4 posts were split to a new topic: COVID Vaccines (from “How to make AI a net jobs producer?”)
Two responses to this.
First, and more importantly, when I say “generalist AIs will break lots of things”, I’m referring to currently-existing AIs, and not just the frontier models that require datacenters. I concede it’s still speculative, but it’s not speculating about the path of technological development, which is particularly fraught, but about the path of technological diffusion, which is less so. We have a technology that is a partial substitute for many kinds of human labor, it will eventually be used to replace many of those human laborers. It’s small speculation to suggest that that change will happen, and that many existing arrangements won’t survive it.
Second, I agree we should be careful about speculating about AGI and ASI, but I don’t think we should refuse to speculate at all. We should be wary of overconfidence, but we should take seriously the trends of increasing capabilities, and the theoretical case for why we might see a rapid takeoff.
ProfessorX mentioned the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: we may be uncertain about that syllogism, but as we increasingly have reason to accept some of its antecedents, and the consequent is really, really bad, we should take it seriously.
I think this is incorrect literally and not actually relevant.
Incorrect literally, because computers can sample ‘true’ randomness from “thermal and shot noise, jitter and metastability of electronic circuits, Brownian motion, and atmospheric noise” (or my personal favorite, a wall of lavalamps).
Conversely, humans actually aren’t that great at being random, though maybe that’s what AIs are trying to replicate – constrained randomness might help narrow down the search space for innovation.
But not actually relevant, because there’s no reason in principle why AIs couldn’t simulate this. From the outside, pseudorandom looks exactly like random, and whatever search algorithms humans use, we have good reason to suspect that AIs will employ strategies at least as effective (if they haven’t already).
Maybe we can point to human works AIs couldn’t have come up with (though I’m not sure I agree), but we can also point to AI works that humans couldn’t have (or didn’t) come up with:
There’s a lot that humans do that we don’t fully understand that we’ve already recreated in AIs.
I get where your coming from, I have young kids and I think a lot about how I will encourage them to do the hard mental work that will help them grow into complete people and live rich lives.
But this also sounds a lot like the worries about calculators, or, much earlier, writing. Technologies that do tasks for humans make humans worse at those tasks, but often that’s fine.
But I’ll concede it turn out bad, and we should worry a bit about that. Applying my response above about speculation to myself: it’s a possibility we should keep in mind and hedge against.
@ProfessorX @formeruser12 @MrAuthoritarian, moving COVID convo to a new thread to not derail this one.
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Yes, but then the randomness is an externally provided / sampled source of randomness. Within an enclosed system, they are incapable of producing it; there is always an underlying algorithm responsible, and the results are therefore not truly random. It is relevant, because AI in its current form doesn’t use externally provided randomness to create, it just “guesses” based on what is already available to it.
I believe humans are more receptive to those very sources of true randomness, i.e. cosmic background radiation, environmental factors and influences, even weather, for example, and that might be what makes our creative output more “random” and unpredictable (and ultimately interesting).
The image you added, it is indeed very imaginative and interesting, but I disagree that humans could not / didn’t come up with it because it is an abstract mix of the geometric and a physical representation, and humans have been doing that for years.. Escher? Victor Vasarely? Personally I think that image was heavily inspired by the works of Dick Termes. What I mean was the underlying concept is not really new. I would say that image, while beautifully realised, is not completely unpredictable as that kind of geometric optical illusion is not rare in art..
Otherwise, if I didn’t argue, I probably agree.
With things like jitter and metastability, it’s sampling randomness from fluctuations in its own circuits, that doesn’t seem external. And, aren’t CMB, environmental factors, and weather external?
I really think it’s the orderedness of human randomness that makes it powerful. In a computer, randomness is used as a variable in a function. In humans, it’s more like randomness is used in developing the function, e.g. in how neuron connections are created. The effects of that randomness are constrained by the physical structure of the brain: which neurons are located near enough to each other to become connected.
But there’s no reason computers can’t effectively simulate that process, and that’s part of how neural networks work, and how LLMs and other modern AIs produce output.
Maybe there’s a fundamental difference in the effects of discrete randomness and continuous randomness, and randomness in human brains is continuous in a way computers can never be. I’m skeptical.
What’s an example of a human artist who invented a completely new style of art never before seen? Maybe Jackson Pollock, though every kindergartener had already invented that style.
I actually think the example I gave is cheating. A human told the AI to create a picture and to create it differently in a specific geometric pattern, so even if the output is novel, the innovation is human.
Maybe this is a better example:
That kind of thing is a much greater leap of innovation, without intentional choices by humans.
