2mo ago

Singularity for me but not for thee

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It's a weird conclusion to take that the people working towards or excited about a world where AI robots have automated all labour and resources and services are free and near unlimited for everyone would want to limit that to only white people, or people who are rich now - since being 'rich' in a world with unlimited resources isn't really a concept.
I can only talk with certainty about myself, but I would hazard a guess that the majority of people excited about a post scarcity world are not part of the bourgeoisie, and see it as a way to solve the social injustice issues we see now but are powerless to do anything significant about, not to further exacerbate wealth inequality - there would be no motive to hoard resources in a world without scarcity, when you can have most of what you ever dreamed of and so can everyone else, including the people living in what were formerly third world countries.
It's a dream of a paradise, not a dystopia, and it's a dream people are actually working towards, to try and make the world better. What is the comic writer doing to make the world better? Donating a fraction of the money that current charities need? Tearing down other people's attempts at solutions? Complaining online about how other people aren't doing anything about the starving children in Africa?
Not to say there aren't legitimate fears of AI, such as a misaligned ASI being created that turns into a paperclip maximiser and destroys everything we care about. But that's a very different argument than what the comic writer is making.
- Increasing wealth has only ever been observed to fuel greater inequality.
  I don't see any evidence that the value that increasing automation is bringing will be distributed more evenly.
  We produce enough food for everyone and still let people starve - equal access to AI is even harder to justify than equal access to food.
  
  I’m not so sure about that. When we compare medieval wealth inequality to now, it was worse back then. Ew, a link to Reddit, but it’s got good info.
  Not saying we don’t need to fix things… we need to destroy even the concept of billionaires. While things are bad, and trending worse, they’re not yet “literally eat the rich” bad.
  
  Only when not looked at on a global scale (such as 1% owns 99% being assumed to be about the USA rather than global wealth). Mormengil's opening response is very feels over facts (also the claim that there was no state support for the poor can be technically true, but churches and local elite as well as royal dictat were often involved in poor relief and charity in the Middle Ages), the later response are better detailed.
  And in the 1200s, global wealth inequality and access to food was for much of the world better or comparable to where it is now.
  But global wealth inequality and access to food got worse after colonisation rearranged American and then African economies for European, and then USAian, benefit.
  AI is already filled with implicit bias towards the current status quo. It can be very tricky to get AI chatbots to give anything other than platitudes about inequality, and they're often very quick to try to shut down or redirect talk of system change. To think that they'll not reflect continued post colonial and extractivist systems of power seems, to me, shortsighted.
  
  I'm not sure that link does have good info.
  That's a 0 point comment on ask historians, from 11 years ago, with no sources listed, no details and little explanation. The follow-up comments have a little more info but only from 1870, and even then it's only talking about land not wealth. Also the only source linked is a NY Review of Books article that 404s.
  I think it's fairly safe to assume that wealth inequality was lower before industrialization. That really supercharges the power of capital, encouraging and rewarding larger and larger accumulations of capital. Before that it's also much harder to get reliable data.
  Aristotle in the politics mentions a plan to cap wealth inequality at 1:5. Once you have more than 5 times the poorest citizen, your wealth is redistributed. He thinks it too radical, but could you imagine anyone talking about capping CEO pay at 5 times the janitor? That's unthinkable to us.
  
  You would just have to let an superintelligent (aligned) AI robot loose and prompt it to produce enough food for everyone. It wouldn't even be any maintaining effort, once the robot had been created. If it doesn't have any negative consequences to the creators to have positive consequences for everyone else, and there are any empathetic people on the board of creators, I don't see why it wouldn't be programmed to benefit everyone.
  
  As long as it doesn’t generate any negative externalities, sure. That’s a huge alignment problem though.
  
  True, and I have my doubts on the alignment problem being solved. But that's a technical problem, a separate conversation from whether even attempting it is worthwhile in the first place.
- We don't live in a limitless world. And adding robots will not change the limits. It just changes who does the work.
  
  That's why I said near unlimited. Creating a Dyson swarm will give us near unlimited energy for anything we want to reasonable do. Robots can give us near unlimited food by working tirelessly on farms on O'Neill cylinders. The same cylinders can give us near unlimited space to live, while preserving the natural world on Earth.
  Some people won't get their most outlandish fantasies, but the vast majority of people will get the vast majority of what they want, and everyone will get unlimited free time to be creative or socialise. Mandatory jobs, the great thief of time, will have been slain, assuming you believe the robots are not conscious. It would be a vast improvement on what we have now, for everyone.
  
  So, mythical heaven? Religion made of machines. Spirituality from a piece of tech you hope to one day fix everything because of faith. Something that let's you ignore now and possible futures so you can have a singular one to believe in.
  You do understand the comic. You are just are angry it called your god fiction.
  
  I'm not sure where all the allusions to religion come from, or why you're so against a dream of a world where everyone is free from work and most suffering. Trying to fix the world now is admirable, and one way to do that is to work on long term solutions such as working on automation technology.
  It's not faith to extrapolate that the advances we've made in automation so far are likely to extend to eventually almost all forms of work being automated. It's not faith, because I still admit the possibility that it may not happen. But imagining it happening, wanting it to happen, and trying to work on making it happen seems nothing but positive to me. And it's still not chauvinism, to refer to the earlier point. Do you still believe that, or have I managed to convince you of that point, at least?
  
  When I became atheist, I figured “if God doesn’t exist, we’ll have to make heaven ourselves.”
  And I believe we’ll do it, given enough time (probably hundreds/thousands of years).

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