started working with humans?

(Personally I believe AGI is just hype and nobody knows how anyone could build it and we will never do, so I’m not worried about that facet of thinking machine tech.)

Re: AI is different

#306

Post by simgt »

000ooo000 wrote: post #64
drooby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carpenters, landscapers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, elderly care, nurses, cooks, servers, bakers, musicians, actors, artists... Those jobs are probably still a couple decades plus off from displacement. some possibly never, And we will need them in higher numbers.. and perhaps it's ironic because these are some of the oldest professions. Everything we do is in service of paying for our housing, transportation,…

What this delusion seems to turn a blind eye to is that a good chunk of the population is already in those roles; what happens when the supply of those roles far exceeds the demand, in a relatively short time? Carpenters suddenly abundant, carpenter wages drop, carpenters struggling to live, carpenters forced to tighten spending, carpenters decide children aren't affordable.. now extrapolate that across all of the im…

It's naive but also ignores that automation is simply replacing human labor by capital. Capital captures more of the value, and workers get less overall. Unless we end up in some mild socialist utopia where basic needs are provided and corps are all coops, but that's not the trend.

Re: AI is different

#307

Post by 331c8c71 »

sneak wrote: post #289
motorest wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere. Utter nonsense. Do you believe the European countries that provides higher education for free are manning tenure positions with slaves or robbing people at gunpoint? How come do you see public transportation services in some major urban centers being provided free of charge…

> Are countries with access to free health care using slavery to keep hospitals and clinics running? No, robbery. They’re paid for with tax revenues, which are collected without consent. Taking of someone’s money without consent has a name. Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

My understanding is that your info is seriously out of date. It might have been the case in the distant past but not the case anymore.

https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/20/tracking-decline-social-mob...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

Re: AI is different

#308

Post by afro88 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #98
ares623 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pisses me off so much. So many engineers are so excited to work on and with these systems, opening 20 prs per day to make their employers happy going “yes boss!” They think their $300k total compensation will give them a seat at the table for what they’re cheering on to come. I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises. Unless you have y…

The same argument could be made for actual engineers working on steam engines, nuclear power, or semiconductors. Make of that what you will.

More like engineers coming up with higher level programming languages. No one (well, nearly) hand writes assembly anymore. But there's still plenty of jobs. Just the majority write in the higher level but still expressive languages.

For some reason everyone thinks as LLMs get better it means programmers go away. The programming language, and amount you can build per day, are changing. That's pretty much it.

Re: AI is different

#309

Post by juniperus »

motorest wrote: post #301
juniperus wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery. It used to be called corvée. But the words being used have a connotation of something much more brutal and unrewarding. This isn't a political statement, I'm not a libertarian who believes all taxation is evil robbery and needs to be abolished. I'm just p…

> You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery. You're letting your irrational biases show. To start off, social security contributions are not a tax. But putting that detail aside, do you believe that paying a private health insurance also represents slavery and robbery? Are you a slave to a private…

No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism. But taxation is de facto a form of unpaid labor taken by the force of the state. If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery, and in the ideal situation, it is a benevolent sort of exchange, despite existing in the realm of slavery/robbery. In a totalitarian system, it become malevolent very quickly. It also can be seen as not benevolent when the exchange becomes onerous and not beneficial. Arguing this is arguing emotionally and not rationally using language with words that have definitions.

social security contributions are a mandatory payment to the state taken from your wages, they are a tax, it's a compulsory reduction in your income. Private health insurance is obviously not mandatory or compulsory, that is different, clearly. Your last statement is just irrelevant because you assume I'm a libertarian for pointing out the reality of the exchange taking place in the socialist system.

Re: AI is different

#310

Post by BuckRogers »

ACCount37 wrote: post #296
thephotonsphere wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc. LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...

Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.

Except a car isn’t a human.

That’s the mistake Elon Musk made and the same one you’re making here.

Not to mention that humans driving with cameras only is absolutely pathetic. The amount of accidents that occur that are completely avoidable doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that all my car needs to be safe and get me to my destination is a couple cameras.

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