Some people will point to their supposed crimes or immoral actions while in office, having to do with execution of their duties as president. Large countries tend to do many questionable things. But the current US administration is pretty unique in terms of its corruption, avoidance of accountability, authoritarian and fascist tendencies, etc.
It's not a useful contribution to the discussion to essentially claim that "they're all the same" without making some sort of case for it.
I’d find your argument would be more persuasive if you outlined what you believe Trump had done worse than the others — rather than argument-by-name-calling.
I've mostly been reading that since the Bush years. Definitely said against Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump. In fairness, I don't remember it about Clinton.
That you don't agree with a politician doesn't make him or her particularly worse than others.
As long as we wait for a godlike leader for rescue the end result is same as with Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Thiel, Epstein, Musk, ...
The godlikeness can come though in many forms, political (Trump), propaganda (Musk/Zuck7Thiel) or via extortion material and money like Epstein.
A good litmus test for a decision maker is the universal ethical principle mentioned in the article put into concrete and compare everything via the lens of "what if all eight billion of current humans and also the future generations would do this".
Right now nobody's daring to to this but as long as we start asking "who's afraid of the narcissist zillionaire" the world starts to make sense and the solution appears.
I realize the hyperbolic framing of the idea, but none-the-less I haven't been able to get it out of my head. This article feels like it's another piece of the same puzzle.
Diamonds are pretty worthless but expensive because they're scarce (putting aside industrial applications), water is extremely valuable but cheap.
No doubt there are some goods where the value is related to price, but these are probably mostly status related goods. e.g. to many buyers, the whole point in a Rolex is that it's expensive.
It's called utopia.
But my issue with AI hype is that it's not clear how it will lead to "everyone can do anything." Like how is it going to free up lands so everyone can afford a house with yard if they want?
If you want everyone to be able to afford a house with a yard within walking distance of downtown Palo Alto, there aren’t enough of them for everyone that wants to do that, and AI (and utopia) can’t change that. Proximity to others creates scarcity because of basic physical laws. This is why California is expensive.
This is something I always wondered about in Banks’ post-scarcity utopian Culture novels. How do they decide who gets to live next door to the coolest/best restaurant or bar or social gathering place? Does Hub (the AI that runs the habitat, and notionally is the city) simply decide and adjudicate like a dictator or king?
Unfortunately, the labor theory of value is self-contradictory. If you invent a new machine that replaces human labor, it will clearly produce more value, yet human labour is reduced. So this follows that not all value can be attributed to human labor.
What this really breaks down is meritocracy. If you cannot unambiguously attribute "effort" of each individual (her labor) to produced "value", then such attribution cannot be used as a moral guidance anymore.
So this breaks the right-wing idea that the different incomes are somehow deserved. But this is not new, it's just more pronounced with AI, because the last bastion of meritocracy, human intelligence ("I make more because I'm smarter"), is now falling.
1) I think it's the destruction of our value, as workers. Without an unthinkable change in society, we'll be discarded.
2) I think it will also destroy the unrealized value of not-yet-created work, first by overwhelming everything with a firehouse mediocre slop, then by disincentivizing the development of human talent and skill (because it will be an easy button that removes the incentives to do that). AI will exceed humans primarily by making humans dumber, not by exceeding humans' present-day capabilities. Eventually creative output will settle at some crappy, derivative level without any peaks that rise above that.
The only people I see handwringing over AI slop replacing their jobs are people who produce things of quality on the level of AI slop. Nobody truly creative seems to feel this way.
> The only people I see handwringing over AI slop replacing their jobs are people who produce things of quality on the level of AI slop. Nobody truly creative seems to feel this way.
Have you ever worked for an American company? They almost always choose slop over quality. Why should an executive hire employ a skilled American software engineer, when he can fire him and hire three offshore engineers who don't really know what they're doing for half the price? Things won't blow up immediately, there's a chance they'll just limp along in a degraded state, and by then executive will be off somewhere else with a bonus in his pocket.
Also, how many people are "truly creative" and how does that compare to the number of people who have to eat?
> then it is a moral imperative that we stop employing human beings in those roles as it’s a terrible waste of a human life.
And what should they do then? Sit around jerking off under a bridge?
There's no "moral imperative" to cast people off into poverty. And that's what will happen: there will be no retraining, no effort to find roles for the displaced people. They'll just be discarded. That's a "terrible waste of a human life."
No, it’s not. This is where your concept fails. AI is a tool, like any other tool. It doesn’t provide unlimited anything, and, furthermore, it needs human inputs and direction to provide anything. “Go make me a profitable startup from scratch” is not a useful prompt.
Perhaps it's not how you use LLMs, but it is the promise of AI.
For the record, I make a distinction between LLMs (a current tool that we have today) and AI (a promise of some mystical all-powerful science-fiction entity).
There is nothing intelligent about what we have today, artificial or otherwise.
Not really. The value to a thirsty soul of water in the desert is as high as they value their own life (to some there is little) and have a currency of value to the seller. Still, once thirst is quenched the value to that soul drops nearer to zero.
For an optional good the value only rises to the point that there is excess asset in the inventories of those that would like to add the option.
