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I wish GPT4 had never happened

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Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#951

Post by simonh »

arrosenberg wrote: post #916
simonh wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are loads of other economic systems. Feudalism, oligarchy, tribal pastoralism, you name it. I was mainly thinking in terms of critiquing the idea that value is created by labour, since HyperSane mentioned it twice in comments. It happens that the labour theory of value in central to Marx but it’s not exclusive to him. Adam Smith indulged a lesser form of it in one of his uncharacteristic slip ups in economic th…

Capitalism is responsible for chattel slavery in the Americas, the genocide of untold native populations in Asia, Africa, Ireland, the South Pacific and the Americas; famines and environmental destruction around the world; destroyed the stability of most of Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America; and it has rewarded bad behavior like pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere that we have irreversibly alt…

Are you aware of the utterly catastrophic environmental devastation caused by the Soviet Union, and to this day by Chinese state industries? This is the problem with undemocratic centrally planned systems, with state controlled media. Complete lack of accountability.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#952

Post by tmdroid001 »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #339
netbioserror wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a profoundly naive opinion. Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value. Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete. Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair. I've been through some of that befo…

> Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value You think people get meaning and fulfilment from flipping burgers at McDonalds ? Talk about naive. Frankly, it's quite elitist to assume that a majority of people are performing meaningful and fulfilling jobs, a lot of people do jobs they absolutely hate. > Not working is a s…

If no people like doing that, than who will do it? Who will do the hard or nasty jobs that nobody likes to do? Where are you going to eat your next McDonald's burger? Cuz all restaurants will be closed cuz nobody really likes doing that full time but it pays the bills.

There are just so many jobs that need to be done and there's nobody that likes them. Who would pick the garbage up? Who would unclog the sewer? Who would drill for petrol or mine for coal? If I got my regular salary without needing to do anything, then I wouldn't go into any of these jobs for sure. Would you?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#953

Post by Herval_freire »

blibble wrote: post #950
Herval_freire wrote: post #943

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean..? the status quo is like this already. People choose the most competitive product so if a machine is the better performer then payment is made towards purchasing and maintaining a machine instead of paying a worker. The current electorate 100 percent supports this and considers this fair. You actually have to create a new nation state if you don't want this.

> People choose the most competitive product so if a machine is the better performer then payment is made towards purchasing and maintaining a machine instead of paying a worker. how do you explain the significant market for hand made products? regardless, this wasn't my point my point was the electorate aren't going to support e.g. Microsoft replacing every single worker in the US with a piece of code regardless of…

>how do you explain the significant market for hand made products?

Because a segment of people think the hand made product is superior. So they purchase it. I never made the claim that machine made is superior to hand made. I made the claim that If machine made was superior then people won't employ others to make hand made things.

For a vast swath of products, machine made is often more superior. With AI, that swath becomes even larger.

>my point was the electorate aren't going to support e.g. Microsoft replacing every single worker in the US with a piece of code

The electorate is not clear about this. Morally it's a strange situation because free trade is a liberty that's part of the American Dream. If a machine can automate all jobs then it's a persons god given right to use that machine rather then pay someone to do the work. The implications of AI nor the morality of the change AI will bring is so muddy it can bring a democratic electorate into a deadlock via conflicts of interest and slow decision making.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#954

Post by za3faran »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #29

The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .

According to whom is the point of life is to enjoy it? There are different cultures and societies in the world. According to my faith and traditions, the point of life is to worship God. Of course we still strive to avoid suffering and to make things nice and appealing and safe and and, but we know that at the end of the day, we are all being tested and it can all be taken away from us at any moment, no matter how much we achieve.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#955

Post by jacquesm »

lm28469 wrote: post #821
pixl97 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we built the first airplane it could barely carry a single person and didn't go far... We are just barely touching digital general intelligence, and we're not even using API enabled versions that use tooling. And that's what we have today. Tell me, what is AI going to do tomorrow? >If you're worried about GPT taking over your job you just show your own lack of knowledge and experience. Oh, I'm glad you popped ou…

> When we built the first airplane it could barely carry a single person and didn't go far Yet here we are still flying in more or less the same.hsit we flew in 70 years ago (Boeing 707) No space plane, no faster than sound travel, &c.

But not because we can't. Mostly because the numbers don't work out. But if we really wanted to those are pretty much done.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#956

Post by zamnos »

simonh wrote: post #809
zamnos wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that USA's brand of late-stage capitalism is even considered capitalism is an even more damning indictment of our education system. Somewhere between Feudalism and Karl Marx, Adam Smith is spinning in his grave. How much we don't have capitalism and are living, globally, under an oligopoly, replete with robber barons in tech clothes; one can only laugh at. The amount of misery under "capitalism" says there's…

I’m open to suggestions, at the end of the day it’s what works that matters, it’s just that every other system ever tried is minimum an order of magnitude worse. I’m not particularly a fan of the ‘red in tooth and claw’ brand of capitalism in the US. It’s a bit raw for me, but undeniably very dynamic. Meanwhile in my lifetime capitalism has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into solidly middle…

The problems with the Chinese brand of capitalism and the USA brand of capitalism is that both are called capitalism and the general public hasn't developed a better language for debating the nuances of each. If anyone dare say that the USA brand of capitalism is imperfect, they're automatically assumed to be a communist (I'm not even kidding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35497892), which totally misses all nuance.

The claim that it's capitalism that has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is a common one, but it's our technology that's advanced. If we were still living under feudalism and the industrial revolution and the Internet happened, hundreds of millions of lives would still have transformed. Thanks to John Deere and Monsanto and the like, billions of lives have been raised up from subsistence farming to where we are today. There's the argument that we wouldn't have this technology without capitalism, and the length of the Egyptian and Roman empires without the Internet lend credence to this possibility, but it's also impossible to deny that we've never and can't test whether a system other than capitalism wouldn't also lift millions out of poverty, given the same advancements in technology.

