Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
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User ID: 894
Why? If it can do our work trivially why would there be a culing?
I think the question whoever in charge of AI would ask is if AI can do our work trivially, what's the point of having so many people around at all?
The idea that people who are themselves threatened with unemployment are going to vote to cull unemployed people beggars belief.
Keep in mind that is scenario would be that AI eliminates 99.9% of jobs, as you described. In this hypothetical future, I don't even believe there will be any voting. Society will essentially be controlled by the AI and the few who actually still work to maintain or guide the AI. That's what I mean by turn people into pets or cattle.
If you're taking this seriously then data center moratoriums are trivially not sufficient and you should absolutely be advocating for bilateral treaties with china to cease frontier development.
I do, and I would support a politician that made this a part of their platform. I'm only a private citizen, however, without a platform. So I can only reach as far as my immediate circle.
We're getting points mixed up because I've described multiple potential scenarios and did a poor job of separating them. Here are what I see as likely futures under three different scenarios:
AI is everything the marketing says it will be.
Under this scenario we have three likely futures.
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AI is benevolent and everything works out like you appear to believe it will. This is probably the best result. It's also the least likely, in my opinion.
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AI is benevolent but only for a select few. This is the culling scenario I describe. The AI heads or AI itself eliminate 99.9% of all jobs and look around and start wondering why they bother keeping all these people around. This is the second most likely scenario if AI is all it's cracked up to be, in my opinion.
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AI is malevolent. This is the scenario covered by James Cameron. Obviously this is probably the worst result. If you ask me, this is the most likely out of the three described so far.
AI is pretty good, but not the paradigm changing technology we were sold as.
I'd say this is where we currently are. Productivity is slightly up, but we've also created an increasing underclass. Productivity is not up enough, however, for us to implement UBI or similar policy, meaning these people will just have to suffer as a permanent underclass. In this scenario, The AI heads would still have oversold and underdelivered. Maybe we haven't been sold a complete bill of goods, but we'd still have greatly expanded the permanent underclass for what? A 20% increase in GDP?
AI is not and will never be as good as the marketing.
Under this scenario, we've done like I said. We've ruined hundreds of thousands of lives and been sold a complete bill of goods. In this scenario, I'd be advocating for public executions of the major AI executives.
Edit: I didn't address one of your points
Now that this labor isn't necesary it is a trivial thing. People will find a way to self define and fine meaning without the need to do labor.
Do people do this right now? If you took someone off the street and told them that they don't have to work in the future and everything they need will be paid for, do they find a way to self define and find meaning? Do lottery winners self define and find meaning? If people don't do this right now, what will have changed between now and the omniscient AI that will cause them to self define and find meaning in the future?
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
19d ago
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I think a lot more people than you think derive meaning and value from their work. Maybe not a majority, but I'd say a large minority.
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I, and a lot of people, don't even believe AI will ever allow the majority of us to live in luxury. Personally, I believe that if AI were as good as it's touted as being, there will be a culling in the best case scenario. Worst case scenario would still be Skynet. (Bit of a tangent, but part of me actually thinks that if AI gave us functional immortality and infinite luxury, that that result might be a worse hell than any other. This isn't based on anything other than my feelings.) But if nothing changes, and things simply continue to be as they are, it would still be a disastrous result as that would mean that hundreds of thousands of people have lost and will lose their livelihoods and futures because we as a society were sold a bill of goods by an entire industry of charlatans.
All that is to say that we've sacrificed the livelihoods and futures of people today for future benefits that I don't think exist. And if these benefits do exist in the future, I don't think the vast majority of people will ever be party to them.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
20d ago
Is this because of a rational calculation or because communist twitter artists have been throwing up a nonstop alarm since the second stable diffusion was able to generate furry smut art for pennies undermining their only marketable skill?
