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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#621

Post by jimbokun »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #435
UncleMeat wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops. Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create…

If you want another side data point, most people I know both in Japan and Canada use some sort of an AI as a replacement for any kind of query. Almost nobody in my circles are in tech or tech-adjacent circles. So yeah, it’s just everyone collectively devaluing human interaction.

A more sophisticated replacement for search engines seems like one of the more positive use cases for chatbots to me.

What am I missing?

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#622

Post by jimbokun »

cryptonector wrote: post #447
UncleMeat wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops. Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create…

> I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity [...] Who do they think will make their ventures profitable? Who do they think will take their dollars and provide goods and services in exchange? If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.

They will own the robots that can make whatever they need or want.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#623

Post by jimbokun »

cryptonector wrote: post #472
palmotea wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing. I don't think that's right. The owners will still own everything . If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners." There's an old Isaac Asimov book with something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_uni…

What would they get from the plebs? Suppose we went through The Phools and so the plebs were exterminated, then what? Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics, but only for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner", then.

That could be an incredibly dark Star Trek prequel/parody.

That the Earth of Star Trek is populated by only the descendants of the capital holders. Everyone else was directly or indirectly exterminated.

Then they created an egalitarian tech utopia for themselves.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#624

Post by jimbokun »

fooblaster wrote: post #587
martin82 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

why exactly do you need a deity to tell you to love your fellow man? Do you need god in your life to want to love your children? I think this is not quite right. I don't expect that the desire to create these tools independent of outcome in the valley is simply about greed , and for companies like anthropic, the ability to use AGI fear as a means to drive investment in themselves from VC class that lives the idea of…

Just an empirical observation.

Decoupled from the social systems built by organized religion, our “elites” are taking society to a horrific place.

Could you build up traditions and social structures over time without any deity that would withstand the hedonism and nihilism driving modern culture? Perhaps. But it would require time measured in generations we don’t have.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#625

Post by jimbokun »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #599
DeusExMachina wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why exactly do you need a deity to tell you to love your fellow man? Because that is not a given, as shown by the entirety of human history. Without God, the only arguments for love, or what is right, is just what people think/feel/agree on at a certain time and place, which has a lot of variations and is definitely not universal. > Do you need god in your life to want to love your children? Most people don't need…

Are we completely ignoring the tonnes of awful things people have done in the name of their god? Belief in a higher power doesn't automatically make you good/bad. The same is true of the inverse. >Without God, the only arguments for love, or what is right, is just what people think/feel/agree on at a certain time and place, which has a lot of variations and is definitely not universal. Lets ignore that laws exist for…

If you are serious about these questions, read Dominion by Tom Holland. He makes a very long and thorough historical case that Christianity has contributed more good than bad over the centuries. (I don’t know what comparable works are for other religions.)

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#627

Post by jimbokun »

lawn wrote: post #600
martin82 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Not at all. You can have morality without religion. Religion arguably makes it worse too.

At the very least , it takes generations to build up shared traditions and values across a society. If you want an atheistic version of that, you would need to start now and it’s going to take a long time to build.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#628

Post by jimbokun »

stuaxo wrote: post #590
martin82 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We don't need religion for that, humanism exists a way of living for instance. I don't think (most) people treat science "as a religion". Some tech leaders seem to have swap Ayn Rand (who if you look at the early days definitely acted like a cult leader), to this AI doomer cult, and as a result seem to be acting terribly. Religion was much wider spread in the 1800s, but that didn't stop industrialists acting terribly…

Humanism doesn’t have the kinds of social systems and traditions that people need to have shared values and morality.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#629

Post by jimbokun »

bambax wrote: post #377
JohnMakin wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you’re realizing that the OP understands this, and that in this analogy, the horses are human beings

In this analogy, horses are jobs, not humans; you could argue there's not much of a difference between the two, because people without jobs will starve, etc., but still, they're not the same.

What happened to the horses after they lost their jobs?

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#630

Post by jimbokun »

glenstein wrote: post #432
pas wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

population projections they already predict that prosperity reduces population and even if AI becomes good enough to replace most humans the economic surplus does not disappear it's a coordination problem in many places on Earth social safety nets are pretty robust, and if AI helps to reduce cost of providing basic services then it won't be a problem to expand those safety nets ... there's already a pretty serious an…

I think the concerns with UBI are (1) it takes away the leverage of a labor force to organize and strike for better benefits or economic conditions, and (2) following the block grant model, can be a trojan horse "benefit" that sets the stage for effectively deleting systems of welfare support that have been historically resilient due to institutional support and being strongly identified with specific constituencies.…

But if you have true UBI you don’t need the rest.
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