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AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

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Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#561

Post by customguy »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #207
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate just how much we value human achievement. Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast…

> Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly. Big sports events are the…

> the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten"

No, that would be "Untenhaltung", which isn't an actual German word, but could be.

"unterhalten" in German can both mean to entertain (however, not as in "entertaining a notion") having a conversation, as well as "to maintain". It has several meanings, all of them positive.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#562

Post by _DeadFred_ »

jplusequalt wrote: post #463
DroneBetter wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well inflation is equivalent to a flat wealth tax that doesn't consider insoluble assets, and is entirely in the hands of the government that imposes the UBI. "cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not…

True, but again, the other points are more damning. We're talking about an increased federal budget in the hundreds of billions/trillions to support such a UBI. That will cause a massive increase in taxation on the people who can still find jobs. To make matters worst, the government in 10-15 years will likely be spending ~25% of it's budget on interest payments alone. Hiking the federal budget up even more sounds li…

You seem to think feeding the population is optional. The current form of government and personal asset accumulation is actually much more optional in the situation.

Look at Rome and what it had to do when the system shock of so many slaves disrupted labor. Wild that Roman patricians understood you have to...like...feed society, but modern right wing Americans don't.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#563

Post by UncleMeat »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #534
fireflash38 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judge people by actions not what they say. You are arguing the opposite, that we should judge by what they say and not what they do?

The problem is that people have a million stories to explain the observed actions, most of those stories are bullshit, and people repeating them know fuck all about the decision-space in which these actions were chosen and taken.

Hm. I guess we can't possibly judge the guy who threw the molotov cocktail. He could have been clearing a wasps nest.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#564

Post by fwipsy »

fwipsy wrote: post #366
gherkinnn wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The initial Spanish conquest of the Inca empire by 168! Spaniards was not a question of disease as much a war of succession the Incas fought amongst themselves that Pizarro knew to exploit. Throw in horses, steel, and gunpowder and you have a one-sided affair.

Actually this is another good counterexample! As I recall, Incas lost battles against the Spaniards where they had something like 100x the numbers. It's true that they were initially divided, but they quickly united against the Spanish--and it didn't really help. The technological advantage was insurmountable.

Turns out I misremembered. Incas never fully united, and even though Spaniards had a huge technological advantage in some battles, the war as a whole was more evenly matched. Technology, disease, and infighting ALL played a part in their victory.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#565

Post by card_zero »

runarberg wrote: post #543
card_zero wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh-huh. It brings clarity to say you'd be happy to have the wealth destroyed. These are two different concepts, and the second one (about redistribution) always muddles these conversations. 1. Billionaires shouldn't wield lots of wealth, because it's scary. Sticking to that concept makes the discussion a lot clearer. Never mind concept 2, it's haunted by the futile spirit of Marx and he's throwing crockery around.

Personally I am a fan of logistical taxation, where the mean income (including capital gains) pays 50% in tax and every standard deviation σ above (or below) pays extra (or less) according to 1 / (1 + e^-σ). What will happen with this taxation is that if everybody makes the same income, then everybody pays 50% in tax. If some rich dude is making a lot more money then everybody else, they will lower the tax for everyb…

Suppose it's 1999, and I'm planning to expand my online bookstore into a worldwide network of distribution centers and logistics, that can deliver anything at all to anybody, very quickly, though a unified web interface. How can I carry out this major business enterprise without getting very poor?

I guess the board would have to vote to keep my income at the optimum level, or just below, to prevent me from jumping ship to run a competing company that offers to pay less.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#566

Post by _DeadFred_ »

UltraSane wrote: post #559
TeMPOraL wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in the opposite way to what you think. Do the math, there's billions of people consuming the overly cheap, massively subsidized goods and services parent listed; there's only so many billionaires and they have only so many billions, and most of it is just fake bullshit accounting paper-shuffling anyway.

I have no idea what you are trying to say. Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion

And that is just the public list. We all know of people with family fortunes that don't show up on any of the public lists.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#567

Post by logicchains »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #396
estimator7292 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone . That includes the small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth. Everyone needs to contribute to the wellbeing of society as a whole and nobody is exempt.

I'd like to emphasize that the above should be immediately obvious. The fact that it's not does not bode well for humanity's future. Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong go…

>Billionaires simply _should not exist_. T

If American billionaires couldn't exist then America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe, the entire tech industry wouldn't exist, and it'd be entirely at the mercy of China. Because nobody's going to start a business in a country that violently confiscates their wealth just for being successful. The envy of people like yourself is a deep moral illness that destroys civilizations if left unchecked.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#568

Post by Lerc »

fireflash38 wrote: post #515
Lerc wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, but then what? Do you judge what they say as if their perspective is the same as yours, and then conclude from that context that what they suggest could only come from an evil person. That seems to be what a lot of people do. What if they actually think what they are suggesting is the best thing for the world? How can you tell what is in their minds? Alternately you could criticise their arguments instead of…

Judge people by actions not what they say. You are arguing the opposite, that we should judge by what they say and not what they do?

Judge their actions, consider what they say as given in good faith and praise or criticize.

To judge the people is to pretend you know why they did or said something.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#569

Post by elevatortrim »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #362
estimator7292 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone . That includes the small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth. Everyone needs to contribute to the wellbeing of society as a whole and nobody is exempt.

Good luck taking away the detached single family homes, pickup trucks, SUVs, commercial flights, out of season fruits/vegetables, and imported manufactured goods. The people that expect those things are the “ small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth”, and there are quite a few of them (probably 1B+ worldwide).

Is what you say really controversial?

Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.

Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.

As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.

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