> All of these arguments in this thread are essentially attacks on free market capitalism.
These argument aren't attacks because one of the basic tenets of free market capitalism is that everyone being greedy for himself is good for everybody. So people saying that corporations care only about profit and not about higher values only reaffirm that basic tenet.
You could try to convince them that they are wrong in their desire to make corporations care about more than money but you cannot blame them for saying something that fully agrees with free market orthodoxy.
> the same arguments hold about management and investors... reducing domestic employment in manufacturing without regard to employees and communities. > If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good?
First, automaton wasn't the reason for the reduction of US manufacturing, outsourcing was. Wall Street used every leverage to push manufacturing and engineering abroad and that included outsourcing software work. At that time, both workers and engineers criticized the process, so you're factually wrong about that, twice.
Second, their criticism was right because... oh look, we have to bring it all back now, at a great expense paid for... by those same workers and engineers. Because after the big corporations got rich in China they want to come back here and own absolutely everything, including the government and continue the process of disfranchisement of the public by using AI not for higher output but as a cost and workforce reduction tool.
> It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.
This topic has nothing to do with Marxism, which you appear to be using as a smear word, purely mechanically, without any understanding. Marxism has bigger problems but let's not get sidetracked here.
> I think it depends on the individual... plenty who earlier warned about how terrible Trump was, then... jumped on the bandwagon.
That kind of says the opposite - for the vast majority of individuals, incentives matter more than their innate convictions (and we're losing those at a fast rate, thanks to modern education and entertainment...)
> I will never understand why people post these clearly ai-generated articles under their personal name without at least disclosing they didn't write it.
First, "ai-generated" is a huge assumption without any proof. The article could've been only spell-checked, or proof-read, or assisted by AI - you don't know. If you really think it was "ai-generated", prove it by providing the prompts that generated it. Lacking that, your comment is baseless.
Second, the author is whoever writes the prompts, anyway.
> they have a very predictable markdown structure (these 5-6 word summary headers before every paragraph), a predictable length, and of course full of em dashes.
Totally irrelevant peeving over form with nothing of substance.
> Immediately removes credibility... you're being duped... to get traffic to their site... you fell for it.
I don't know what generated that, but it's not an honest person. On the other hand, the original article is excellent.
> or even libertarians tend to agree civil court is an important function.
Libertarians cannot agree on anything between themselves, they are programmed to hate the government, the hate for each other and humanity as a whole is just a natural consequence of that.
> From the article in the comment above, it seems like lack of government involvement is a factor.
We now have a government that is unwilling to control market excess because the government and big business have merged into one. Actually, the government has resigned from that "core function".
> In my now long lifetime, I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase "This time it really is different"
This isn't an argument and it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of risk and game theory.
Besides, it's always been different, in the sense of boiling frog temperature going up. The present case is more different because this time, the rate of rising is high enough to make the frogs uncomfortable... and you're trying to calm them down and keep them in the water:
> Look frogs, the temps've always been rising, "many times I've heard the phrase "This time it really is different" for it to turn out that it really wasn't all that different."
> Maybe this time it is, but I'd put my bet on isn't.
Bro, it's not about betting... you have to try hard to learn something about risk.
> Better than your kids having to move to China for upward mobility, which is the way we're currently headed.
I see, we're currently headed in the direction of falling skies, imminent nuclear threats and various other nasty Godzillas which, of course, urgently require more sacrifice from the population for more "preventive" wars, both trade and kinetic, so that the value of assets concentrated in very few hands can grow faster.
It's really urgent, honest! These same hands benefited greatly from globalization, but now, on the way back, it's your turn to sacrifice for their continued benefit.
> DOE is not and has a proven track record of controlling nuclear material in far more challenging scenarios than some startups with enough diluted PU for a reactor.
Really? In the case of the Apollo affair, also known as NUMEC affair, the DOE lost enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs. NUMEC wasn't a big company.
Your statement is backwards. The larger the organization using the material is, the easier it is to control its use. Multiple cases of "some startups" are the opposite of that and a lot harder to control.
> enough diluted PU for a reactor
Diluted PU is chemically separable, no need for fancy centrifuges, "some startup" can easily extract weapons grade material and it doesn't take much to cause irreparable harm to the US.
> Those risks are frankly trivial compared to the ones related to pollution and climate change people are willing to endure because it doesn't tickle their monkey brain with the "nuclear" word.
A rogue nuke can do a lot more damage than pollution, especially in the current political climate. You severely underestimate the difficulties of safeguarding nuclear materials too. Pollution and climate change are several orders of magnitude less risky than willy-nilly distribution of plutonium.
And of course, "monkey brain" is a cheap manipulation attempt.
In 1965. So much has changed since, especially when it comes to accountability and tracking of nuclear material and waste.
Yes in theory, no in practice the attempt to do so would probably require a state sponsor. Now you have US companies transferring PU to a foreign power to turn into weapons grade? For what? The pleasure of ending up in ADX Florence until they die?
It really can't, over a million people die annually from air pollution alone, never mind the billions expected to perish as a result of downstream effects of climate change. Frankly a nuke or two is nothing by comparison, even if this story had anything to do with nuclear weapons...
