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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#731

Post by aphyr »

green_wheel wrote: post #400

I wonder if the author would advocate for us to stop driving cars as well.

I would! I grew up in a low-density suburb near Portland, then lived in small-town Minnesota, Madison, SF, Chicago, and Cincinnati. I didn't own a car until my 30s, and I currently drive about once a month---camping, Costco, lumber, that sort of thing. Pretty much all my day-to-day travel is and has been by bicycle (now an e-bike), foot, train, or bus.

Situations vary, obviously! I'm no stranger to rural life, I wound up in a car-dependent suburb with terrible bus service for a bit, and my partner is in the trades. Private vehicles are sensible and essential answers to lots of problems.

But as the Netherlands illustrates, it's not all-or-nothing: reductions in car utilization and car infrastructure have real benefits. Broadly speaking I think we can and should disincentivize private car use, increase public transit frequency, and build networks of protected infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-car means of getting around.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#732

Post by the_af »

munksbeer wrote: post #673
the_af wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we reach this post scarcity society A full automation society, where the implied post scarcity is not necessarily for everyone. Maybe it needs most of the population not to exist in order for the few to enjoy the lack of scarcity. Resources aren't infinite, but greed is. I mean, resources and wealth could be far better distributed right now , no need for AI, yet most times this is attempted the wealthy fight too…

> It sounds like a failure of imagination. I see it as the opposite. Doomerism is the easy path. It takes no imagination to repeat doomer memes and sci-fi dystopian tropes, without articulating exactly how we get there. I think what is far more likely is that as these tools proliferate, we continue on the path we've always done, some discomfort, probably negatively impacting some, but ultimately a better life when me…

> Doomerism is the easy path. It takes no imagination to repeat doomer memes and sci-fi dystopian tropes, without articulating exactly how we get there.

It's not "doomerism" because there is a call to action, impractical as it may seem. TFA is stating one possible, if flawed course of action. There may be others. Doomerism just cries "the comet is coming, end your lives now!". Also, if you're honest, there is some articulation of how this may come to be, it's just that nobody is an oracle and the particulars are shifting.

> I don't see a way the billionaires take all power away from 99.999% of the rest of humanity without literally murdering them. And why would they want to murder them?

They don't need to actively murder them, they just need to restrict access to resources required for living (maybe made worse by the climate crisis) and this would alone cull the population "naturally".

Imagine a world of full, total automation of everything. The rich always needed the less rich to work for them, make things for them, pick up raw materials for them, take care of them, even be their security forces. But all of this would be unneeded with an inexhaustible force of robot labor [1]. This is one of my worries if they ever go all-in with the automation of the military... who will be there to have a crisis of conscience if given immoral orders? We're not there yet, but this is something to ponder.

> It's much easier to just let everyone benefit.

There are things right now that would be easy to do that do not get done. And in any case, I don't think anybody is arguing about what would be easier? Also, before you say it: who cares if it's self-destructive? There's a current subset of rich people who don't care if we're destroying the planet, presumably they don't care that much about their children or their children's children. Or maybe they hand wave it away, "someone, somehow, will take care of this problem in the future".

----

[1] a funny tangent, obligatory Bob the Angry Flower: https://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#733

Post by dalyons »

minajevs wrote: post #678
dalyons wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll still lose their job to AI, whether they’re paying attention or not.

I am not saying you are wrong, just that your comment reads as "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you".

Haha. I meant it as more like… people who say “I don’t pay attention to politics at all it never actually affects me”. Well, that’s true until it suddenly isn’t. You might get away with sticking your head in the sand, you might not, hard to say it’s a wiser choice.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#734

Post by duskdozer »

kelzier wrote: post #15
miltonlost wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using claude but then refuse to do much cleaning up of what it spews. Im leaving that for the PR reviewers who love AI and going through slop. If they want slop, I'll give them the slop they want.

I thought the de facto policy was that the individual remains responsible in a team context.

That attitude is so last-month, get with the program!

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#735

Post by tim333 »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #304
Gooblebrai wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time Source of this claim?

E.P. Thompson, „The Making of the English Working Class“. It is admittedly a specific cherry picked point in time at which this was true, but useful to illustrate the issue.

I had a look out of curiosity. The book has:

>“In the summer of 1812 there were no fewer than 12,000 troops in the disturbed counties, a greater force than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsula.”

But for that year Wikipedia has

>Wellington's 48,500-man army... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salamanca

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#736

Post by balamatom »

somewhatgoated wrote: post #600
noosphr wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same way that numeracy skills were in the blast radius of the Colossus. People seriously underestimate how underpowered and tiny llms are for the tasks they need to solve. A trillion parameter model can't tell the difference between left and right. We will need to grow them millions to trillions of times before they are half as good as AI boosters claim they are. This isn't the end of thinking any more than th…

I don’t know about you but where I live only some rich people ride horses for fun sometimes; they are mostly irrelevant otherwise.

And where I live you can sometimes still see a horse-drawn cart on the roads. Albeit rarely - they are forbidden. 10 or 20 years ago it was more common. I rode one once a bunch of years ago, went with its owner to harvest construction materials from a collapsed building.

Plus, on the way here today, I passed over a favela-type assemblage I can only describe as festering. No offense meant to its inhabitants - they are more real human beings than any of us.

Point being, the future has been here for long enough. And, as the adage goes, it's not evenly distributed. I never made any money from being strong or being intelligent; my usefulness, like that of any "nerd", was rooted in knowledge arbitrage. Now that the psychopaths in charge have cognitive prosthetics, I expect to be culled.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#737

Post by prismatix »

munksbeer wrote: post #481
seer wrote: post #455

What the author is missing is that in his decision to limit the use of LLMs in his work, he omits the part where he “can”. E.g. he is resourceful and accomplished enough to be able to do the work he desires with no LLMs - but most people actually can’t. There are whole swaths of people software engineers that don’t write tests because “it slows them down” but they have never learned how to write testable code. And wh…

People learn what they need to learn to be successful (if they want to be successful). The newer generation of coders will learn exactly what it takes to be better than their peers, and that will still include building rock solid, highly performant software to beat the competitors, or they'll lose their jobs and someone better will do it. If they do it entirely using AI to code, and the end output is good enough, the…

Exactly this. People are so "doom and gloom" about the future with AI, but I think it's because they are subconsciously worried they can't keep up. I am not immune to it. I feel that dread every once in a while too.

But at the end of the day, does it really matter to most people how a car works? No. When it breaks, we still have professionals to fix it.

The same can be said about software. Does it actually matter how it gets built or what the code looks like, so long as it works and there are no security vulnerabilities? Not really. We will always need people who know how to debug/fix it, albeit that number might be smaller than it is today.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#740

Post by Eisenstein »

intended wrote: post #666
pjc50 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values. This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write tha…

> I hope. For solving all things complex, there must be a plan.

Have humans ever had a grand plan for society and succeeded in carrying it out such that the desired goal was reached? I'm not talking about something like the Marshall plan, which was a reaction to previous failed attempts and was created during an urgent need for such action, but a plan where a group of people figured out the best course of action, despite humanity existing in a different paradigm, and then enacted that plan and saw it come to fruit as they predicted?
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