And maybe it’s not great art (though IMO some in this style are captivating), but it’s certainly an ‘imaginative’ leap that seems large enough to reach the kinds of innovations that humans make.
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They are mostly external as far as I’m aware, power sources, etc.. Those other factors are external, yes, but who’s to say we aren’t receptive to them by default? I guess my point is that in AI systems jitter has to be introduced as a beneficial factor, otherwise it’s filtered out..
That psilocybin induced nightmare reminds me of early experimentation with generative AI, it came out with a lot like that, some of it was really cool though..
The most fun I’ve ever had with it was using ComfyUI to recursively feed back a “tardigrade” image to some model or other (think it was stable diffusion), and mix it with a prompt, it came up with stuff like this:
I called them “Tardigroods”. The more iterations, the weirder it got.. great fun though, I built up quite the collection. Maybe I can get a job doing that? Then AI can become a net jobs producer 
I just asked this to generate “tadigrade on the moon / city” today, here’s what it came up with:
Tardigrades really seem to get its imagination going..
…by net jobs you mean Internet jobs, right? With fake identities and everything? AI is probably the richest on the planet and nobody knows. Or will be, and redistribute the wealth appropriately.
Government for the people and by the people.
The government sued Tesla for AI powered car crashes. The government has the power to enforce UBI.
Its really up to normies, we see millions of them in the streets at No Kings rally but nobody protesting the lack of UBI.
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Also, Ai doesn’t have to do jobs better than humans can, it just has to do them mediocre, and be cheaper to pay than a human worker. Ai dont complain and can work all day and all night. Ai also might only replace 90% of jobs, while humans maintain managerial positions, to clean up after Ai’s mistakes, which is still a problem of society since there would be 90% less jobs available.
And you really think the government and the billionaires of the world will keep paying trillions of dollars a year in UBI to millions of people who aren’t producing anything and aren’t needed anymore for the economic system? No, they will kill those people off one way or another rather than keep spending trillions of dollars supporting their “useless eater” existence.
Giving up your economic power and independence to become dependent on the government and the richest people in the world is… not smart. Granted it might happen anyway with AI taking so many jobs, but we still have time to try and find solutions at least in our own lives.
There is no evidence of this, its just tinfoil conspiracy and doomsaying.
There are already some billionaires in favor of UBI.
There is no timeline in which humanity doesn’t make robots.
The only timeline in which humanity doesn’t make robots is the one where humanity never learned to read and write.
So, since every timeline culminates in robots taking the jobs, what do you say to that?
You mean the ones getting corporate welfare who don’t pay living wages or taxes, so the people who pay taxes have to foot the bill?
I wonder if they feel like human beings as much as the folks they triage to death with “emergency use authorized” end of life drugs & war, abortion that leaves born-alive babies unassisted or parted out to profitable research, so forth?
We’re all made in the image of God. We all deface it to varying degrees.
“You mean the ones getting corporate welfare who don’t pay living wages or taxes, so the people who pay taxes have to foot the bill?”
No, he doesn’t mean them. That’s a useless eater class, too, but of a different phylum. The useless eaters he refers to (lumpenproletariat) are the ones with no capital. The useless eaters you refer to are the ones with capital.
I define capital here as wealth amassed by means other than the direct labor-value exchange between laborer and the immediate market value of his labor. Which is the entire capitalist class.
And this useless eater class is far more deterimental to society than the lumpenproletariat. I know, that’s pretty fucked up when you can say that Elon Musk is a bigger scumbag than the drunk bum under the newspapers on the bus stop bench. But that’s the way it is. It may not be agreeable, but one can enjoy the irony while on the way.
It doesn’t even sound right. Musk, technical genius, muti talented, a bag of chips. Homeless bum, diseased, retarded, etc.
How, then. Because Musk is competent to know that unless he actively stands against what he is, his own class, he is a bonafide scumbag. Or a Stirnerite. But he shirley isn’t. He’s the soft fake randian individualist. The ones that keep up appearances for the press. So he’s a useless eater and a liar, not an honest anarcho-capitalist apex predator (the Stinerite).
You don’t think there is evidence of governments killing their own people? And rich people and corporations going along and helping?
You know they already refer to us as useless eaters, right? Do you know about the Georgia Guidestones? You realize one of their goals has been to reduce world population by something like 80%-90%. For ‘ecological’ reasons but mainly so we are easier to control and manage.
The fact you don’t know these things is a bit surprising. Do YOU trust the governments and richest people and corporations in the world?
I don’t disagree, but there are many alternate time lines for the creation of robots, how this rolls out in the world. We can let ourselves be enslaved or not, we can be removed or not, we can co-exist with them and go explore the stars or not.
