A thread for unboxing AI

Yep and you need to be able to replay (or simulate the activity exactly) an insane amount of times.

Chess is trivial. What's the fitness function for music or a good life.

well that's the point. you have to define the goal.

btw I am not sure fitness as a concept works there, because it's about something that has a start and an end, explicitly, you have to divide the game of life in gamified chunks where you can define victory with 100% accuracy (like "getting a raise of at least 5% this year", stuff like this).

we all know it won't be possible for everything but for what it's possible, alphazero already proved it can achieve outcomes better than the best human with 2018 technology and computing power which means it could be extremely cheap for everyone for a lot of well defined domains soon if it isn't already

Yeah it works for everything. The simplest way to triain on art is for a human to start off as determining fitness (Dawkins did a very simple similar thing in the blind watchmaker (may have been selfish gene)) or some sort of algorithmic comparison with current human music. It's not going to be anyhtign like 100% objectively defined but it will still work.

It may not work all the time or even most of the time but it provides the basis for competitive evolution. Humans will try to compete in that pool as well. What's fit? who knows? but we know what we like.

I am not excited about AI in the slightest right now. The end game isn't 20$ or even 200$ subs to make individuals more efficient at writing. OpenAI already said they are losing money on the 200$ pro sub currently.

The end game is 1,000,000$+ subs for corporations to eliminate huge chunks of their work force. This doesn't end well for the mass majority of people. Thats why all these rich sociopaths are so wrapped up in AI and propagandizing idiots to think its a good thing.

AI will obliterate whatever semblance of economic balance we have left in the world

Yep. At some point the denial about all the value in jobs evaporating is going to have to stop. It's already started but we're just at the beginning. Capitalism as we have known it cannot survive. The post WWII world we have all known is over.

Good thing or bad thing is irrelevent. It's accelerating and nothing is goign to stop it.

Is there a lot of denialism about the impact of AI on jobs? I see at least as much fatalism on that point as denialism.

There is much more doubt about your prediction that AI wiil be the end of capitalism, especially if you are predicting that the end will occur on the same sort of 30-50 year time scale as the other things we have been discussing. (Everything happens in the long run.)

End of capitalism as we know it. If we keep our heads in the sand then authoratianism is our future.

Yes there's is a lot of denial of what is happening. Even to the extent that people claim that new jobs will be created just as they always have been in the past.

There is also denial about the pace. It's accelerating and that's not stopping. 30-50 years isn't what it used to be and even that would be a huge issue now.

Note: Robotics etc is included here. It's not just software

What's the "capitalism as we know it"? capitalism as we know it is private capital competes to sell goods and services to people with money, so the vast majority of the production of goods and services in the economy is dictated by what people are willing to spend for, and that companies can provide.

That's just opposite to production being in the hand of the public sector, and goods and services being produced according to what public sector leaders think is proper to produce, and distributed among the population according to criteria decided by the public sector leaders.

You can have capitalism working perfectly well even within a population that doesn't contribute at all to the production of goods and services, as long as the production is private and the population is allowed to choose how to spend money.

That's already happening right now , it's called "retirees". A large and growing chunck of the population accesses goods and services produced by others without doing absolutely anything to produce it , often for decades.

They just pick and choose among the options provided (thus determining who wins and who loses among producers, and what get produced) within the constrains of their financial means.

Their financial means depend both on public sector structures (SS payments and the equivalent in many other countries) and private savings.

Then you have a tiny but relevant and growing percentage of people in society who "retired early" or "never worked" because it inherited or made enough money soon. Those as well are 100% perfectly fine participant in capitalism even without ever again being part of the production process.

As long as people have money to spend and others are allowed to produce goods and services for them capitalism "as we know it" doesn't die.

I suppose you implicitly work under the assumption that the masses won't have any money at all, so they won't be able to participate in capitalism as consumers anymore. That assumption is preposterous, as a scenario where AI can do everything better than the best human (in terms of output per resources spent) is a scenario where actual material production of goods and services is so abudant, the state can easily tax producers a little (far less than it does today) to give enough money to everyone to fulfill their basic needs better than today people do with 100k / year .

The masses will be forever out of access for actually scarce resources (whatever they might be, maybe premium real estate, "live" experiences by real human beings and so on), but that's already the case right now for most actually scarce things (like beluga caviar, white truffle, dom perignon, and many other luxury items and services).

The same model will keep existing unless there is a complete political upheavel which doesn't look likely, because people aren't usually in a revolutionary mood when there is abudance everywhere.

It's a lie that people want equality at the end. They want material improvements in their lives and get very angry if that doesn't happen, but if meanwhile a small portion of the population has private resorts in the maldive islands or an army of servants living with them they aren't angry at that, if they get increasing material prosperity.

Take healthcare. Once every single human being has access to a personal consultant which is better (even-charisma wise) than the best physician in the world has ever been, for $3 per visit, do you REALLY think that's going to provoke a revolution because the human physician wouldn't earn 5-10x the median salary anymore?

capitalism as we know it relies on people exchanging the value of their labour for wealth. That value is evaporating at an accelerated pace. At the same time as wealth is going to explode

Your supposition is false. The system will have to share the wealth but it wont come from the value of people labour. We could try to plan for this and move towards it but more likely we will have to cope with an increasinly discontent population voting for more and more extreme/populist leaders.

