It is quite telling that so many comments here are about UBI as a solution. UBI is a billionaire proposed solution, or distraction. Yeah, of course they want to keep control of the surplus and just have a sustenance spigot for the former workers.
> We are allowed to regulate businesses. We simply don't.
If workers are defunct, what are businesses? Also defunct. Business owners can’t gloat about not needing workers while at the same time claiming that their businesses have a right to life. What is a business owner sitting on a completely automated set of assets? Smaug sitting on his cache of gold.
In that sense the general public is less superstitious than many technologists. Some of the general public might anthropomorphize too hard. Which is pretty tame compared to the belief of the alien AI intelligence sprouting and killing us accidentally or intentionally.
As far as the paperclip problem is concerned, we’ve already had that problem for a long time now in the form of good old fashioned human institutions.
> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society.
This is straightforward? This is a colossal task. Monumental. Billionaires own it. That’s the political status quo. You could build something to counter those centers of power. But from what base?
Well-paid software developers have scoffed at or been ignorant of worker organizing for, maybe forever? But I have good paycheck and equity... Now what?
But it's not a clear way to solve the issue. UBI, even if enacted tomorrow, doesn't stop the enormous crash of the middle-class, and the fallout of that. Maybe it will stop some people from literally dying - that's "solved"? It's a small buffer at the very worst end of a gigantic problem. The word "solve" is totally ridiculous.
Okay you’re right. In some sense of the word it is straightforward. But I still think it is not straightforward compared to most things.
I can get more muscle mass at the gym. That is straightforward. Only a few things makes it not easy.
But “share the productivity with society at large”... you have to collapse so many more variables.
- How to organize political resistance against AI tech billionaires
- How to not get co-opted by counter-measures by AI tech billionaires
- How to resist false promises (backed by nothing) that some AI tech billionaire will enact UBI for everyone so everything will be fine (those with all the power can withdraw whatever they want at any point)
- How to deal with white collar competition in the interim period before automation: everyone using AI and nodding along with it[1] just to not “fall behind”
- How to potentially fight against a small minority (AI tech billionaires) but that now might have enough megawatts to turn their stochastic parrots against any dissenters
Weird to have these threads and then fifteen minutes later there will be a 350+ comment, 500+ votes thread about some 200 USD/month AI subscription service which is now the I Have Seen The Light moment and My Beautiful Side Projects Are Finally Materializing.
This is creative destruction in a whole new sense. Just chugging through genuine (or human) creativity, then training on human prompting, then finally ascending near the cluster of Anthropic/AWS nuclear power plants. And people pay for the pleasure.
Vibecoders are by now completely dependent on their subscriptions. Their skills are in the process of deterioration, they have no other choice. It's like heroin.
> If some new slow method of societally expensive suicide hit the market, it would get banned quick smart. Cigarettes have only stuck around so long because of legacy and well funded lobbyists and PR / marketing types that have been happy to lie at the cost of millions of lives.
> Nice, let's defend that.
Many discussions about freedom are just marketing and corporate interests in a trench coat.
I get the apparent logic of phasing cigarettes into unlawfulness over decades. But considering this is so one-sided in terms of curtailing liberty for one generation,[1] it would have been interesting if they also got a privilege that us oldies are cut off from. Just as a perk to offset things.
But whatever could that be? Twenty-year 5% discount on vegetables?
[1] But this youngest generation also gets the privilege of never having easy access to cigarettes.
> [1] But this youngest generation also gets the privilege of never having easy access to cigarettes.
Being an island, it's probably slightly easier to control smuggling, but if there's money to be made, people will be smuggling in cartons. Anyway, getting an older person to buy cigs isn't difficult, and they're still legal for the majority of the population. I doubt smoking will become immediately attractive, but if the ban sticks around, probably in a decade or so tobacco will be a niche hipster rebellion, then become poser-cool, then totally normalized again.
"being an island" doesnot, in fact, make it easier to inhibit smuggling. One reason, the sheer number of small, unstaffed seaports and the volume of small fishing vessel traffic does in fact make it easier for unobserved ingress of materials under the guisd of small commercial and noncommercial fishing and small to midsize shipping. (see Scotland as major import of currently illicit drugs and undocumented refugees)
Adding another globally common and less regulated substance to the list of extrajudicial desireables simply equals a performance bonus and being low aquisition risk (already shipping other goods from places that grow tobacco and make cigs) as an incentive for the already very profitable and active operators of these networks.
From my perspective this would simply make being a smuggler easier and more profitable and be a value uplift for corrupt enforcement and a net reduction in collectable taxes... moving the revenue from comsumption tax books to black market coffers.
> "being an island" doesnot, in fact, make it easier to inhibit smuggling. One reason, the sheer number of small, unstaffed seaports and the volume of small fishing vessel traffic does in fact make it easier for unobserved ingress of materials under the guisd of small commercial and noncommercial fishing and small to midsize shipping. (see Scotland as major import of currently illicit drugs and undocumented refugees)
I mean, sure, that's true, but is it more difficult to smuggle by walking or driving over an imaginary line or getting a boat and crew and crossing the water? I don't see water as being the low-effort option.
They're about the same in practice .. with a boat having the advantage of being able to unload tonnes of goods outside a national limit in open waters for pickup by fisherman where heavy incoming tonnages by truck or aircraft are a little more constrained in respect to transport path (roads for haulage) and drop offs (typically airfields, air drops are relatively rare (but not unheard of)).
Taxes as they currently exist are a bandaid on wealth inequality. Getting rid of rich people parasitism would be a better way to balance the budget than either right-libertarian principles or taxing commoners for their stress relief like tobacco.
Though judging by the amount milords in the article I suspect that is far ways off.
Plain text coupled with non-deterministic interfaces (AI) is not great. It’s like a hybrid: some of the best of old school tech coupled with the most sketchy high tech.
I will now get to have Kafkaesque conversations with computers in MarkDown.
> We are allowed to regulate businesses. We simply don't.
If workers are defunct, what are businesses? Also defunct. Business owners can’t gloat about not needing workers while at the same time claiming that their businesses have a right to life. What is a business owner sitting on a completely automated set of assets? Smaug sitting on his cache of gold.
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