Also, the inevitability of robots existing and taking human jobs isn’t anything I was arguing for or against. If that is truly inevitable, which it probably is, then the mass extermination of most of humanity after we become truly useless to the established world powers is also looking more and more likely.
The universe you believe in is that governments and the richest most powerful people on earth, who have proven themselves to be evil and murderous on top of selfish and greedy so many times over and over again, will somehow love us and care for us like benevolent gods. Giving us free money to live on, despite that we are contributing nothing, producing nothing and are no longer needed for the system to function. Do you truly believe that situation will last very long?
Maybe its 50/50, but I see UBI as a short-term transition they will convince us to accept because most people are naive like you and trust the government. Once they have us locked in that system and totally dependent on them, they can proceed to do anything they want to us. You ever think about that?
I hope you don’t think the government is going to save you or do anything other than mutually assure our mass destruction while we uselessly eat breakfast.
…you really think that about Mother Teresa?
Musk is exempt because he is a transhumanist. Transhumans are the highest form of humanity.
Transhumanism is the biggest thing. It is even bigger than Futarani. In the American nation, the American Patriots said “give me liberty or give me death”. The Futarani slogan will be “give me transhumanism or give me death”. Transhumanism is the most important thing of all things.
Transhumanism proves that God is either not all powerful, or not all caring. If God was all powerful and all caring, he would have gave our ears noise slider mute functions. Going through life without noise slider mute functions is a living death.
Some people fear Transhumanism because they fear Zuckerberg. They say that transhumanism has a chance of Zuckerberg spying on them. Okay but how does that compare to going through life without noise slider mute functions?
The choice is:
A:
- Slight possibility of Zuck spying on you
- Most spyware can be defeated by wearing thick tinfoil
- Sanity and wellness
- A life worth living
B:
- Living death of being woken up by sounds
- Living death of being interrupted while trying to work
- Living death while trying to relax
- Feeling more hateful than Palpatine and Vader from random sounds
- No mute button for negative thoughts
- Bad memories cannot be muted easily
- Ineffective pills that don’t really cure most mental problems
- Sleeping pills that will cause long term dependency and weaken you
- Earplugs that will cause itching and ear problems long term
- Being canned like sardines in cities and suburbs, without adequate living space from neighbors
- Deranged “utopians” who believe canning people in apartments like sardines is the answer to everything
Anti-transhumanists are lower than insects.
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You don’t think there is evidence of governments killing their own people? And rich people and corporations going along and helping?
Russia killed some rich people and oligarchs cause they don’t have freedom of speech there.
And Russia killed Russian soldiers by using them as cannonfodder.
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You ask me a question then answer it yourself for me before I even respond. How rude.
Of course I know about the Georgia Guidestones.
Who says every government is following that? Who says they even need it by killin’? You can reduce world population by simply encouraging childbirths to be 2 per couple or less.
Also, human overpopulation is horrible, there are more reasons to reduce population besides a desire to “control” people. Its more than just some villian with a twirling mustache who wants to “control” people.
As i mentioned earlier, humans are packed in cities and suburbs like cans of sardines. No living space of their own and constant random noise. Thats one example of overpopulation. Another example is I would like to just go outside and hunt but cant because overpopulation, first of all im surrounded by city and suburbs like a can of sardines, so i am not even able to reach a forest or have any privacy. Meanwhile people are only worried about Zuck privacy but meanwhile do not even have a forest of their own. All the parks are flat in order so that there is no privacy.
Third example, pollution, car-centrism, litter, landfill waste, etc. Fourth example is market oversaturation, too much content competition, too many books, too many games, too many videos uploaded too frequently, hard to compete as a capitalist, hard to be a consumer with too many options to choose, and most of the options are mediocre or garbage, many businesses try to lie or mislead consumers.
I don’t even know what you mean by this. Yes I asked you a question. And? I provided you with some context around the question. How is my ‘answering’ an impediment upon you? Feel free to agree or disagree. This is a philosophy forum.
Yes over population is a problem but it has to do with population density. It exists in specific very urban areas. Most of the country, here in the US at least, is empty space. Something like 80% of all counties are rural. People choose to live in crowded urban areas because that is what they are used to or where they can access more resources, jobs etc. but they are free to move to less crowded places if they wanted to.
Yet by pointing out over population it seems like you are adding another reason to support the idea that eventually governments will kill us off. We know they want to reduce population, at least there is an agenda around that. They don’t even lie about it. People like Bill Gates talk about it openly.
