Accelerate towards UBI, you cowards.
Which would actually accelerate progress more than any other national allocation of funds.
Ever since the industrial revolution, the driver of progress has been mass purchasing and mass production.
If only billionaires could afford an iPhone, we would only be on the 3rd or 4th revision by now.
It was the subsiding of cell phone hardware that accelerated that market because carriers effectively covered hundreds of the costs so nearly everyone was buying them every two years.
If people want acceleration of the future, inject as much money as possible to main street - it’s the closest equivalent to throwing fuel on the fire of industrial capitalism.
Hoarding it among executives or money traders is a fickle and temporary accelerant which is much slower than the alternative over sustained periods.
UBI falls into the bread and circuses camp of policy to me. On one hand I really do want people that need bread to get it, so I’m not opposed, but it’s a placating move that I don’t see how it handles the growing fear of labors value to society being eroded. Like it’s great and all to say “human life has inherent value” but most wouldn’t give up a few dollars that could be spent on nick nacks to save a human life, because a random person with no measurable impact on your life isn’t relevant to your life.
Socialism for example is totally built on the idea that because of industrialzation laborers have soft power that they can leverage to influence society in their favor. That’s a real concern that we should focus on addressing and I think attempting to ignore it through ineffectual and local bans will only serve to make those countries less relevant as a whole.
I am terribly surprised that ultra-rich sociopaths have no empathy toward mankind.
The real issue here is not that these people support a terrible vision of the future; it’s that we are allowing these sociopaths to run our world now.
I don’t understand. The economy is not only driven by production (workers/labor), but also by consumption (people, also workers).
Let’s say AI can perform the production side without any human labor. That eliminates the workers (who are also the consumers). So, what do you get when you remove most/all consumption from the economy and are left with just AI?
So, what do you get when you remove most/all consumption from the economy and are left with just AI?
You get what’s in the movie Elysium.
They don’t care. To them, the world is doomed anyway. It’ll all have to collapse before they can rebuilt it into a better world, so better to accelerate the collapse as fast as possible so they can start sooner on the rebuilding part of the plan. And if you have to break a billion human shaped eggs to make a tech bro wet dream omelet then that’s what’ll happen because afterwards they say humanity as a whole will be much better off.
It’s very cold hearted.
Elysium has human laborers, though. The main character literally works at a factory creating the droids for the station’s uses.
It seems implied that they have labor and work as a means of control and less because they need to. Most of the work seemed to be just oppressing people like him.
In these people’s mind it’s always somebody else who is supposed to employ people and pay them salaries.
It’s roughly a Tragedy Of The Commons situation: each such individual wants to take without giving, and it is indeed sustainable if only a few do it, but as others see them gaining from doing that, they too want to do it - eventually in aggregate there will be too much extraction for what little production there is to keep up and the whole thing collapses.
This has already been going on with Globalization - notice how in the last 2 decades or so for the average person in wealthy nations it feels that money doesn’t go as far and the abundance of shinny toys still fails to make up for a feeling of constant pressure and uncertainty, and how what we are told is the inflation adjusted amount equivalent to a 1960s blue collar worker salary that paid for a house, car and a family of 5 back then, in the present day barelly covers housing.
IMHO, there are already too many with too much power (and, remember, Money is Power) whose relation to Society is purelly extractive, and the political direction in most Western nations, especially the US, is for things to keep on getting worse so it seems we’re bound for dystopia.
Why do you think labor is demand capped and not supply capped?
In the short term we’re going to see first movers downsize as they scale up artificial labor to maintain status quo production.
But those first movers are going to have effectively dug their own grave when other companies instead keep head counts high but scale up production with the additional support of artificial labor.
So you’ll have one company offering their same slate of offerings with the same marketing at 1/10th the labor costs, pocketing the difference. But then their smarter competition will have 10x the variety in offerings with 10x more targeted or niche marketing efforts at the same labor costs.
The companies that prioritize their quarter over their 5 year performance are going to die out.
The greater job loss isn’t going to be driven by automation but by outsourcing, which is going to be easier than ever with the ways translation is going to be improved to the point of seamlessness using AI as an intermediary. So no matter what the job a human working from home in the US can do, someone else can do it a lot cheaper elsewhere even when it requires reading and writing a lot of English.