I doubt there will be a revolution. Wars may feature but a slide into authoratarianism seems most plausible. Anarchy is also possible.

No, bold is utterly false. Capitalism vs comunism (and all the in-between mixes) is about who produce things, who commandeers the production of things (and services), not about the role of labour.

The role of labour can be the same in capitalism and communism and mixed systems btw. Or not, but it's irrelevant to determine if it's capitalism or not.

The value of labour isn't evaporating. The total real $ amount of value generated by labour isn't going down. The value of the median hour of labour isn't going down. What's going up is the role of capital in the production chain.

Even if capital ends up capturing 90% of the value, if the value is 200% greater than today, that 10% of labour is still going to get more value than the 60% it gets today.

You can have capitalism even if 100% of the production of all goods and services is based on capital with no human input at any point, as long as there is a wide enough customer basis.

But currently labour is as strong as ever and there is no need to do anything to change that right now, at most we can start preparing by passing basic UBI or equivalents, at very low level (to avoid discouraging labor which for now is needed a lot for production).

Then you increase it if/when the AI bonanza generates so many more actual real goods and services with the same input that by taxing it very little you have enough to increase the UBI

No it isn't false.

It's not about what it is. It's what it relies upon.

One of the problems we already face is that people dont feel useful, they dont believe they are equal and they dont believe they can aspire to improve their lot (and/or for their childrens). They still vote and it's not pretty. It's going to get far worse.

I fear that both your diagnosis and your prediction are correct. And I agree that the intersection between the way our technologically makes us feel and the way we express those feelings politically in a democracy deserves more discussion.

I wish that I saw a desireable solution to the usefulness dilemma that you describe, but the only solutions I see are horrid and basically amount to allowing our technology to delude or anesthesize us.

Having children used to be the most important thing in life for many (most) people, and then having grandchildren.

Is it so horrid to try to get back to that, especially if material prosperity gets "solved" by technology?

For many people in the United States, modern parenting involves a lot of anxiety about the world that your children are entering.

I also think that you are missing chez's point. Feelings of uselessness don't necessarily disappear just because your technology keeps you healthy and distracted.

Many people have said they want to be creative instead of slaving away in a cubicle all day.

AI will man the cubicles and the people can go back to pottery, masonry, and blacksmithing. Have you noticed how generally shitty and uninspiring most homes and architecture are nowadays? When is the last time you've seen a proper gargoyle or artistic wrought-iron fence?

The only hand-crafted pottery in my house was made by my children as art projects. The craftsmanship is woefully lacking.

And that activity like a thousands other will be far easier for aspirant creators with the help of robots and AI .

And btw, we shouldn't forget the best movie about how ennui and a sense of internal dread because of lack of purpose was "fightclub", there is no need at all of AI substituting people in their job to lose meaning in life as a "clog in the machine".

Social activities, organization and groups which people were part of and felt an identity within didn't get destroyed by robots , AI , social media or tech in general.

They were dismantled one by one by precision surgery by the left.

Beauty in architecture which you mention was destroyed by leftism taking power in academia as well, as it is well documented by everyone attempting to explain how such an aesthetic disaster could happen at that scale.

The left is a corrosive, toxic, cancerous and very powerful force which exists to devour everything that came before it, it's sole ambition totalitarian control of every single aspect of human life.

How are people going to afford bespoke craftsmanship if they don't have a job?

How are people going to afford to become successful bespoke craftsmen if they are 41 with no savings and they lose their job?

There is a massive disconnect between this regressive utopia in your mind and the reality we live in.

Are you anti-communists suddenly for an AI tax that provides a UBI?

Can we please, please, please not turn this thread into another Luciom/leftism debate?

Something like 15-25% of Italians believe the Holocaust never happened and that Jews control their economy.

You can just read every criticism of the left from Luciom as a desired projection for fascism. Its really that simple. There is no reason to engage beyond that reality

Big scary dudes < Guns

I'm sure the billionaire with a bunker and a private security force will be desperate for an overweight admin to take a bullet for them tho

Stop ruining my dystopian fallback plans with your rationality, jerk.

You can't train for being a giant. RNGesus handed that one to me for free, and surely there will be at least one billionaire who appreciates visuals over actual combat training. I'll have plenty of free time to shed some fluff for more practical muscle while I'm sitting unemployed in my dusty home gym.

I've watched enough Batman cartoons to know that there's gonna be a market for giant henchmen.

I am a extremely pro Israel and probably fanatically pro Jews overall, if anything I accept victor calling me a zionist but sir, just go **** yourself with your claims I am antisemite.

Ask Mets who the antisemites are in this forum

The state still exists and can help. We aren't anarchists

Milton Friedman was pro UBI (and against all other forms of welfare).

UBI is objectively the best form of welfare, the less distorsive one. Ofc you need to remove the rest