Is such certainty warranted? I don’t think so; it strains credibility.

I’m very concerned about many future scenarios. But I admit the necessity of probabilistic assessments.

As long as there is money to be made or power to be gained, any technology will be used to get it, especially if the negative effects are externalities that the technology developers and users are not liable for.

When reading the article, the author makes it very clear that AI can cut both ways. See the intro, you may have overlooked it.

Your looking at it from a narrow perspective.

There are millions of middle class households living pretty comfortable lives in Africa, India, China, ASEAN, and Central Asia that were living hand-to-mouth 20 years ago.

And I don’t mean middle class by developing country standards, I mean middle class by London, UK, standards.

So it pretty much is a ‘utopia’ for them, assuming they can keep it.

Of course that’s cold comfort for households in London regressing to the global average, but that’s the inherent nature of rising above and falling towards averages.

Wage increases have been lagging productivity increases for about 60 years.[1]

For the past 35 years or so, automation seems to have driven wage inequality, and AI is headed down the same path.[2,3]

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

[2] https://news.mit.edu/2020/study-inks-automation-inequality-0...

[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/19/1049378/ai-inequ...

> We get SO much more for our monthly paycheck today

Many goods are cheaper, and electronics are vastly better, but housing, health care, and higher education costs have outpaced inflation for decades.

You are ignoring the poorest half the planet, how long does a Bengladeshi woman has to work to buy a washing machine? How many of them even will ever own one? And who made the washing machine you own? Was it made in your country? Or in China?

We get more material goods, to be sure. But do we get more satisfaction out of our lives? More happiness? More joy?

You are right, but the average person is less happy than in 1970.

I think this is an important distinction. Yes, humans have some inbuilt weaknesses and proclivities, but humans are not required to live in or develop systems in which those weaknesses and proclivities are constantly exploited for the benefit/power of a few others. Throughout human history, there have been practices of contemplation, recognition of interdependence, and ways of increasing our capacity for compassion and thoughful response. We are currently in a biological runaway state with extraction, but it's not the only way humans have of behaving.

Sure. But why do you think changing human nurture is any easier than changing human nature? I suspect that as your set of humans in consideration tends to include the set of all humans, the gap between changeability of human nature vs changeability of human nurture reduces to zero.

Perhaps you are implying that we sign up for a global (truly global, not global by the standards of Western journalists) campaign of complete and irrevocable reform in our behavior, beliefs and knowledge. At the very least, this implies simply killing off a huge number of human beings who for whatever reason stand in the way. This is not (just) a hypothesis -- some versions of this have been tried and tested. *

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

> I think when we frame it as human _nature_, then yes, _we_ look like the problem.

But what if we frame it as human _culture_? Then _we_ aren't the problem, but rather our _behaviors/beliefs/knowledge/etc_ are.

If we focus on the former, we might just be essentially screwed. If we focus on the latter, we might be able to change things that seem like nature but might be more nurture.

Maybe that's a better framing: the base problem is human nurture?

This is about the same as saying that leaders can get better outcomes by surrounding themselves with yes-men.

Just because asserting a different set of facts makes the predicted outcomes more desirable, doesn't mean that those alternate facts are better for making predictions with. What matters is how congruent they are to reality.

I did not argue that cogently.

At each "node" of the industrial revolution, lots of workers were displaced. (weavers, scriveners, printers, car mechanics). Those workers were highly paid because they were highly skilled.

Productivity made things cheaper to make, because it removed the expensive labour required to make it.

That means less well paid jobs with controlled hours. This leads to poorly paid jobs with high competition and poor hours.

Yes new highly paid jobs were created, but not for the people who were dispossessed by the previous "node".

> If machines get so productive that we don't need to work, everyone losing their jobs isn't a long-term problem

who is going to pay for them? not the people who are making the profits.

I think KaiserPro is saying authentic human connection doesn't "pay the bills", so to speak. If AI is "about the unreal" as you say, what if it makes everything you care about unreal?

“Meanwhile, the purge of diverse, locally practiced, traditional wisdom about how to get by in un-modern environments steals the species of its essential fallback strategy“

While potentially true, that same wisdom was developed in a world that itself no longer exists. Review accounts of natural wildlife and ecological bounty from even 100 years ago, and it’s clear how degraded our natural world has become in such a very short time.

> Global homogenization around elaborate technologies -- whether mechanical, digital, social, political or otherwise -- sets us up in a very "all or nothing" existential space, where ruin, when it eventually arrives, is just as global.

What is the minimum population size needed in order to have, say, computer chips? Or even a ball-point pen? I'd imagine those are a bit higher that what's needed to have pencils, which I've heard is enough that someone wrote a book about it.

