Unfun thought experiment: In an AGI scenario, what lever of power do the UBI recipients have to force what you've described?
Historically, humanity's biological monopoly on the fundamental resource of "general intelligence" has always been that lever. Looking at the world today, it's pretty clear that democracies are just a temporary balance between the general contempt of the powerful towards commoners, and the fact that the powerful begrudgingly need our economic utility, which is ultimately based on our general intellect. Even callous dictatorships had to exercise partial restraint on violence and murder, to retain a pool of general intellect.
AGI will be a multiple-whammy here:
- most people will become economically worse-than-useless, they will be a total liability on the rich and powerful
- those same people are unlikely to be given access to any levers of power or influence, because they no longer have anything of value to provide to the rich and powerful
- AGI in combination with robotic platforms, after a certain threshold, will permit for insurmountable policing. The "rise up against the robots" cliches we see in film simply become impossible after a certain point.
I desperately hope we end up wielding AI to usher in a post-scarcity utopia, but looking at the types of people who own the world...we'll get what we're allowed to get.
The people in power (whether a government/king, or company) will have the incentive to shrink the population. In the past, the economy grew with the number of people, but now only the costs would grow. There is basically a non-zero chance that our future contains laws limiting who is allowed to have kids or how many. And that's not even the worst action they could take.
Excellent comment. From a pure resource allocation perspective, walking the current path is like looking down the barrel so to speak. I guess our fate is already in the hands of the decision makers. Hopefully theres enough conscience up there.
That said, I would expect that if such a position were taken, it would be accomplished via a mass sterilisation campaign rather than direct extermination. More justifiable amongst other decision makers. Less moral burden.
The lever is that whenever somebody tries to give you a scarcity-only token like USD or BTC you say "that's no good here, come back with something that proves to me that you didn't make it by making life worse for the people around you". We (the masses) still control consensus on what counts as valuable, and if were going to break from scarcity as the basis for that (and we should) then it has to be a proper break.
Play by rules that have something to do with our collective values or we're not going to acknowledge your stores of "value". "I got this from my grandpa who was a successful swindler" needs to stop being a source of money that you can expect the children of the swindled to accept. We need to drop the idea that scarcity implicitly creates meritocracy and instead deal in verifications of merit.
If they're really ready to go it alone in their bunkers with robots for friends then I guess we won't be seeing each other anymore, but I kinda doubt that'll work for them in the long run.
No, that's a protocol that were going to have to build.
I think CirclesUBI gets it partly right, re: different dynamics between parties based on their connectedness on a trust graph. But I think we'll want this on a CRDT, not a blockchain, and I think we'll want more nuance than their treat-others'-tokens-as-equal-in-value-to-your-own approach. But it's a decent start.
I used to think that "AI operating in meatspace" was going to remain a tough problem for a long time, but seeing the dramatic developments in robotics over the last 2 years, it's pretty clear that's not going to be the case.
As the masses fade into permanent unemployment, this will likely coincide with (and be partially caused by) a corresponding proliferation in intelligent humanoid robots.
At a certain point, "turning on them" becomes physically impossible.
What development have happened in robotics over the last 2 years, that changed your mind?
I am familiar with general industry trends in electronics over the last two decades, as well as the 1 decade in machine learning.
Do you genuinely believe that this is a binary decision, or is this just anti-euthanasia rhetoric disguised as concern trolling?
Offering humane end-of-life options to people suffering today does not prohibit ongoing disease research towards potentially helping people in the future.
It's not entirely binary, but there is an obvious unpleasant tendency in e.g. Canada, to soft-push MAID onto potentially treatable patients who don't even seek medically assisted death.
I wouldn't want my government to have an option of dealing with the problem this way, and if I needed MAID, I'd just self-administer.
He is alluding to the fact that over the last decade or so, consumers have unwittingly slid down the slope of "not having true control over personal electronic devices". Iphones are already there, Android devices are a few years behind, as are most desktop PCs.
Once there's critical mass, it would not be a stretch for ISPs to only deliver internet to endpoints that have a secure element that attests to the integrity of the internet-con ected device. This will of course be done under the guise of "fighting the spread of malware" and such.
iPhones have always been able to access web pages. Web pages run on general purpose computers, and basically have to, because they're made of site-specific content and site-specific code. To get rid of "piracy" you would not only need to prevent users from having access to their own phones, you would need to make it impossible for anybody to have their own web page.
That level of dystopia is the sort of thing that could never last very long because enough people would rather burn it to the ground while still inside of it than allow it to continue to exist.
when you try to connect to some commercial streaming websites in France, you already have to upload your ID, film yourself with your camera, and enable biometrics, as the government forced them to do that "to protect children" (even as they're in the middle of a scandal about silencing children when things went south in some institutions up to 20 years ago).
last time I checked, China didn't force users to give in their IDs and turn on webcams to authenticate themselves on the internet.
France does.
dystopia is never far away in France, and ppl always agree
> dystopia is never far away in France, and ppl always agree
Isn't the entire premise here that people are instead using pirate services that presumably don't require you to upload your ID and film yourself with a camera?