The threat is realistically less “AI can do your job” and more “another human aided by AI will take your job.”
If the US government were smart, they’d be investing in nationalized AI as a public utility similar to the USPS and passing laws restricting outsourcing labor or at least taxing/tariffing the labor itself significantly, using the proceeds from both ends of this pincer approach to fund social services or basic income.
Because you’re right that draining main street is going to be bad news for progress. But it’s not that AI is going to do this inherently. It’s a very specific aspect that’s going to do this in most cases, with demand for human labor remaining high as production scales up and out.
I’m not sure this is true, most of recent big tech changes seem to have been driven through a “invest a lot at loss, then monetize” model. So I don’t think this relies on demand anymore.
Where do you think the money for the monetize step comes from if it’s not demand?
Funding, right?
Don’t companies like Twitter, Uber, OpenAI, Bumble etc. fully rely on them for growth and try to actually be profitable once they have reached all the audience they can have?
As a user this is especially infuriating because many of these service have an expiration date, for example there will be a new dating app every so often, which will start its enshitification process after about 2 years.
A human surplus. This on steroids possibly?
until there isn’t a human surplus in the consideration of those who manipulate the easily led…
Well, what I seen this image as was the classic divide and conquer strategy of the capitalist classes against the working class and/or arbitrary race category to enable them to control and/or murder at will.
However, this image is actually a complete gas lighting exercise in using toxic characteristics from capitalism to describe communism. I didn’t notice the hammer and sickle, which to be fair makes no fucking sense…
The relevance to the above post was really trying to play on
“The Production of too many useful things results in too many useless people”
which I take as a satirical poke at the deficiencies of capitalism, although it’s of unknown origin as far as I know…
If automation does reach a point where labour isn’t needed, then it may well encourage the likes of Murdoch et al to intensify the encouragement of class war.
Sorry, I clearly don’t pay enough attention to the shit I post :(
My view of it is that if it doesn’t go fast, we end up in a boiled frog situation where every year a few more jobs are lost but not enough for people to protest and the rich end up owning all of us like slaves after a couple of decades.
If in the space of a few years we lose virtually all jobs, it will be hard to argue against the obvious solutions like rapid nationalization of assets and fully automated communism.
A frog that is slowly boiled will jump out. However, if it’s dropped in boiling water, it’ll die because it doesn’t have time to jump out before the proteins in its body get destroyed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
Relevant because I don’t think slow change is as irreversible as fast change, and might actually be more manageable
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The boiling frog is an apologue describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly. While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
While I agree with your first paragraph, I’m not sure that communism would be a solution, given how history has shown us that it can be quite easily corrupted and used by the elite to exploit the masses.
A capitalist system where political power have the means to control financial power, and where there are limits to the influence of money in politics, might be better IMHO.
I’m not sure that capitalism would be a solution, given how history has shown us that it designed to be corrupt and used by the elite to exploit the masses.
Humans being as they are, just as it is naive to expect that a Society were everybody has the same (i.e. the actual Communist utopia) even if created instantly by magic would remain Equal for more than a few seconds, it’s naive to expect that in a Society were personal monetary wealth is valued as the greatest quality of a person and the core political message is that “Greed is Good”, the Makers of Laws (a.k.a. Politicians) and the Enforcers of Laws would be - uniquelly in such a society - not driven by personal upside maximization and instead work for the common good.
In the game of Capitalism, there is no greater Return On Investment than that of buying rules and referees and the more it get invested in overall on those with the power to subvert the system that defines and imposes check & balances the easier it gets to treat law-making and law-enforcement as services for sale.
Scandinavian nations are degrading along with everybody else at this point, it just took longer and was harder to subvert governance in the heavilly supervised version of Capitalism of countries with a general pro-social culture than it did in “free for all” US of A were there none of the social, non-Capitalist, ideological elements are about considering others and not just one’s own satisfaction and ego (which is how you end up with Libertarians rather than Equalitarians and pure ego-driven Moralists rather than Conservatives).
