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More Everything Forever

nytimes.com

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Re: More Everything Forever

#51

Post by Hemospectrum »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #17
oceanplexian wrote: post #12

> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us. While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the tr…

I don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.

Even if we solve poverty, we can always turn right around and un-solve poverty. Something like this has happened in quite recent memory with a whole lot of other "solved" problems. Luckily, we can come back from that failure and solve those problems all over again, as long as we don't go extinct.

Re: More Everything Forever

#52

Post by amarcheschi »

elefanten wrote: post #50
amarcheschi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I had someone here tell me timnit gebru didn't contribute to hard science She has a PhD in electrical engineering and has worked at Google before researching on Ai with a more philosophical approach

Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"... She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique. It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the…

Oh, and I don't necessarily agree with all what she says, I don't want to know what happens when someone which 100% agrees with her enters the room

Re: More Everything Forever

#53

Post by gusmally »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #33
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars have killed millions of people. Add to that the consequences of electricity, industrialization, urbanization, and even capitalism itself. But billions and billions of people are not only better off -- living lives of outrageous luxury when measured against recent history -- but they wouldn't have existed at all. Everything good comes with tradeoffs. AI will likely also kill millions but will create and support a…

That's one vision of how things play out. But I do think it's possible that AI ends up killing every last person, in which case I think "everything good comes with tradeoffs" is a bit too much of an understatement.

Even if AI doesn't kill every last person, I think it will almost certainly increase the wealth gap. I agree that the tradeoffs will most likely not be worth it.

Re: More Everything Forever

#55

Post by snozolli »

bko wrote: post #20

This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt. I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%…

What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%?

IMO, the harm is that the weirdo billionaire who wants to do this has said that he needs a trillion dollars to accomplish it and subsequently embedded himself within an incompetent, would-be-authoritarian regime.

I want humanity to colonize Mars and space. I don't want it happening at the whim of a madman whose only concern is going down in history as the man who made it possible at any cost to society.

Re: More Everything Forever

#56

Post by Henchman21 »

ferguess_k wrote: post #38
bko wrote: post #20

This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt. I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%…

Because a lot of these stuffs like longevity and advanced AI are going to break the human society? I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal. With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.

The media has taken an orchestrated turn to the right. The people just fall in lockstep behind because that is what they’re used to doing.

The public is and has always been played like a fiddle.

Re: More Everything Forever

#57

Post by cgriswald »

bee_rider wrote: post #34

Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man. Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so,…

You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical.

I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.

Re: More Everything Forever

#58

Post by ericmcer »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #17
oceanplexian wrote: post #12

> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us. While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the tr…

I don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.

It depends on how you answer the question "why are we here?"

Is the goal is to create an earthly utopia with minimum suffering and maximum happiness? Is it aggressive progress so that we can't be wiped out by a random cosmic event? Or should we be eschewing all of that and living harmoniously with nature and dying spiritually content when our time is up?

There is also the argument that if we had focused on solving poverty 150 years ago instead of prioritizing rapid industrialization and economic growth more people would be in poverty today. A 50 year period of scarcity would completely erase all progress we have made towards lifting people out of poverty, regardless of how equitably we distributed the scarce goods.

Re: More Everything Forever

#59

Post by elefanten »

f1yght wrote: post #32
bko wrote: post #20

This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt. I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%…

I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could…

Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.

Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.

So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?

Re: More Everything Forever

#60

Post by moolcool »

iNic wrote: post #21

It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent. That is what technology is! I don't think we'll have a colony on mars anytime soon, but AI is obviously coming and will obviously be extremely disrupting (for better or for worse)

> It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent

I would dispute the relative significance or meaning of those changes though. We can build dams and tall buildings. We can cure diseases and develop elaborate communications infrastructure.

I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.

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