This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Are we all going to work fake jobs
From a Yarvin blog a few weeks ago:
Yarvin is influential, but many others including people in the Silicon Valley VC, AI, LLM research X.com e/acc space have made similar comments over the last few months. This is because, in part, it appears that AI researchers, senior lab figures etc increasingly believe that as multimodal performance and robotics both benefit from extreme uplift in terms of p investment and intelligence, which makes mobility inherently easier even if the mechanical components don’t change, the mass automation of all employment will happen as one Happening, over a brief period of a few years. This rather than over a prolonged 20+ year period, as had been predicted by early 2010s mass automation projectors, like CGPGrey in 2014.
I argue there are three core schools of post-AGI economics:
It Doesn’t Matter Because We’re [Almost] All Going To Die. This category encompasses the three primary groups of AGI doomers: (a) malicious and/or paper clip maximizer AGIs will destroy the human race, (b) AGI will help human terrorists or factions to destroy the human race by eg. assisting in genetically engineering a deadly pandemic that kills most or all humans, and (c) AGI, in eliminating most/all jobs and therefore making all of us economically superfluous will lead to rich and/or powerful people exterminating or starving the majority of the population, and then perhaps eventually each other.
UBI or some other form of by-default, low obligation distribution. To maintain consumption as productivity increases and employment decreases, governments transition their populations over to welfare, which eventually everybody is on. Ignoring significant implementation issues (like the classic Soviet ‘who gets the most beautiful apartments with the high ceilings’) this runs the risk, Moldbug argues, of a loss of meaning so extreme that it leads to a form of civilizational suicide. Proponents argues that this kind of true freedom will allow people to find their own meaning, in leisure, in raising families, in falling in love, in learning about and understanding the world and themselves. But what did humans do with their hugely increased leisure time starting from the mid-20th century? Spent much of it watching TV, porn, consooming products and scrolling online. Wall-E is about this, although the obesity will seemingly be avoidable by then.
The Gamification of Life Something interesting that happened as the ‘live service’ video game developed over the last thirty or so years is that players increasingly demanded ‘progression’ in their competitive multiplayer games. It is not enough that the game you play for 20 hours a week is fun, it must involve your character’s statistical advancement, the slow grind for rare armor or skins or minute stat increases. Players demand ‘progression’. Man yearns to labor. Huge categories of modern day employment are already fake jobs that exist to reduce the number of welfare recipients in overall terms, the result of regulation and government spending in everything from compliance to college administration and the DMV to HR. This economy involves fake work in fake jobs, perhaps with stratification in terms of resource allocation, progression, a kind of gamified simulation of pre-AGI labor that most people engage with to a greater or lesser extent and which confers status and resources.
If (1) occurs, it was probably almost always inevitable (perhaps as a solution to the Fermi paradox). There is little anyone here can likely do to stop it. The choice between (2) and (3) is much more interesting. If you were the absolute ruler of a country that transitioned from widespread employment to mass automation of all labor, would you really give up on any incentives to encourage prosocial behavior beyond ‘obey the law’? Would you really trust people to live dignified, meaningful lives? Would you care?
Yarvin is simply wrong if he thinks that almost everyone is currently a zero marginal product employee. Businesses often act in stupid ways, but overall they're not that stupid.
As for the mass automation of employment happening in a brief period of a few years, I have some doubts. This is for two reasons:
Even the best AI that I am aware of is, currently, not very intelligent. All the theorizing about the AI revolution is based on extrapolating the "AI getting smarter" curve of the last few years. But there is, as far as I can tell, no clear reason to believe that the curve will continue shooting up instead of plateauing for a long time. Current AI can barely do simple, entry-level software programming tasks. It's great if you want it to basically just summarize Stack Overflow entries for you so that you don't have to Google them yourself, but no intelligent person would let it write the business' code without heavy human supervision. Of course, this could very well change soon, but I haven't seen anything other than curve-extrapolation to justify the massive AGI/ASI hype that is happening online.
Even if hardware becomes significantly cheaper, I am not sure that it would become economically competitive at things like fruit-picking any time in the near future. It's just really cheap to hire a third world indentured servant to pick the fruit, rather than buying a robot. Now the Uber drivers and so on, sure. I feel bad for them and I hope that they are planning post-AI careers. Self-driving cars are still limited in some ways, and there is no way I would trust one to drive me 100 miles on the highway, but at least now they can usually roam a city effectively. But there are many jobs where it's hard for me to imagine AI becoming economically competitive against humans any time in the near future.
For me the funniest thing about the whole AIpocalypse is that effectively, if the curve does manage to continue going significantly upwards, it will mean that the very software geeks who made the AI will be likely among the first who automate themselves out of having jobs. Now, I have compassion for the software geeks. After all, they are trapped in the cold Darwinian logic of "if I don't do it, someone else will, and then they will put me out of a job". But I do find it darkly funny. People who bullshit for a living because they have good social skills, and literal prostitutes, will likely still be making good money, at least for a while, even if 90% of programmers have been replaced by AI. In an AGI world, humans will probably increasingly find the very fact of someone being human to be economically valuable. Which means that the hard-striving, tech-loving engineer will be among the first to be replaced by the products of his own creation, hoist on his own techo-autism petard, while meanwhile the smooth-talking salesman and the sexy escort will continue to find people willing to give them money.
Ironically I'd probably trust an AI car more on the highway than in an urban area. Higher speed, but far less complexity and random variables compared to a Pedestrian & Obstacle rich area.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link