Can you honestly look at the state of society (and the planet, in a more literal sense) and say that capitalism is doing a good job…? It’s rampant with corruption and suffering.
It’s doing a not so bad job in a few countries (spoiler: the US is not among them), e.g. Finland, Denmark, Germany, Canada. I’m not saying it’s a perfect system, not even a good system, just that it’s a good place to start.
Wealth redistribution requires that there’s wealth to begin with, and capitalism is clearly the system with the best incentives to create wealth. You just need strong policies to prevent sociopaths a la Musk, Thiel or Bezos to try to hoard “all the money”, to easily break up monopolies, etc.
I’m not a proponent of this mindset but this seems like an obvious mischaracterization of the argument
My biggest issues is that it seems to exist only in direct response to “doomers” as they love to say. And are maybe right to criticize, but having the whole thing just being a counter extreme doesn’t work either. And there’s lot of hand waving about technology and history and markets correcting themselves.
But I’ve never gotten the impression that it’s just a cynical “I don’t care if AI fucks everyone as long as I make money.”
It’s 100% not a mischaracterization. Most of the ghouls involved with these AI companies to a one are effective altruists. Who would gladly see millions suffer and die. If they thought it would mean that they and the people they chose would get to go on and colonize space and other worlds etc. They would totally rip this planet, a new hole and shit all over everything just to get them themselves ahead.
They really really don’t care. Altman, musk, Google, Microsoft. They literally couldn’t care less. Though you’re more than welcome to try to prove otherwise. But I don’t condone masochism.
Most of the ghouls involved with these AI companies to a one are effective altruists. Who would gladly see millions suffer and die. If they thought it would mean that they and the people they chose would get to go on and colonize space and other worlds etc.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here given that wikipedia describes effective altruism as:
Effective altruism (often abbreviated EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis”.[1][2] People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, sometimes called effective altruists,[3] may choose careers based on the amount of good that they expect the career to achieve or donate to charities based on the goal of maximising positive impact. They may work on the prioritization of scientific projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.[4]: 179–195
Effective altruists aim to emphasize impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. Popular cause priorities within effective altruism include global health and development, social inequality, animal welfare, and risks to the survival of humanity over the long-term future.
Effective altruism is something that sounds good in principle, and I still think is good in general, though can kind of run out of control.
Sam Bankman Fried was someone who at least claimed to follow this philosophy. The issue being that you can talk yourself into doing bad things (fraud) in the name or earning money that you would then donate much of.
And more generally get into doing “long term” or “big picture” good while also doing a lot of harm. But hey the ends justify the means.
Again, I think the principle of being a lot more calculated in how we do philanthropy is a huge good thing. But the EA movement has had some missteps and probably needs to be reigned in a bit.
Funnily enough Wiki quotes Altman as one of the critics.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Effective altruism (often abbreviated EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, sometimes called effective altruists, may choose careers based on the amount of good that they expect the career to achieve or donate to charities based on the goal of maximising positive impact. They may work on the prioritization of scientific projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.: 179–195 Effective altruists aim to emphasize impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. Popular cause priorities within effective altruism include global health and development, social inequality, animal welfare, and risks to the survival of humanity over the long-term future. The movement developed during the 2000s, and the name effective altruism was coined in 2011. Philosophers influential to the movement include Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill. What began as a set of evaluation techniques advocated by a diffuse coalition evolved into an identity. With approximately 7,000 people active in the effective altruism community and strong ties to the elite schools in the United States and Britain, effective altruism has become associated with Silicon Valley and the technology industry, forming a tight subculture.The movement received mainstream attention and criticism with the bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX as founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a major funder of effective altruism causes prior to late 2022. Within the Bay Area, it received criticism for having a culture that has been described as toxic and sexually exploitative towards women, which led to conversations inside the community about how to create an environment that can better prevent and fight sexual misconduct.
I don’t think it’s necessarily true that if we listen to “doomers” we get sensible policy. And it’s probably more likely we get regulatory capture.
But there does exist a sensible middle ground.
I actually think they are correct to bring up the potential upside as something we should consider more in the moral calculus. But the of course it’s taken to a silly extreme.