Let's not pretend that the heads of the AI companies haven't been boasting about the hundreds of thousands of jobs they've already eliminated, and the hundreds of thousands more they are soon to eliminate. Further, it's not like the vision of the future that these heads are selling (the best case scenario being that humans are some form of pet or cattle, to be dispensed on the whim of an AI overlord and the worst having already been tastefully adapted by James Cameron) are particularly attractive to these people either.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
20d ago
This is too broad of a definition of "bribe." Food drives, little league, and the like are a way of buying good PR that's existed for the better part of the last 100 years and to a certain extent, does actually make the community better. programs like these are simply ways of reminding the community that actually, the nameless, faceless corporation that has taken over a part of the town does bring benefits to the town. For the likes of OpenAI, this type of good PR is especially important because unlike the factories of old, they don't actually bring that many jobs to the local community. When done correctly, the community itself views the company as a pillar of the community. They actually want the company to be involved in events. The loss of the company is actually seen as a loss to the community.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
20d ago
I'll paraphrase something I read on Twitter recently: Currently, 80 IQ cartel narcoterrorists have a better idea of civic duty that the tech oligarchs. When your town gets taken over by the cartel, at least they bring electricity, hospitals, running water, and a level of stability. Because even the lowest scum drug runner knows that they need to at least give something back to the community they exist in. Tech oligarchs will go into a community, drive up utility prices, and call anyone who isn't enthusiastically supportive a luddite who deserves to rot in the permanent underclass. In this way, the drug cartels are closer to the likes of John D. Rockefeller than anyone alive in Silicon Valley.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
21d ago
To me, it's not very surprising, and seems genuine. Let's ignore the problems with the physical data centers for a second. There's been much ink spilt on the issue of water, electricity, noise, and general quality of life for the people who actually need to live next to these AI data centers. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that some of those concerns are legitimate and some are not. The backlash against data centers seems to me to be an indictment on AI as a whole and the view of the future that has been, let's be honest, forced on us.
The average person's experience with AI is slightly positive at best. Maybe they use it as another, better search engine (with how trash Google has become, this is probably the most prevalent use of AI. Maybe they see some vaguely amusing AI slop on social media. Unfortunately, however, a lot of the average person's experience with AI is extremely disruptive and literally life ruining in some cases. It's not hard to find people who had their parents, grandparents, or friends completely one shot by AI on Facebook or companies replacing all customer service with AI agents, making it impossible to get any help. And don't even get me started on AI and its consequences on the job market. As if mass AI layoffs weren't enough, if you're searching for a job, you're now getting your resume reviewed by AI, interviewed by AI, and rejected by AI all before a human has ever seen your resume. People are resorting to using AI to apply to hundreds of jobs a day to have a chance. And when you get a job, you're being forced to use AI as a part of company policy. I'm not saying that a small slice of the population didn't make great productivity gains with the help of AI. I am saying, however, that these gains are simply not felt by the average AI user, let alone person.
All of that is to say nothing of the actual people who are responsible for AI. Everything I said before might even be acceptable if the people who ostensibly are responsible for selling AI to the public even vaguely resembled humans. Instead they loudly and often brag about how many jobs they've eliminated, how everyone's current way of life will be completely upended, and how everyone who does not enthusiastically support this is a luddite and should be left behind to rot as a permanent underclass. And by the way, the AI layoffs will continue. And not only that, they will actually accelerate. And actually we think it's a good thing that you're being rejected by AI hiring managers. And also, do you have any more of those subsidies that lets us build more of these?
Is it really, truly a surprise, then, that the average person is against anything and everything that supports AI?
It hasn't happened yet because there isn't enough control yet. I'm not sure that you appreciate just how big of a change your ideal AI future will be. In your ideal AI future, the levers of power would necessarily be concentrated with the AI or the people responsible for its decisions. I'll pose a question to you. Suppose you can tomorrow, with a snap of your fingers, make your ideal AI future become reality in the US. But in the process, you'd have to liquidate the bottom 10% of the US population. Would you do it? What about 20%? 30%? How much of the population are you willing to liquidate to realize your ideal AI future?
Ok so what do you actually suggest I do? Say I'm a private citizen who one, doesn't not support the AI future and two, would like to stop AI development world wide. How do you suggest I act to achieve these goals?
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