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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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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.

The OpenAI board has hired Emmett Shear as CEO. He is the former CEO of Twitch.

My understanding is that Sam is in shock.

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.

Motte: e/acc is just techno-optimism, everyone who is against e/acc must be against building a better future and hate technology

Bailey: e/acc is about building a techno-god, we oppose any attempt to safeguard humanity by regulating AI in any form around and around and around"

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1683208767054438400

Motte: e/acc is just techno-optimism, everyone who is against e/acc must be against building a better future and hate technology

Bailey: e/acc is about building a techno-god, we oppose any attempt to safeguard humanity by regulating AI in any form around and around and around"

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.

Ok, so now we're back to the thing I originally complained about: vaguely mystical predictions of a massive social revolution. Is it possible at all to talk about specifics?

Another pet peeve of mine is, if people are going to predict massive revolutions reshaping our societies, can they at least do it right? The current state of AI, and the law of comparative advantage, clearly implies replacing intellectual, not manual labor.

Yes. With enough investment - I will have a robot that will be good enough cleaning lady, housekeeper and gardener. That will be also able to do some basic house/electric maintenance stuff. I was joking couple of years ago that the Qatari definition of hard labor is the act of pointing the bangladeshi what to move and where. Also nurses and whatnot.

It will start as simple things - better roombas, tile laying and painting machines etc etc. Even the blue collar work will be augmented. Eventually we will get to good enough universal laborer.

Judging by the way other household appliances adoption was done - it will become extremely affordable in just a couple of years. In the west - I don't care about the rest of the world - it will only make migration problems sharper and worse - since the people coming are literally worthless except as organ donors or sex work. It will also deprive the developing world of chances to develop - the only thing they will have worth anything - their natural resources.

If you are on the right side of the divide it will be utopian. If you are on the wrong - dystopia.

Yes. With enough investment - I will have a robot that will be good enough cleaning lady, housekeeper and gardener.

And what is it that you will be making your income from?

Donating organs and/or sex work?