It turns out that centralized, long-term planning is necessary for certain advancements. Eisenhower's US highway system, for example. Or the Manhattan project. Yes, the market is great for a large number of things. One of my most favorite is the food bank story, where they created their own internal market, with credits, and used that to more efficiently organize actors and allocate resources *.

I'm also just done pretending that USA's brand of capitalism is perfect, or that we have a free market in the first place in places where we don't (eg pharmaceuticals) but still try to run it in a capitalistic way, and then get surprised when someone like Martin Shkreli plays the game according to the rules, buys a company with a monopoly on a product, and then raises prices when that's just the rules we've set up for ourselves. Yes he went to jail, but that wasn't because he raised prices on Daraprim, but because he was also running a ponzi scheme and the attention made that finally catch up to him.

We're not going to get to a better system by upending what's been working well enough, but with smaller, more specific changes to the existing system to make it work better. Framing any changes to the system as a moral upheaval and equivalent to communism is the problem. We can have a better system. Yes, some of it involves sharing with others and caring for your fellow human. Some of those humans don't look like you and you may not like them. That's okay, you don't have to. There are people I don't like either. But what we have that works for some, also isn't working for others. When baby food is locked up because people are stealing it, if we assume it's mostly not being stolen and used for nefarious purposes, like cutting cocaine; if we assume people are stealing baby formula to feed babies, and that's criminal behavior according to the rules of our society; stepping back and looking at that from first principles, that all the rules of society and capitalism are for the benefit of humanity. If we really stop and think about that, something has gone wrong.

* https://theeconreview.com/2018/02/12/how-food-banks-used-mar....

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#957

Post by shagie »

breck wrote: post #846
adwn wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes: open source. Open source is not an economic system in the sense in which this term is generally used. > Open source has proved itself to be vastly superior to closed source development models. "Superior" by which metric?

> Open source is not an economic system in the sense in which this term is generally used. We should move to a society where we look at software engineers as we look at road builders. City workers build roads, the people use those roads. Likewise, engineers build software, the people use said software. Our current system of (c)opywrong is bizarre and unnatural. > "Superior" by which metric? Well, I'm responding to yo…

I'm assuming that you don't pay for a license for Sublime Text.

How do you propose that the authors of Sublime Text make a living?

Road projects are funded by the government at some level - taxes and municipal bonds. I'm not sure how that would work for software which has a potentially worldwide audience.

There's also the "what gets built" is determined by the government. So, office products get funded - but not games (unless you're fortunate enough to get a government grant https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2162800/view/3729584... ).

And do you want to run a government funded operating system and web browser?

I don't see a model where this works... unless you're thinking of toll roads as micro transactions and advertiser supported billboards while playing games.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#958

Post by camgunz »

kazinator wrote: post #925
tarsinge wrote: post #912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better distribution is through capital tax, not income tax. Taxing workers even more is the opposite of sharing productivity gains captured by shareholders. Are capital gains and dividends taxed at least at 70% in Sweden?

1. Salary is your company's money that becomes your money. 2. Capital tax is tax on your company's money. 3. Income tax is tax on your money. With either tax, the economic system that consists of you and your employer is being robbed. Speaking of which, if someone takes your groceries and runs, just before you have paid for them, that is shoplifting. If it's just after you paid, it's robbery. You might think you're b…

1. Companies only have money because of the work I and others do.

2. It doesn't follow that when companies have more money their workers get more. Evidence is: record profits concomitant with layoffs, corporate profits vs wages, etc etc.

3. Taxes fund a government that answers to me. Capital powers corporations that not only don't answer to me but likely want to exploit me.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#959

Post by kazinator »

camgunz wrote: post #958
kazinator wrote: post #925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Salary is your company's money that becomes your money. 2. Capital tax is tax on your company's money. 3. Income tax is tax on your money. With either tax, the economic system that consists of you and your employer is being robbed. Speaking of which, if someone takes your groceries and runs, just before you have paid for them, that is shoplifting. If it's just after you paid, it's robbery. You might think you're b…

1. Companies only have money because of the work I and others do. 2. It doesn't follow that when companies have more money their workers get more. Evidence is: record profits concomitant with layoffs, corporate profits vs wages, etc etc. 3. Taxes fund a government that answers to me. Capital powers corporations that not only don't answer to me but likely want to exploit me.

The government does not answer to you; it answers to corporations and the rich.

That's why taxes are instigated where they are.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#960

Post by goodluckchuck »

agentultra wrote: post #623
goodluckchuck wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is not an economic system, it is a description of fundamental economics. Countries can have a highly regulated form of capitalism where trade and ownership is strictly controlled… and they’re often called socialist or communist, or a laissez faire system. However, so long as people are using land, buildings structures, designing equipment… the laws of capitalism will apply.

Capitalism isn’t a fundamental law like the speed of light or thermodynamics. We can use other systems that suit our goals better. Even if it’s a better form of capitalism than what we’re dealing with now. This post-monetarist form of capitalism is killing people and this planet and enriching but a few. That’s not the kind of society most people want. A matter of time before there are enough have-nots and upheaval be…

Capitalism is a fundamental law.

It’s inexorably true that means of production control the outputs.

It’s unavoidable that whoever has power over production has power over those who rely on those outputs.

Unless you’re advocating for the destruction of factories, the razing of homes, etc. you’re in favor of capital. We’re just discussing who is going to control the capital.

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