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Yeah, it's kinda depressing to realize that some of the most optimistic scenarios for AI will still result in a lot of human misery. It's fun to be a trust fund baby, but if all the hoi polloi are trust fund babies too, it kinda loses its shine. You are just another unemployed loser who can't get a reservation at any of the best restaurants. And if you want to earn extra money beyond your UBI, you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the grandchild of some schmuck who was lucky enough to put $10,000 into the right stock at the right time.
There is a story they used to teach in American history classes in high school that many of the early immigrants to the United States were people who had been locked out of European status hierarchies and decided to make a fresh start of things. Perhaps a similar sentiment will drive migration to the stars.
Even if we assume there isn’t still some guy getting paid to crawl into the server farms and cooling towers and fix stuff, you don’t need to be a personal servant. Waiting tables isn’t demeaning- and these people will eat at restaurants, waiters are already a luxury good, that job’s not going away.
You'd be amazed at the shit customers pull these days. I don't wait tables anymore, but in the time I did, I had customers:
Bartending wasn't much better.
My partner still works in the industry and it seems like not much has changed.
I have a modest proposal that service workers shouldn't have to deal with that.
For example, maybe if a customer is rude, the business can forcibly fine them. A customer can challenge the fine + court fees, and is presumed innocent, but since it's a private establishment the business can present video evidence.
Thus, business owners are incentivized to let employees refuse to serve rude customers, rather than the other way around (importantly, the customer can't be fined after a sale).
It's a small thing, along with letting factory workers wear headphones.
I believe this one's actually OSHA banning it, not the factories.
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Even without the modest proposal part, ask yourself "exactly how could a business (particularly a small business) abuse this against customers, if the business owner was petty enough to want to do that?" (And plenty of business owners are petty. That's one of the advantages a big box store like Walmart has over mom and pop stores.)
If your proposal is vulnerable to such abuses, it's a bad idea.
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As someone who worked in retail years and years ago, hollow laughter.
Managers won't take the side of staff because customers bring in money while staff cost money. And nowadays, with your business living and dying by online reviews, and anything less than 5 stars being seen as terrible, there's even more of a perverse incentive to appease even the loudest mouth, because that's precisely the person who will leave 1 star reviews everywhere and get up an online campaign to boycott your business. Throwing staff to the wolves is easier than telling bad customers to buzz off.
Used to be the right of refusal of service, but that got neutered after all the lawsuits about equal treatment etc. (just think of the gay wedding cakes argument for one). You can technically refuse service so long as the reasons are non-discrimination, but today everything can be turned into "that's discrimination!" (e.g. Kamala and Hillary didn't get elected because sexism and racism, in Kamala's case, not because nobody wanted them as president).
Some places will protect staff, but generally customer facing is low ranking, high turnover anyway, and you're disposable.
To illustrate the point from my own retail experiences from years and years ago: We had to do customer service training every year. I worked the service desk a lot, and my first year there I was always baffled by the manager's willingness to give refunds for stupid shit. For example, it was a grocery store, and we sold deli pizzas that you took home and made yourself. Someone tried to return one that 1. Was already cooked and 2. Had two pieces left. The couple's stated reason for the return was that it "wasn't as good as we remembered it being". I had to call the manager because I wasn't allowed to refuse refunds (this wasn't normally an issue since most refunds were pretty routine), and I was incredulous when he gave them store credit.
It wasn't until they started the customer service trainings that I realized that $3 was a small price to pay to keep from pissing these people off. They shopped there every week and weren't constantly returning items, and it would probably cost the store a lot more in the long run if they decided to go somewhere else. We had already disappointed them with the pizza, after all. Add to it the fact that stores will spend huge amounts on advertising without even thinking about it and then try to nickle and dime the customers as soon as they get into the store. I was told that we needed to provide an absolutely flawless experience to the extent possible. If someone asked where an item was we weren't allowed to tell them; we had to walk them to the location. The thing is, it's not like it was that great of a store or anything. Good service is just a customer expectation, and if you can't provide it, and can't make up for it in other ways (like having rock bottom prices), people will take their business elsewhere.
