Thanks for sharing your thoughts. If you’re so inclined to share, could you please share the highly improbable event you mention in your bio which reawakened your faith? You don’t have to mention anything you don’t want to.
AI doesn’t have any awareness of me vs. someone else. To wit, I or someone else cannot be in a relationship with it because it has no meaningful connection with me beyond my credit card paying a subscription, or it having a place in my computer memory. There are people who role play relationships with AI, but that’s an extension of a parasocial relationship.
People who say they’re voting “with their gut” lie about that, they’re voting to ensure specific outcomes for themselves or their community, but have no desire to explain any of that. Having six+ year olds vote would just include a population that votes with their gut, but doesn’t have any justification beyond peer or social pressure. While some adults vote based on peer or social pressure, the majority do not. The targeted political messaging at a young age will also create an even more polarized society, maybe with more propensity towards extremism because the longer you’re recruited to a cause the more likely you are to do something violent for it.
Giga-rich dude with massive AI investments extols the virtues of AI while minimizing obvious harms. Are we seriously past the point of questioning such an obvious conflict of interest?
Guns are an equalizer for physical strength, and AI could be an equalizer for mental capability. That’s essentially what many people are saying when they talk about the benefits of AI, maybe without even realizing that’s what they mean. People aren’t very aware or reflective, in general.
In a hypothetical scenario, what’s a better moral option? IMO, kill yourself, instead. There’s no point to any of this to begin with, and what kind of world are you creating for your children in this scenario?
Besides that, where’s the solar punk fiction, or the post-work society fiction? Why is everything and everyone so fixated on dystopian fantasies without any balancing with other types of possible realities?
I’ve found that people who want you to focus only on the negatives in any scenario are motivated by ulterior motives. That is to say, they’re not realists or pessimists, they’re simply conniving, and are manipulating you to gain something else.
It’s not “just 500K” jobs. It’s a pipeline of hiring managers who set up outsourcing to their home countries at the expense of Americans, and this doesn’t change when they naturalize. Immigration is a tool for supplementing the deficiencies of your home country with outside assistance. In America’s case, immigration has been weaponized by both the left and right. The left wants to settle the entire Global South in western countries at the expense of never building the countries where people have to immigrate from. The right scapegoats immigrants for whatever issue ails them. Should there be incentives for creating businesses in America that support work that gets outsourced? Definitely. Will that happen while there is a preserve incentive offered by H1Bs and biased hiring managers? Of course not.
> It's pure religion and has all the power associated with religion
Not exactly. Consciousness has a lot of useful properties that help with different kinds of behaviors in living things, e.g., improving information synthesis through learning (where self-reflection can also help you discover what you don’t know, so you find out what else to learn), and applying cognitive flexibility for adaptability.
That said, you’re right that AI does not need consciousness to be a useful tool. But does AI need consciousness to attain AGI? I think so, there’s no other model that we’re aware of where properties related to conscious beings can be found in beings that aren’t considered as having consciousness.
Is AGI necessary for a tool to have beyond human information synthesis. I don’t think so, as long there’s some process which can help it realize where it’s wrong, and how to correct itself.
The conversation about social contracts and societal organization has always been off-center, and the idea of something which potentially replaces all types of labor just makes it easier to see.
The existence of AI hasn’t changed anything, it’s just that people, communities, governments, nation states, etc. have had a mindless approach to thinking about living and life, in general. People work to provide the means to reproduce, and those who’re born just do the same. The point of their life is what exactly? Their existence is just a reality to deal with, and so all of society has to cater to the fact of their existence by providing them with the means to live? There are many frameworks which give meaning to life, and most of them are dangerously flawed.
The top-down approach is sometimes clear about what it wants and what society should do while restricting autonomy and agency. For example, no one in North Korea is confused about what they have to do, how they do it, or who will “take care” of them. Societies with more individual autonomy and agency by their nature can create unavoidable conditions where people can fall through the cracks. For example, get addicted to drugs, having unmanaged mental illnesses, becoming homeless, and so on. Some religions like Islam give a pretty clear idea of how you should spend your time because the point of your existence is to worship God, so pray five times a day, and do everything which fulfills that purpose; here, many confuse worshiping God with adhering to religious doctrines, but God is absent from religion in many places. Religious frameworks are often misleading for the mindless.
Capitalism isn’t the problem, either. We could wake up tomorrow, and society may have decided to organize itself around playing e-sports. Everyone provides some kind of activity to support this, even if they’re not a player themselves. No AI allowed because the human element creates a better environment for uncertainty, and therefore gambling. The problem is that there are no discussions about the point of doing all of this. The closest we come to addressing “the point” is discussing a post-work society, but even that is not hitting the mark.
My humble observation is that humans are distinct and unique in their cognitive abilities from everything else which we know to exist. If humans can create AI, what else can they do? Therefore, people, communities, governments, and nation states have distinct responsibilities and duties at their respective levels. This doesn’t have to do anything with being empathetic, altruistic, or having peace on Earth.
The point should be knowledge acquisition, scientific discovery, creating and developing magic. But ultimately all of that serves to answer questions about nature of existence, its truth and therefore our own.
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