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Since @Hawaii98 complains about insufficient quantity of quality commentary, I've taken it upon myself to cover one of the topics proposed by @greyenlightenment, namely the doxxing of Based Beff Jesos, the founder of effective accelerationism. My additional commentary, shallow though it may be, got out of hand, so it's a standalone post now: E/acc and the political compass of AI war.
Quoting Forbes:
My main objective is to provide the reader with convenient links to do own research and contribute to the debate, so I rapidly switch from Beff to a brief review of new figures in AI safety discourse, and conclude that the more important «culture war» of the future will be largely fought by the following factions:
In the spirit of making peace with inevitability of most discussion taking place in the main thread, I repost this here.
edit: not to toot my own horn, but
I am checking here less and less often because A) with my current concerns and the way wind blows, Western culture war is largely irrelevant B) there's little for me to contribute in addition to all that has been said and C) I've concluded that my ability at making commentary is better used for making an impact.
edit 2: I also mildly dislike the fact that standalone posts need approval, though I can see how that follows from the problem/design choice of easy anon registration.
What impact?
I think the interesting question is who is going to have more impact on the discourse?
It seems manifestly obvious to me that the answer will be 2. Google engineers are often very smart people, but in the end Silicon Valley has always bowed down to Washington, and to some extent to Wall Street.
It's like, imagine some absurd new war breaks out in some corner of the world nobody cares about and that nobody expected. Who suddenly has power? Is it the one analyst at a dusty CIA desk or the two guys in some obscure think tank in DC who were the only people who cared before this incident happened? Probably not, it's everyone powerful who jumps in on the gravy train now that something interesting has happened.
I don't think so. For example, I think 'true UBI' will never happen. Which is not to say that I expect the Manna scenario (and indeed I've argued it makes little sense for elites to pursue here before). It's to say that stratification by resource distribution is key to all human hierarchies and it's hard to see this system being abandoned any time soon. Therefore UBI will be distributed according to how closely some individual or group fulfils the role the 'system' considers prosocial in that context. Social credit, belonging to the right group, participating in a certain way, all this varies, but the core structure will be similar - UBI if.
I also think you'll see huge cultural shifts, as huge amounts of ambitious young (particularly young male) energy that has been devoted into pursuing economic self-improvement must suddenly be redirected into some other avenue. It could easily be video games or weightlifting (some would say it already is), but it could be something else.
I also have become more and more sceptical that mass automation heralds some new age of leisure in general. We already live (as both you and I have argued) in a substantially 'automated' society. Even if FALC is technically impossible, in the richest countries it's likely a high standard of living could be maintained with only 20% or even less of the population in full-time employment, the rest work bullshit jobs as per (slighly modified) Graeber. I now consider it substantially possible that in fifty years time the majority of the working age population engages in some form of 'employment'. You really can legislate luddism, New Jersey kept gas pump operators employed sixty years after they ceased to exist elsewhere after all.
I do think e/acc is compelling, and there's no inherent reason why huge social problems can't be brute forced by creating a machine god. The problem, as ever, will be that the solutions the machine god comes up with won't be amenable to a large proportion of the population, including many e/acc types.
There are different grades of what we might call "post-scarcity", from the worst being something akin to modern welfare or even medieval charity, to the unbounded abundance if we somehow get infinite energy/negentropy (I'm not counting on that).
Thus, even if we don't all receive an equal share, given the sheer amount of resources out there, even just in the Solary System, I fully expect that even with a non-egalitarian distribution, we can all be wealthy beyond belief, or if you've got an exceptionally vivid imagination, leading the kinds of lives available to a modern billionaire or at least a multi-millionaire. That's still true even if the people with the lion's share are truly absurdly well off, the former represents a rounding error on available resources for a long, long time.
In other words, if they were motivated to maintain hierarchies, it could be on the scale of who has dibs over entire star systems or galaxies while the rest of us are merely filthy rich.
One can argue that, from the perspective of a medieval peasant or even nobility, we're already there, at least in the West.