I actually use this exact example when encouraging careful attention to paradigms where a fundamental variable is slowly but consistently changing.
It's essentially equivalent to a boundary on a phase diagram: Cost/Watt has fallen past a critical threshold, and suddenly this dramatically different approach just makes more sense.
I am entirely convinced that absent LEO comsat constellations, people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".
If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of space-based telescopes.
Yes, I am quite aware that the current generation of space-based telescopes are quite limited. And it's solely due to the historically extreme cost of mass to orbit.
The largest proposed ground observatories already use segmented mirrors. One can use the same approach in space, it's only a matter of launch cost.
Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?
> people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".
You've constructed a strawman for the purposes of gatekeeping; meanwhile, there very much is a reason to have a rational conversation about the trade offs of these large commercial ventures that impact literally the entire planet.
> Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?
It doesn't, and admittedly I don't really care that much.
I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet, one of the most transformative and enabling technologies in existence, than niche hobbyists being mildly encumbered. And most people likely fall into the same camp.
As already mentioned, I find it really hard to believe that the common person whining about "the poor amateur astronomers" are being sincere. Some of them likely are, but "finding any reason possible to whine about billionaires" seems to be vogue these days.
> I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet
Then can you tell me how many remote communities were not being served before that are now suddenly capable of accessing the internet now that these particular constellations exist? I mean just looking at Starlink's current availability map shows how little you might actually care about this particular outcome.
Even so was this the most affordable and sustainable option for these countries? Was there absolutely no way to achieve both goals at once?
> I don't really care that much.
Noted. We're just picking sides today, I guess. Bummer.
You did notice that many of those areas are "Service Date Unknown," "Pending Regulatory Approval," and "Coming Soon?"
The first world has great coverage, I'll give you that, but to say that this network is somehow an inherent advantage to indigenous and under served "remote" people is quite literally laughable.
And yes, the Amazon is being served, and they have _faster_ internet than before, which is somewhat good and not without it's problems to be sure, but they had the internet before. They have smartphones. How did you think they utilize the starlink service at all? They have a pretty narrow power budget which this really doesn't help with all while delivering them deeper into the pockets of American monopolies.
Oh, and the mining and logging companies absolutely love that they have the service necessary to support their commercial work in the Amazon. High rating from them, they would agree, it's "amazing."
The ocean, planes, and all sorts of remote vehicles had internet before as well. This is nothing particularly new other than being faster. Which moves the question to the appropriate place. Is it worth damaging the sciences for faster commercial internet? Are we actually doing anything more than sending youtube poop and pornography and gambling websites into places that never had to deal with these intrusions before? All while enabling a higher rate of destruction of the very place they live?
I've always felt that trying to pin down the precise definition of AGI is as useless as trying to pin down "what it means to truly understand". It's a mental trap for smart people, that distracts them from focusing on the impacts of hard-to-define concepts like AGI.
AGI doesn't need to be "called", and there is no need for anyone to come to an agreement as to what its precise definition is. But at some point, we will cross that hard-to-define threshold, and the economic effects will be felt almost immediately.
We should probably be focusing on how to prepare society for those changes, and not on academic bullshit.
It's definitely a trap for those who aren't familiar with the existing academic work in philosophy, cognition, and neuroscience. There are no definitive answers but there are lots of relatively well developed ideas and concepts that everyone here on HN seems completely ignorant of, even though some of the ideas were developed by industry giants like Marvin Minsky.
Stuff like society of minds (Minksy), embodied cognition (Varela, Rosch, and Thompson), connectionist or subsymbolic views (Rumelhart), multiple intelligences (Gardner), psychometric and factor-analytic theories (Carroll), and all the other work like E. Hutchins. They're far from just academic wankery, there's a lot of useful stuff in there, it's just completely ignored by the AI crowd.
I'd encourage you to review the definition of "brute force", and then consider the absolutely immense combinatoric space represented by the grids these puzzles use.
"Brute force" simply cannot touch these puzzles. An amount of understanding and pattern recognition is strictly required, even with the large quantities of test-time compute that were used against arc-agi-1.
Historically, humanity's biological monopoly on the fundamental resource of "general intelligence" has always been that lever. Looking at the world today, it's pretty clear that democracies are just a temporary balance between the general contempt of the powerful towards commoners, and the fact that the powerful begrudgingly need our economic utility, which is ultimately based on our general intellect. Even callous dictatorships had to exercise partial restraint on violence and murder, to retain a pool of general intellect.
AGI will be a multiple-whammy here:
- most people will become economically worse-than-useless, they will be a total liability on the rich and powerful
- those same people are unlikely to be given access to any levers of power or influence, because they no longer have anything of value to provide to the rich and powerful
- AGI in combination with robotic platforms, after a certain threshold, will permit for insurmountable policing. The "rise up against the robots" cliches we see in film simply become impossible after a certain point.
I desperately hope we end up wielding AI to usher in a post-scarcity utopia, but looking at the types of people who own the world...we'll get what we're allowed to get.