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Notes -
You said
This is a statement about your feelings.
To be extremely clear, the number of people contemptuous of the random Americans who is worried about automation getting rid of their jobs is a rounding error. All the heads of the labs have written and spoken extensively about a need to make sure these people are taken care of. The contempt is for the people who spout out obvious bullshit and try to stop development entirely.
No, it's a factual matter that can be verified by observing the speech and behavior of that class of people. That's why I described your response as reinforcing my point, because you explicity stated your own contempt for the median person. I'm not sure how you don't understand this?
The median person who hates ai. this is a very different distribution from the median person who doesn't have social media induced black pill brain worms.
This whole thread feels like every conversation I've seen about AI.
The really sad thing, to me, is that it doesn't change a thing even if it changes everything; the winners will still spit and step on the losers forever and they'll invent whole new losers if they run out. The underclass correctly intuit that their overlords hate them and would rather they be replaced, as they would prefer to never pay the underclass again. The overlords correctly intuit that the underclass wants what they have and is likely willing to put them into wood chippers to do it.
The previous mechanism was offshoring of physical labor, the new mechanism will route intellectual labor to the data centers. There's a more interesting conversation to be had about how offloading the intellectual labor to machines makes everyone collectively dumber, but that conversation might be even more fraught. Thinking is hard, learning is harder.
I think this is a bad framing. We ought all want AI to go well. It has the potential to end toil, cure disease and bring about incredible abundance. I am no overlord, but I have loved ones I've watched die to cancer, I spend a significant amount of my life in an office do work I'd rather not do. The benefit I care about is to me and everyone else. This us vs them framing is the problem. Yes, we need to implement some policy to make sure we have a solution to keep the economy going and the people having buying power if work is alleviated and that will necessarily include taking things from the entrenched owners of things, whether it be the labs or other legal owners of things. But the lab leaders aren't even opposing this. They've written long posts, raised the alarm and spoken at length about how we need to do this. There doesn't need to be some knock out fight at all.
I don't disagree! I think it will end toil, cure disease, and bring about incredible abundance... for a select group of people, who will do everything in their power to make sure it will increase my toil, monetize the cures for diseases they inflict on me, and make it harder for me to attain abundance.
Even if we go fully post-scarcity, we can't change people. We might be able to do so, but only if we change the definition. There is too much human joy in causing others suffering even if there was no profit in it.
Why on earth would anyone want to increase your toil when they have full automation? What possible theory of mind could exist for this? Just pure malevolence? why would they wait until it's pointless to increase your toil?
You still don't understand what I'm saying?
I work in automation and I believe there is a good chance at this point it's a net negative for humanity, especially given serious knowledge of the people funding and in charge of these projects. Even discounting malevolence, I doubt very much that full automation will reduce suffering, especially in cases where automation has proven to be more expensive than humans, or you can offload the human cost onto others. What nobody is willing to say is that automation is done a lot of the time not out of cost, productivity, or profit reasons but because the ownership doesn't trust or like humans, and sees them as incidental business expenses and an obstacle.
Why should I trust these people who despise everything about humans when they say it'll be used for my benefit? Previous technological advances that were supposed to free us have not done so. You could argue that AI is different, but I'm not really arguing about AI, I'm talking about people.
Speaking as someone who’s weighed up automating some processes versus hiring some manual workers to do it, there seems a world of difference between “we’d rather automate this because hiring a team will open us up to lots more compliance, plus it’ll be really inconvenient if they drop out or aren’t any good or demand more interesting work or we decide to end the project” versus hating people and wanting them to suffer.
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