I think providing good service is reasonable, as long as the customer is polite and not asking for something particularly demanding.
The refund wasn’t your problem, the manager is the one who’s losing from giving customers extra.
My focus is when customers are disrespectful, or the boss is disrespectful, or otherwise causing the employee unnecessarily difficulty.
I think that pettiness is particularly evil, because it’s clearly unjust, loss without gain. Whereas even a robber baron, while unjust, at least gains the money others lose, and can donate it back to society. I wonder why society doesn’t focus on tackling pettiness more than other issues.
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That’s why they were proposing a legal framework where it becomes profitable for the restaurant to go after rude customers. If the restaurant gets most of the fine and there is an additional even more punitive fine for reviewing a restaurant after you’ve been found against (and running an anon review service is banned), you could reset the incentives. I would be mostly fine with all of this except for the banning of anon review sites because I don’t like the idea of ID gating the internet, even a small part of it.
I don’t want ID to be part of the internet either.
Anon review sites are already untrustworthy. Ideally, people revert to paid trustworthy critics or form paid webs of trust, so rando nitpicking and shill glazing are both ignored.
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You go be a waiter for your whole life then.
It all depends on how people treat service workers, and increasingly it seems to be entitlement and treating them like servants/trash. "I'm paying for this so I deserve to be treated with the bowing and scraping you'd give a duke" is the attitude.
Even years back, when I worked in a shop, I still remember the guy who was buying a newspaper and who didn't even bother to look at me as he paid, he kept his head turned chatting to his friend and literally threw the money down on the counter. That was just bad manners, but clearly in his mind, I wasn't even a person to be acknowledged.
Now add in drunks and lunatics, and I'd crawl over broken glass rather than work public-facing jobs again in service/retail industries.
Daily I am reminded of how I am fortunate to live in Japan. There are of course drunks and lunatics here as well, and entitled pricks are not difficult to find, but generally service is superior and customers are gracious. Even--maybe even most noticeably because they're just workaday usual-- in regular retail jobs.
edit: Japan is fucked in many ways.
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We have robot waiters now.
And they are a marginal presence because people prefer humans to clankers.
Funny enough, I've had the insight that the one thing you can do to increase your odds of success in the post-AI world is be pleasant and enjoyable to physically be around. Whatever that means for you. If other humans WANT to spend time with you and be in your presence, you can parlay that into success in whatever the situation becomes. Attractive women have a clear advantage.
As an introvert, the robot waiters work exceedingly well for me.
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For a lot of people it is, especially if there is a kind of permanent aristocracy in place. Personally, I don't think I'd mind being a waiter or a bartender, but I've already had a lengthy career as a well compensated professional. For someone who just graduated law school or business school or whatever, well, that might be a different story.
Yep.
The implied lack of upward mobility is probably the part that would make it unbearable.
You're a waiter because that's the only role you are capable of serving in this world. You cannot ever expect to get recognized for more than that. Not even luck will save you.
The patrons who use your services may even treat you with basic dignity, but yeah, your status will never approach theirs, and you both know it.
Yeah, I'm not sure it would be unbearable, but it still seems pretty lousy. I'm not an expert on European history, but I am pretty sure there were situations like that in medieval Europe. Where a person worked the fields as a serf, not because of any innate abilities or lack thereof, but rather because his father had been a serf; his father's father had been a serf; and so on. Meanwhile, he served some kind of feudal lord. Who was a feudal lord because his father was one. And so on back to some day in the distant past.
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At some point, a Matrix style world where everyone is just dumped in a virtual reality simulator where they can each become a hero of their own tale switched from one of the most dystopian outcomes imaginable to one of the better ones.
The realization hit me this weekend as I was hanging out with some friends at an artificial lagoon with temperature controlled water, lifeguards on duty, and basically everything optimized for keeping guests from getting hurt (and keep them spending money).
