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 -
Another day, another entrant into the OpenAI drama. Emmett Shear is the new interim CEO of OpenAI.
I don't know why it was surprising to people that Sam wouldn't come back. The company was meant to be subservient to the nonprofit's goals and I'm not sure why the attempted coup from Sam's side (you know the whole effectively false reporting that Sam Altman was to become the new CEO) was apparently "shocking" that it failed.
https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101
What's kinda sad about all of this is how much people were yearning for Sam Altman to be the CEO as if he isn't probably one of the worst possible candidates. Like maybe this is just a bunch of technolibertarians on Twitter or HN or something who think that the ultimate goal of humanity is how many numbers on a screen you can earn, but the amazing amount of unearned reverence towards a VC to lead the company.
In any case, here's to hoping that Laundry Buddy won't win out in the rat race for AGI, lest we live in a world optimized for maximum laundry detergent. Maybe we'll avoid that future now with Sam's departure.
Anyway, I'll leave this to munch on which I found from the HN thread.
https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1683208767054438400
I'm a grumpy Luddite who hates the idea of AI regardless of whether it delivers on all it's promises, spells our doom, or fails to deliver on any of the hype either way and ends up just being another iterative improvement. It feels I somehow found myself in the middle of a battlefield as two religiously fanatic armies are about to clash and rip each other to shreds.
Can't you guys settle your differences in the Las Vegas Octagon, or something?
In the last 6 months I have thrown every menial dev work I could at chat gpt. For me there is no turning back for QoL improvements. For 20$ month you get a whole Bangalore team of juniors.
Yeah, but that's not what everybody is getting hyped up / scared to death about. Everybody's talking about how this is infinitely scalable and how this means doom / utopia.
I think that will LLM and the battery tech improvement we observe - eliminating manual labor in 20 years is real possibility. That is both doom and utopia for big parts of the world.
I still think most white collar stuff will go first, but certainly with LLMs applied to robotics it’s clear now that blue collar labor won’t be far behind.
At some point, maybe, but why waste GPUs on manual labor, when naked monkeys can dig for cobalt for a mere 2-3K calories of Uncle Klaus' Bugs?
Yeah obviously in parts of the world where labor is $1 a day it’ll take much longer. But at the same time there could be a textiles effect (where indigenous textiles industries in Africa were totally destroyed by cheap donated clothing made in Bangladesh for the West) where they can get donated machines from Bill Gates or second hand stuff that lets them eliminate labor all the same.
Labor prices are perfectly able to adapt to the current market situation, so I don't see why the developed world should be exempt. It's also not about absolute prices, but about the relative marginal costs/profits of investing resources into building a manual labor performing robot vs. putting those same resources into expanding SkyNet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link