611–620 of 694 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand this take. For me creativity and thinking is the whole purpose of life.
Then you clearly don't understand my take.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legislators elected for that policy, I suppose.
Friend, they choose our legislators. They control the political process. They own the mass media and the social media companies. Denial isn’t a strategy.
I know many democracies around the world are in critical failure modes at the moment (particularly in the USA). But there is still hope. With enough pressure democracy can be reformed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then who pays for it?
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.
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…
Chess is a good example. When chess engines started becoming really good, some people worried that competitive chess would die. Today, grandmasters stand no chance against a smartphone, and yet, chess popularity is at an all time high.
Chess is an unusually poor example. When computers took over Chess, we didn't have something stupid like 30% of employment relying on playing Chess to eat and pay rent.
The analogy only makes sense if you're already convinced that we won't lose the majority of white-collar work to computers.
To those who are not convinced that we are looking at making 50% of the workforce redundant, Chess is an analogy that makes no sense.
It only makes sense if you're already a true believer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magic or no, ultimately "AI" leads to labour displacement and it's just a continuation of the much broader trend of automation driven by computers. Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living and in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level. It was always going to be met with violence once it became more than a curiosity for tinkerers.
>Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living The two biggest labor displacements in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, both of which resulted in enormous gains in human living standards. Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.
The mass evictions of the Scottish Highlands [1] in which peasants were driven at the point of bayonets to the lowland city slums to make way for the British government to transform Scotland into a mass sheep/wool production monoculture economy.
The use of kidnapped Africans as slaves in the Americas was also an example of a labor displacement - by introducing a source of mass human labor with absolutely no human rights - to scale the agricultural commodity economy (cotton, tobacco, sugar), which resulted in horrendous living standards for the enslaved, and an erosion for the poor paid peasants whose labor they replaced. Slavery was a very "efficient" way to use labor.
Maybe it’s my own lived experience coloring my perspective, but man the author feels like a centrist sitting upon an imagined moral high ground. “Violence is bad but inevitable” is the kind of milquetoast non-committal position one takes when they have nothing else to contribute to the discussion at hand. My own take goes that one step further, as I said in a prior comment rebutting Altman’s whinging blog post: > You…
Bank run, general strike.
It's a matter of these people realizing that their choice is not between avoiding and not avoiding being driven under the AI wheel/credit crunch wheel that the AI wheel is hiding. It's whether they want to leave their jobs now, willingly, in an act that builds leverage for the negotiations over how the next epoch of human existence will look - or if they want to do it in a few months-to-years, unwillingly, with zero leverage. It's your 3 Year Trap in action.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you clearly don't understand my take.
I understood you well enough. I disagree with the idea that something that has been replaced or obsoleted does not warrant survival in general. And human creativity in particular.
I have said repeatedly that when AI eliminates the need for human creativity and work, the only thing left as the natural domain of humans will be bloodshed. The fact that we're using AI killer robots to wipe each other out in droves doesn't bode well for that future does it...
> I have said repeatedly that when AI eliminates the need for human creativity and work Yeah, this is not happening anytime soon. Have you even looked at AI-generated code or text? AI is just a dumb parrot, it's no match for human effort and creativity even in these "easy" domains. The business case for AI generation is just being able to generate huge amounts of unusable slop for next to nothing. For skilled workers…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magic or no, ultimately "AI" leads to labour displacement and it's just a continuation of the much broader trend of automation driven by computers. Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living and in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level. It was always going to be met with violence once it became more than a curiosity for tinkerers.
>Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living The two biggest labor displacements in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, both of which resulted in enormous gains in human living standards. Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.
For a very specific example: the cotton gin likely increased the demand for slave labor in the American South, leading to harsher conditions for slaves, increased acrimony between slaveholders and abolitionists, and eventually the Civil War (the decimation of the Southern economy, the pivot of Northern society to a war footing w/ associated disruptions, and 600,000 Americans dead).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole". I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".
Then who pays for it?