This is precisely how a 'beneficent' superintelligence is most likely to resolve the problem. Stick humans into a simulation, or maybe a completely artificial environment with all the edges that cause death and misery sanded off.
A permanent Disney World vacation. Maybe swap out the aesthetics often enough to make it feel novel.
Call me John the Savage but I always thought The Culture was a human zoo dystopia.
Life without struggle seems positively meaningless.
You can have your meaningful struggle life. I'm very down for the culture, I'll gonna enjoy lava rafting, a brain that can synthesize its own drugs, and fucking my ultra hot girlfriend with my massive gene edited dick.
If I get bored I'll move to a fun sounding meme planet and become a bat-person or whatever. I bet I could have a few hundred years of fun in the Culture.
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This is why The Culture always sounded incredibly uninteresting; maybe as one book exploring an interesting dystopia, sure, but a whole series about how awesome it is? Uh...
I haven't read it though. It sounds boring and dumb. Utopia is stupid setting.
I recently read Player of Games and while to some degree I echo the "boring Utopia" criticism, a lot of what makes the Culture utopia is a literally incredible amount of technological wizardly.
I can buy warp drives and the like, but if you have robots with little force fields and humans that can take a retrovirus to change gender and do drugs by thinking about it, you arguably have moved past the point of being able to offer social commentary simply because your society is inhuman. Banks, it seems to me, does social commentary anyway and I wouldn't say it's entirely a miss - some of it is thought-provoking. But I sort of choke when I am expected to believe that humans were doing stuff like going to dinner parties instead of wireheading or something even thought the technology in the books is more than just "really really smart AI," it is the ability to manipulate the spacetime continuum to a degree that arguably surpassed Star Trek (while having just enough limitations to serve the purposes of this specific plot, much like, well, an old-fashioned Star Trek episode).
Not sure if I explained that well. But basically Banks is, from what I can tell, asking me to believe that the entire Culture has insane gigatech and lives in the way that it does (that way happening to be, basically, what a liberal arts student would hope a socialist utopia would be like) Just Because. I've been vastly preferring the Stephenson I've read recently; Stephenson really is interested in the intersection of technology and ideology and tries to show his work whereas the Culture, to be honest, seems if anything more naive than Star Trek about the ideology of the future (while sharing perhaps certain assumptions of Roddenberry about how The Future would eliminate certain barriers between older men and young and desirable women.) Obviously you can justify anything you want in the Culture by waving your hands and saying "aligned AI" but that doesn't necessarily make it satisfying.
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That is 5000% my own objection to the Culture as portrayed.
The ONLY entities with true volition in that universe are the minds. No human ever makes a meaningful choice, and whatever influence they have on their own fate is inherently pre-calculated in by the minds.
And somehow the humans are 100% aware of the arrangement and there are few dissenters, although they can get uppity from time to time.
It honestly makes me sympathetic to Culture opponents just on the basis of "yes, maybe they're sadistic, evil, and backwards, but at least they're the masters of their own fate dammit!"
I think that's the precise objection leveled by the main character of the first book, actually.
It seems to me that the Culture deals with this by letting the dissenters interact with other cultures/societies on their behalf as part of Contact. Also humans live extended lifespans but not immortality, so far as Wikipedia tells me, so the problem will eventually solve itself; even the most fiery rebel can't maintain that meaningfully within the Culture, and if they leave to join a different world, then they are no longer a problem:
Yeah, and that's the existential horror of the situation to me.
You can dissent from the Culture, you can rebel, you can even try to kill yourself.
But none of that will change the outcome.
Its still there. Everywhere. Inevitable. And all alternatives are inherently worse.
I have before said that the inverse of the Culture might be a civilization of pure P-zombies whose whole, entire goal is removing sentience from the universe. Not intelligence, just sentience.
Assuming they're technologically equivalent to the culture, would the Culture win that fight?
The Culture might not even care, unless the p-zombies came after the Minds.
Yes, but I'm suggesting they would do exactly that, SPECIFICALLY with the intent of de-sentienting them, because "consciousness is suboptimal."
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That is also our real world situation.