I would suggest what you are looking for is that some scarcities are shifted by each new technology. Things like the sincere attention of others or more exclusive emotional attachments become relatively more scarce in a goods abundant existence. Earlier, insights on where to apply the tool and to where one should attend become more scarce.
Something you would have to accept if you believe your statement is that you would never value (i.e. need) water again if we could produce far more than we ever could use. Your body's need and use would not cease even if the economics might collapse.
Financializing everything can lead one into foolish conclusions.
I haven’t felt to bad about my creative works being fed into training models. Taken by itself, my creations are minuscule. But it’s very apparent when I look at AI as a whole, having taken from everyone in aggregate.
I feel that.
Since before ai all my tiny little works have been public domain and it tickles me pink when i see something of mine out in the wild.
Journey before destination.
With that said though, the people who press the button and fashion themselves creatives piss me off. Heck anyone who has more than a passing interest in gen ai art disappoints me. After all, what is interesting about printing the Mona Lisa compared to creating your own shitty version by hand?
Radio amateurs used to be a thing. Because playing with radios is fun, but also because this provided a way to hear things that otherwise could not be heard.
It's been the exact opposite for me. Coding assistance is a great boon towards productivity simply because otherwise I wouldn't work on any of my old ideas stashed in numerous note taking apps. It's way easier today to go from 0 to something like an MVP, and see if there's something there. If there isn't, not much is lost. But without these tools it would be 0 all across the board.
All of this stuff is clearly a highly cherry-picked gymnastic exercise to justify a pre-existing position. Classic Elephant and Rider stuff.
It’s the same as support for the snail darter. Same as the story about how groups shouldn’t go out during COVID but BLM protests are fine. And if by some incredible chance it had been the FSF or Brewster Kahle who had produced GPT then you guys would be talking about how information should be unchained because creative work belongs to all Man.
Couching this blatantly motivated reasoning by quoting past philosophers is just such middle-brow woe-is-me whining. Take one look at yourselves in an honest sense. Do you have any principles or will you slave them all to your outcomes?
And now I must repeat the litany lest one assume that my opposition to this kind of balderdash be construed as some kind of political tribalism:
* I don’t think we should destroy endangered species
* I think COVID wasn’t a hoax and does spread in large groups
* I think people have a right to protest if they are discriminated against and that includes the black people at BLM
* I love the Internet Archive and have donated to them
i don't think you have a good grasp of why that it was ok for outdoor protests to happen but people should not go out into crowded buildings. the chance of you getting sick from a protest is much less than the chance of you getting sick from going to an indoor gathering at say a club. getting sick is not a binary on or off. it's exposure time and magnitude vs. your immune system's defenses.
At the same time, if someone designs a robot that prints out copyright-infringing material out of the blue, then they are infringing copyright every time it does so.
I don’t subscribe to this basic idea. Copyrights are a legal fiction designed to prop up an industry. Somehow from that we went to the idea that creative work output is property. It isn’t. It’s a service. This is why “works made for hire” is a thing.
This is the same reason that reasonable people don’t believe that fanfic authors should be jailed.
Likewise, I've felt like the meritocracy story that the author sets up as the "moral foundation" has heavily attenuated in this century. It's still used as the justification in America (I'm rich because I deserve it, you're not rich because you didn't work as hard/smart as me) but it feels like that story is wearing thin. Or that the relative proportion of the luck / ovarian lottery aspect has become so much larger than the skill+hard work aspect.
The trend of the rich getting richer, of them using their power to manipulate the system to further advantage them and theirs at the expense of everyone else, existed before AI burst into the public in '20-21. Maybe, like the fake media, it will finally be the kick people need to let go of the meritocracy trap* and realize we need a change.
* I like the notion of meritocracy, it just seems like America has moved from aiming for that, to using the story of it as an excuse to or opiate for the masses.
No one steals from them.
So far AI companies were settling by throwing VC cash at it so the vocal ones that do have IP will be paid off.
Corporations are just so large and powerful, that people feel hopeless. Byt we could still get together and enact legislation which will override them. Othing is impossible, it just takes some imagination and organisation.
Like Chomsky once said, if the peasants of Haiti could organise and overthrow their government and create a functioning democracy, then surely we can too, with far more advantages.
There are much much bigger forces that impact society in the way the author describes.
The premise is that AI does not allow to do this any more, which is completely false. It may not allow to do it in the same way, so its true that some jobs may disappear, but others will be created.
The article is too alarmist by someone who has drank all of the corporate hype. AI is not AGI. AI is an automation tool, like any other that we have invented before. The cool thing is that now we can use natural language as a programming language which was not possible before. If you treat AI as something that can thin k, you will fail again and again. If you treat it as an automation tool, that cannot think you will get all of the benefits.
Here i am talking about work. Of course AI has introduced a new scale of AI slop, and that has other psycological impacts on society.
AI is exposing the myths of talent and erasing differences between humans making them all a uniform array of subjects. However this erasure comes at the cost of return to monarchy style of economic model, where wealth would be moved from common population to the owners of AI or the neo-monarchies.
khafra•43m ago