There's no solid proof that the changes were for the better, but such a proof is absolutely necessary. If anything, we've been recently observing deepening quid pro quo between government and business, at the expense of public interests.
> would probably require a state sponsor
The probability of that is far above zero while it should be practically indistinguishable from it - which is not realistic.
> It really can't, over a million people die annually from air pollution alone, never mind the billions expected to perish as a result of downstream effects of climate change.
It's pretty clear you're looking at the wrong equation. I am all for nuclear power but plutonium is absolutely irrelevant to the plight of pollution and climate.
Nuclear power has to be built slowly with great caution together with renewables in order to exclude Fukushimas, Chernobyls and Three Mile Islands. It's hard as it is even without plutonium in the mix. Much like in the case of rushed AI and data centers, "move fast and break things" is the wrong attitude here.
There's conventional uranium fuel with low enrichment which is hard to separate, it can work as well or better than plutonium for power in civilian installations, the latter isn't necessary, it only adds risk without any benefit compared to uranium.
> Frankly a nuke or two is nothing by comparison,
This is breathtakingly wrong. What follows "a nuke or two" can wipe out 90% of the globe, and the US isn't going to be spared. If you don't understand that, you need to research more.
> I want to believe AI is the solution, but it's far from certain.
AI could be an important part of the solution... or it could be used to make the problems much worse, unimaginably worse, if good men do nothing smart enough to prevent it.
> But sadly it’s not some evil dudes at the top doing this transfer, the market force behind it is because we promised old people way too aggressive paychecks when they retired.
You seem to be quite confused about pensions, not only "old people" have pensions. Actually the vast majority of contributions to pensions funds come from people who aren't old at all and are actively employed.
> If they do not have the higher PE returns, they basically go out if cash in 10 years and everyone would scream bloody murder.
Where would they "scream"? On the internet? And who'd hear them? The answer is nobody in any PE cares about anyone screaming.
PE's operations have nothing to do with screaming old people, that viewpoint simply avoids the real issues and replaces them with red herring age baiting.
> You seem to be quite confused about pensions, not only "old people" have pensions. Actually the vast majority of contributions to pensions funds come from people who aren't old at all and are actively employed.
This is exactly how pensions work: newer members to the defined benefits plan pay for older members. This isn't surprising.
> Where would they "scream"? On the internet? And who'd hear them? The answer is nobody in any PE cares about anyone screaming.
At the ballot box. There is a reason that public pensions are exempt from the PBGC reserve ratio requirements. People with pensions aggressively vote their interest.
> This is exactly how pensions work: newer members to the defined benefits plan pay for older members.
No, that's now how they work, if that was the case, there wouldn't be any need for PEs to buy and enshitify the assets we are talking about here. Your current description contradicts your previous comment.
I'm not going to explain it to you, there's enough information about the topic.
> At the ballot box.
We don't vote for PEs. And who we vote for makes no difference to them, these truths are so basic, it's a shame you don't know them.
In practice this is exactly how they work, whether it was intended or not. Otherwise it would look a lot less like a defined benefits plan and more like a defined contribution plan.
> AI is a losing bet either way. It’s a “dehumanising" technology, controlled by a handful of people.
That's not a law of nature, it's a consequence of the current system of laws, and only one of its problems among many others - this is important to understand because removing AI (an impossible task, but let's hallucinate), isn't going to fix the system.
> at currently zero overall value for humanity itself,
The value of AI is currently negative - the costs outweigh the benefits, but the reason for it is the rushed and economically reckless deployment. Again, that's not due to how AI has to be it's due to how we do it.
> This whole AI displacement of human values and creation won’t go down without a fight,
There are a lot of ways to "fight", the good ones don't involve getting physical or getting mad.
> what we see are just the first ripples of human collective anger and unlike in the movies, my bet is on the humans.
Anger is a recipe for disasters. AI is here to stay, the cat is out of the bag, there's no way to put it back in, it's basic politics. Fixating on AI, instead of fixing our ways of using AI, is a major blunder.
The fix isn't as simple as "in the movies", it's outside of the mainstream but that space is a minefield too - there's a lot to learn before good choices can be made.
These argument aren't attacks because one of the basic tenets of free market capitalism is that everyone being greedy for himself is good for everybody. So people saying that corporations care only about profit and not about higher values only reaffirm that basic tenet.
You could try to convince them that they are wrong in their desire to make corporations care about more than money but you cannot blame them for saying something that fully agrees with free market orthodoxy.
> the same arguments hold about management and investors... reducing domestic employment in manufacturing without regard to employees and communities. > If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good?
First, automaton wasn't the reason for the reduction of US manufacturing, outsourcing was. Wall Street used every leverage to push manufacturing and engineering abroad and that included outsourcing software work. At that time, both workers and engineers criticized the process, so you're factually wrong about that, twice.
Second, their criticism was right because... oh look, we have to bring it all back now, at a great expense paid for... by those same workers and engineers. Because after the big corporations got rich in China they want to come back here and own absolutely everything, including the government and continue the process of disfranchisement of the public by using AI not for higher output but as a cost and workforce reduction tool.
> It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.
This topic has nothing to do with Marxism, which you appear to be using as a smear word, purely mechanically, without any understanding. Marxism has bigger problems but let's not get sidetracked here.
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