But there's potentially a way out/forward.
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If we're presuming a benevolent superintelligence, I don't see why simulations couldn't provide exactly the right amount and type of struggle to each individual to provide just the right amount of meaning in their lives such that, at each moment, they genuinely feel like they're leading the most meaningful life they could be living. For all you or I know, we're currently in an alpha version of that simulation right now. Surely such a superintelligence would be familiar with Brave New World and other dystopian fiction and criticisms about them and at least try to route around the pitfalls.
Yeah, a similar thought had occurred to me. I think it's a good response to the "too boring" or "too easy" argument.
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Or... the final version.
I actually had that thought as I was pondering this, along the lines of "oh shit what if the singularity happened in 2025 and the superintelligence is just A/B testing or Beta testing the environment to find the ideal amount of suffering, adventure, surprise, intrigue, and danger for human 'thriving.'
Its trying out things like the Moon mission and prediction markets/gambling and weight loss drugs and seeing how we react. Its moving oil prices around, its delaying GTA 6, its generating ridiculous amounts of AI "slop" to see which ones click with us.
(Oh wait, I just invented the plot of The Amazing Digital Circus from first principles)
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I don't see how that would be so dystopian, either. "God wouldn't make your burden heavier than what you can carry" is absolutely lindy. Why not make it truth for once?
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This is why we should have a real meritocracy instead of a luckocracy. My only problem with Sam Altman is that he isn't enough of a genius. His product is good and better people ought to have more money than the rabble.
AI will be more meritorious than any human, though.
I'm pro sentient sillicon super intelligence. I just want to make sure it has qualia and isn't a Chinese room.
"In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland without children." - Nick Bostrom
I'd also add some preferences regarding population and personality and such, but "do our successors have any intrinsic value or not" does seem to be the first and most important criterion to have!
However, I'm confused by the use of the phrase "make sure" here. Unless you're expecting to be uploaded, and you're confident that the idea of a "p-zombie" is incoherent (which I'm guessing you aren't, given the Chinese room reference), what observations could give you any sense of surety here? Today's LLMs can pass Turing tests, which used to be our "fine, they're sentient now" criterion, but their lack of "medium-term" memory and they fact that they still can "slip" in ways that make them seem non-sentient makes us think in hindsight that our criterion was just inadequate, and yet we haven't really found anything to replace it. If tomorrow's LLMs never slip, does that mean they've become sentient, or does that just mean they've become better at faking it?
If it can be a true successor, with intelligence, agency, and everything, it's probably sentient. If we can't figure out what sentience is in the mean time, maybe we don't deserve to keep existing into the future anyway. It's probably not that hard, but humans are very disappointing currently.
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Well in your meritocracy, would people be able to bequeath resources to their descendants?
Yes, because I value latent merit.
Ok, so let me amend my scenario a bit:
And if you want to earn extra money beyond your UBI, you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the wastrel great grandchild of some admittedly brilliant software engineer whose indolent son had a fling with a stripper.
Yes, but he doesn't have the latent merit, and we can measure that. So the scenario would only be
But so what? It's pretty normal for people to bequeath wealth to their wastrel descendants.
It's also normal for people to gain wealth through luck, but I want to stop that.
Except for the luck of being a genetic descendant of the right person, right? I mean, look at the scenario I laid out: Some brilliant guy does brilliant things and gets fabulously wealthy. His son has a fling with a stripper, resulting in a bastard child. Before dying in a motorcycle accident, the bastard child has a 6 month relationship with a girl he meets in community college who lies about being on birth control, resulting in a great-grandchild. A few years later an attorney shows up at some trailer park to tell a single mom that she is now a billionaire.
Ok, that's an exaggeration but you get my point.
I myself have a family member who is a total drug-addict screwup who had only one full time job at age 21, which she held down for about 3 weeks before getting in a fight with her supervisor and getting fired. It's been more than 30 years and she hasn't worked since, instead living off of family money. A trust is being up which will give her a mid-6 figure income (tax free) for the rest of her life.
Would you call that luck?
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