Call me a congenital optimist, but I don't expect that the people who do opt to keep the rest of us alive after we're economically obsolete are likely to keep us at subsistence levels or even what we might call in hardship today if they wanted to cheap out, there's always VR, and I'm not one to turn my nose up at it. I'd obviously prefer a more equitable distribution, but there are plenty of ways to slice the lightcone such that the scraps provide eudaimonia..
Most people become rich through mutually positive sum trade with others, at least these days.
Bezos didn't become a billionaire by "taking resources" from others, he sold a product that people were willing to buy, in the form of something as incredibly useful as Amazon. I reject the "and opportunities" part because it means nothing of significance, sure, someone else might have come up with the idea later or perhaps executed it well enough to capture the value, but they didn't, and I fail to see how it's Bezos's fault for that.
This is broadly true for anyone who isn't wealthy via being a corrupt politician or oligarch.
I certainly disagree, at least with an attempt to clump such an amorphous group under the same banner as Soros and Co. Most of them aren't ideologically motivated to make us bugmen.
Besides, that's driven by (grossly wrong) opinions on the sustainability of modern capitalist growth, and I see no reason to assume they fetishize that for its own sake.
Barring the invention of FTL, dividing the light cone is a process of billions of years. I remind you that merely making everyone else supremely wealthy by modern standards is nothing next to that, even if they're not made true equals.
If they even tolerate our existence and subsidize our lives, then the additional expense of keeping us that way is nothing at all. I'm not claiming the former is a given, just that going to the latter when you're already there is no big deal, in much the same way that almost anyone who cares enough to tip a beggar isn't also going to the trouble of finding the smallest denomination of currency in the world to give them.
All it takes is one entity holding a non-negligible portion of the cosmic endowment having charitable urges, and they can take care of us for geological timescales. My opinion of the elite is nowhere low enough to think that low bar can't be met.
See, I strongly disagree that most of the "elite" are misanthropes who would consign us all to death if it was costless to do so, at least when simply giving us most of the things we do want is, in absolute terms, hardly any more expensive.
I don't think Soros wants us to endure privation for the sake of it, most people who espouse such claims (and many non-elite do! There are plenty of middle class people who demand austerity and "sustainable living" just as loudly), do so because they think expecting sustained economic growth will be catastrophic.
That is an incredibly stupid notion, but to the extent that it's a distinction worth making, that makes them misguided and not evil. Sure, there's quite a bit of aesthetic fetishism involved, such as Greens hating on nuclear power which is greener in both a literal and metaphorical sense than they ever could be, but it's not the overwhelming motivation.
As I've said in the past, one of the reason the wealthy dislike the poor is because the latter have enough power to be a nuisance or intrude on their sensibilities. They're uncouth, they demand a say in public affairs, they threaten your wellbeing if you don't surrender gibs and so on.
On the other hand, how many people hate monkeys in zoos? If you think that hobo on the subway was an incoherent shit-slinger, you've seen nothing yet. However, since they're modestly interesting, don't do any harm, and are utterly powerless, it's not a big deal at all to cough up the pocket change to keep them in conditions that, in the better class of zoo, constitute an improvement over their state in nature! Zoo lions might not roam the Serengeti, but they don't starve to death nor worry about outsiders killing them, then their cubs, so as to make their wives fertile and ripe for the raping.
Just about nobody advocates for both keeping lions and monkeys around and keeping them in conditions barely better than non-existence. The power differential and burden of care between us and godlike Masters of the Universe will be OOMs higher in the former and lower in the latter.
The way I see it, in an unevenly distributed post-Singularity world, the gulf between the people who dominate and the rest of us will easily be as large, if not larger, than that between us and monkeys today. At that point, assuming that status hierarchies exist, and that these entities care about them, I don't expect to see the people in charge weight their status therein on dominating us, not when they can measure relativistic kill penises with the Matrioshka Brain next door.
I expect that they'll be thinking along the lines of "damn, Bezos Prime Alpha 1.2 managed to get dibs on that pair of binary neutron stars I was eyeing" rather than obsessing over the 0.000001% of increased output they could gain by getting rid of us quaint throwbacks.
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