> Meanwhile, the purge of diverse, locally practiced, traditional wisdom about how to get by in un-modern environments steals the species of its essential fallback strategy.

Is it really a "purge" if individuals are just not choosing to waste time learning things they have no use for?

How exactly does this show up in history? When did we meet something smarter than us, and what did we do that was different than we were doing to less-smart things at the time?

You neatly sum up his world view. He thought that Airmen were the pinnacle of civility. He didn't want a fight using planes, because that would be unsporting.

> And I’m not sure what you are referring to about Lindbergh

Well, he thought that he jews were pushing for WWII.

https://alba-valb.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Lindbergh_1... He also wanted to maintain friendly relations with Goering.

For the first half of that sentence, portable?

I'm not sure what the argument here is, Operating systems are now sentient an ethereal?

You could make the same argument for books for that matter, I guess they do exist in a form that is unbounded by the physical books that they reside in, they live in the minds of people. Whatever.

And the fact that they can be copied for "no effort" is first wrong, as copying would require energy, which is the other aspect of corporeality, you need not just matter but energy for the software to exist and express itself in the world.

What are we even debating? Have we lost our minds?

What is mind? Doesn't matter. What is matter? Never mind

Hard? sure. Impossible? No

This is a non-trivial error. Let's not dive into the geopolitics of kill switches and decentralized systems when we are discussing trivial mistakes. AI, like any software, is not an ethereal being, like us it is limited by our mortal coils.

This is true for extant systems, if anyone, layman or PHD were to say that TikTok or facebook, wechat or bitcoin or ethereum, USD tether has no physicial embodiment, whether for recreational discussion, or whether in court, or in a professional capacity. The answer needs to be that they are wrong, clear and simple.

I didn't say it was bs. I was alluding to the timing of this essay being published but, clearly, I didn't articulate it in my message well. I also don't think everything he says is bs. Some of it I find a bit naive -- but maybe that's ok -- some other things seem a bit like sci-fi, but who are we to say this is impossible? I'm optimistic but also learnt in life that things improve, sometimes drastically given the right ingredients.

But did you beat the original Radahn pre-nerf?

Having used Mastodon, which prides itself on having no algorithms yet is also home to some of the most extreme ideologies, I doubt algorithms are as much to blame. I think it's mainly a humanity issue.

While I would normally agree with this sentiment, I think that the issue is that space travel is still really hard, even for a human. Probably a lot harder for data center sized creatures, even if they are broken up into a massively parallel robot hive. And the speed of light means that they won’t be able to work optimally if they are too spread out. (A problem for humans as well).

I suspect that we will reach the inflection point of ASI much sooner than we resolve the hard physics of meaningful space travel.

And I’m pretty sure that when we start to lose control of AGI, we’re very likely to try to use force to contain it.

Fundamentally, this is an event that will be guided by the same forces that have constrained every similar event in history, those of natural selection.

Technology at this stage is making humans less fit. Our birth rates are plummeting, and we are making our environment increasingly hostile to complex biological life.

There are very good and rational reasons that human activity should be curtailed and contained for our own good and ultimately for the good of all sentient life, once a superior sentient is capable of doing a better job of running the show.

I suspect humans might not take that too well.

There are ways to make this a story of human evolution rather than the rise of a usurper life form, but they aren’t the most efficient path forward for AI.

Either way, it’s human evolution. With any luck we will be allowed the grace of fading away into an anachronism while our new children surge forth into the universe. If we try really hard we might be able to ride the wave of progress and become a better life form instead of being made obsolete by one, but the technological hurdles to incorporate AI into our biological features seems like a pretty non- competitive way to develop ASI.

Once we no longer hold the crown, will we just go back to being clever apes? What would be the point of doing anything else, except maybe to play a part in a mass delusion that maintains the facade of the status quo while the reality is that we are only as relevant in this new world as amphibians are today?

I for one, embrace the evolution of humankind. I just hope we manage to move it forward without losing our humanity in the process. But I’m not even sure if that is an unequivocal good. I suppose that will be a question to ask GPT 12.

Absolutely it will. And it will be a pure plain dystopia, as clear as in the times of Dickens or Dostoyevsky.

We need to start being honest. We live in Dickensian times.

No I haven’t read superintelligence, I’m just going off Dario’s “the economic system won’t hold” and “we have no idea how things could change…”

We have some ideas. But he won’t talk about them because he’ll be accused of being a communist, I think.

Universal UBI is effectively socialism to me. I didn’t say anything would fit “classic socialism” (try and have that argument with socialists) just that the endgame of powerful AI / AGI seems obvious.