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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   3995 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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How are you feeling about "The AI Takeover"? Have you gotten more optimistic, more pessimistic?

I have to be honest that I'm positively gleeful. AI appears to be trending in a more anarchic direction as opposed to the more totalitarian direction that everyone assumed. We now have open source LLMs running on home computers approaching parity with the big corporate datacenter AIs. LLMs appear to be a totally uncontainable technology, with everyone training small LLMs by stealing data from big LLMs. I feel like Christmas has come early.

And I have to laugh that the people who hurt me and held me back in life are the same people, left right and center, who are now so terrified that AI will disrupt society. I say let AI disrupt society! If the average US man knew what I know after living in a foreign country, it would totally destroy American society. If you're one of these people that demands that society is morally structured in a specific way (what I might call a moralist), well, how are you going to force people to play your social games in the future? I can just tell my assistant to dream up a world where I don't have to play said games. Uncontainable AIs make uncontainable humans.

A couple months ago I posted a prediction that humans would mostly be socially isolated in the age of AI, due to the forces of moralists making ordinary human interaction impossible. But now I think that the moralists will become totally powerless. (Moralists would be the top of the political compass, sometimes called authoritarians, and the opposite of anarchists.) If nobody has to work, then that takes away the biggest level of power in most people's lives. And TPTB would have no choice but to either share economic power or kill us. (I think the later outcome, and the related idea of Big Yud DOOM, are unlikely for other reasons I can get into if you're curious.) If TPTB don't control all the robots, that's an even less governable situation!

Anyway it's been a crazy couple of months! How has the recent developments in AI changed how you feel about the future? More or less concerned about Big Yud DOOM? Or do you think it's all overhyped?

To be clear, I think there will be UBI, but I think every government will attach strings to it that involve a hybrid of existing incentives, social credit and new incentives.

I don't think it actually changes your point, but I don't think "UBI" is an appropriate term for the type of welfare / economy design you're talking about. The key distinguishing factor between UBI and welfare is that UBI is universal, paid out at the exact same rate to all adults (although I guess I've seen discussions over exactly how to handle payments to people in prison, with some versions stopping UBI payments to them).

I don't think this is an argument against expecting the world to possibly look like this or even an argument against expecting politicians to implement it and call it UBI.

UBI obliterates the 'carrot'.

I assume the idea is that we're predicting a society where there's no jobs (since AI does all of them) so there's no opportunities for income other than welfare? If that's the case, then not having a welfare scheme is sentencing all of the non-owners to death. If it's not the case, then there's still a carrot. Maybe there's some in-between here where somehow neither is the case?

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