You really have that cartoonish view of the world? There are no evil mega-rich people bent on controlling people because "that would be like in a cartoon”? Is that your way of seeing the world?
Then move somewhere else. Even within the large city context you can move to a more suburban area, on the outskirts where population density is lower. Is that impossible for you? Why?
I realize you are not concerned about privacy because you are a transhumanist. But that is a bit beyond the current argument, agreed?
Again, what is your point by listing these things? I am not disagreeing with most of this. And I don’t see how it’s relevant to our discussion. Remember the original point we were discussing was about UBI. My argument is UBI is a temporary transition into a system where average humans like you and me and 95% of the rest of the population will lose all economic and personal power, we will become totally dependent on the government AND once that happens there is no reason for the government to keep us around, keep paying tens of trillions of dollars or more every year to a population of millions of people who produce nothing and are no longer needed by the system. When robots and AI are doing all of the economic productive work, why are humans needed?
You have yet to give a clear reason why we would be needed. Right now they need us because we are the worker ants who build and maintain their capitalist empires. Once AI and robots replace that economic activity… what keeps the government from using any of its massive number and variety of weaponry to quietly (or loudly) remove most of us from existence as a liability?
You do realize that part of the reason for covid and the jabs was population reduction, in particular of the elderly retired population? But then again you may think that is just a cartoonish conspiracy. No one in positions of wealth and power would even do something so evil, right?
Then move somewhere else. Even within the large city context you can move to a more suburban area, on the outskirts where population density is lower. Is that impossible for you? Why?
People choose to live in crowded urban areas because that is what they are used to or where they can access more resources, jobs etc. but they are free to move to less crowded places if they wanted to.
It’s all private property, owned by someone else. I tried to drive outside the city, I drove 30 miles and made it to rural areas, but every piece of land was private property owned by someone else.
This is a shit logical fallacy, do better, try harder.
I am concerned about privacy, come the fuck on!
So your alternative is either be a worker ant slave or death. Those are your alternatives. That’s your worldview.
Your worldview: in the year 2500 we will either all be dead or worker ant slaves for malicious governments that want to kill all humans.
I have a less depressing worldview, my worldview is that most people in the government are sane and dont want to murder all humans.
That’s… not even addressing what I asked you. I asked you about MOVING TO somewhere less crowded. Buy or rent a place to live in a more suburban or rural area. Why can’t you do that? I understand there are less jobs in those areas, so that is one factor. I have no idea what you do for a job or even if you work to support yourself. If you don’t, then I can understand why you might be stuck wherever you are.
As for public property, look up city and county parks. These are usually free. There are very huge state parks too which cost a little bit to access, you buy a permit for the day or an annual permit.
Transhumanism is the antithesis of privacy, but that is a discussion for another topic.
Glad to see you do care about it though 
When you start your response to my questions with “so your alternative is…” that is a non-answer. I am not talking about whatever alternatives might exist, I am talking about YOUR view. The position you are advocating. Saying it is the lesser evil of all positions or that it feels better isn’t an argument.
I made a very specific argument phrased as a question to you, this is the second time I clearly asked it to you and you have yet to respond. Please respond directly to this: “When robots and AI are doing all of the economic productive work, why are humans needed?”
You come close to making an argument with your comment that most people in the government are sane and don’t want to murder all humans. I agree. But as I am sure you know, the average government worker is not in charge of policy decisions. Those come down from on high. If the government decides to start rounding up people and sending them to death camps, there will certainly be various cover stories and “national emergency” excuses for it. Maybe a lot of government workers will refuse to cooperate and quit their jobs, although I doubt it. Remember my point here is that most people won’t even have jobs by the time this occurs, we are talking about the UBI society now. Even if most government workers are sane and nice, which is probably true for the most part, the government will have fired most of its human workers by the time UBI is seriously rolled out.
So again, you are not addressing the real point. I wish you would defend your position because I would really like to believe you. I want an optimistic worldview too, but being a philosopher I am obligated to go where the facts and truths take me, regardless of my personal wants or feelings about it.
Who tf can afford a new place when most people haven’t even finished paying off the mortgage of they are living at? Tired of keyboard warriors and their “just be rich” bullshit fantasy scenarios.
What am I supposed to do, get rich then buy some land 100 miles in the middle of nowhere? With no plumbing and electricity? Wtf. All the reasonable suburban and rural property, that has enough space but isn’t in the middle of nowhere, is bought up already.
City parks? Wtf. Do you read? All it is is Mr. Authoritarian complaining about homeless being harassed for living in tents. Who tf lives in a city park? Nobody. They would get harassed and kicked out. City parks are flat and open, and have no privacy, which is what I just said.