aqouta
Friends:
User ID: 75
aqouta
5hr ago
Somewhere between 40 and 80% of Americans are already not net tax payers. Being redundant and superfluous is a spectrum that all of us are on. There are precious few who if they disappeared today would break the system badly enough to cause a blip. We're a long way from when most people worked on the farm and had a tangible hand in their own survival. As far as most of us are concerned food production is already functionally automated. Most of the basic necessities are already functionally automated. Besides housing, because it's rivalrous, what it took too survive in the 1800s could be provided by the state pretty trivially and with a bit of focus for a couple years with minimal human input. It's just not the case that humans need to be on the beating pulse of survival to find meaning in their lives. We'll be perfectly find with whatever social hierarchy game we entertain ourselves with once our survival is guaranteed.
aqouta
5hr ago
I think one of the big problems here is, ostensibly they might be, but people saw how these companies will threaten lawfare against small towns
The small town is the legal system. I'm sure you can marshal some individual situations from the past but seriously, you think the kind of society that is willing to vote for data center moratoriums is going to have judges and juries who will just allow corporations to bully small towns? Anything unreasonably would be national news and have many millions of dollars in legal funds even if it was half misinformation. You can't get screwed over by a lego reseller without being able to raise millions in a go fund me.
And if you're in a historically industrial area, there is probably still the memory of things like '08 where the companies just left for good, leaving the community to clean up the mess.
I'm sure I've read the same articles you have. The biggest example of this is where the prospective Datacenter is the only entity since this event willing to fund the clean up after almost twenty years. Is your argument seriously that small towns should just give up economically and die rather than ever taking a gamble at industry again? Seriously, what possible investment opportunity passes this test? How is this view different from degrowth?
It's a very low trust system, and at least in my opinion, that distrust is more than earned.
Distrust can't be cumulative and global. Someone somewhere is always going to be being betrayed. There's eight billion of us. Yes, investments have failed in the past, it used to be that whole mining towns found nothing and died. That rate of failure has been decreasing over time but we'll still have failures. You can't just cancel all progress forever because it's not a sure thing. We'd never do anything. It's just safetyism. The logical end is everyone being locked in a padded cell as until the last of us dies out because any risk might lead to a tragedy.
aqouta
5hr ago
We evolved from creatures that hunted in bands and were probably murdered by our kin shortly after we could not longer provide for ourselves. I'm confident in a post work society we can conjure up meaningful games to substitute for the drudgery of what is currently required to upkeep society. Tons of people today make their living in some way derivative of professional sports and many people generate a great deal of their identity from sports teams. Same for celebrities or entertainers. A lot of the economy has already been separated from what is required to survive.
aqouta
6hr ago
I think a lot more people than you think derive meaning and value from their work. Maybe not a majority, but I'd say a large minority.
I think this is a lot of cope. If we didn't have washing machines I think a lot of people might derive a sense of personal definition from being responsible for keeping people's clothing clean. Now that this labor isn't necesary it is a trivial thing. People will find a way to self define and fine meaning without the need to do labor.
I, and a lot of people, don't even believe AI will ever allow the majority of us to live in luxury. Personally, I believe that if AI were as good as it's touted as being, there will be a culling in the best case scenario.
Why? If it can do our work trivially why would there be a culing? We don't cull people currently who can't or won't do value added labor. Many of these people live lifes of relatively luxury to those in the distant past and that's with few voters feeling direct kinship with them. The idea that people who are themselves threatened with unemployment are going to vote to cull unemployed people beggars belief.
Worst case scenario would still be Skynet.
If you're taking this seriously then data center moratoriums are trivially not sufficient and you should absolutely be advocating for bilateral treaties with china to cease frontier development. If you're not advocating for that then I don't want to hear about random data center blocks which will not and cannot prevent this.
But if nothing changes, and things simply continue to be as they are, it would still be a disastrous result as that would mean that hundreds of thousands of people have lost and will lose their livelihoods and futures because we as a society were sold a bill of goods by an entire industry of charlatans.
I'm sorry, are they delivering the goods or not? Because if they are delivering the labor replacement then they are not charlatans. Your lot have this weird way of accusing them of being hype artists while your premises buy entirely into what they're selling. If they can indeed substitute all labor then that is incredible and they are fully vindicated for the rhetoric. If they aren't then we don't have to worry about any of this. It's a very clear sign that what you're actually concerned about is hurting them because you hate them and are not thinking clearly at all.
aqouta
7hr ago
Further, it's not like the vision of the future that these heads are selling (the best case scenario being that humans are some form of pet or cattle, to be dispensed on the whim of an AI overlord and the worst having already been tastefully adapted by James Cameron) are particularly attractive to these people either.
Not spending a third or more of your life in toil should be attractive to everyone. Cattle, give me a break, the median American is working for some company whose mission they don't care about doing some cog level work. We work to live not live to work. A world where AI does all the meaningful work and lest the people living in luxory is a strict improvement to 99.9% of people and the remaining people that must position themselves as superior to other for self definition can do some neosport for the same sensation of superiority.
aqouta
7hr ago
This is notably contrary to your initial statement calling them idiots and claimed there were no rational justification.
I called them barely sentient, not non-sentient. There is a vague and difficult to clean up cloud of noise behind the eyes that still marks them as among the living. The noise is basically ludditism in a pure form that they're too embarrassed to or historically illiterate to own.
If you are trying to get someone to do something for you (in this case let you set up datacenters) it is common sense that you should have a clear answer when they ask what is in it for them.
We're not even talking about the perspective own talking to the perspective data center, we're talking about some third party declaring that the town should be disallowed by gunpoint from even negotiating.
aqouta
8hr ago
The communist twitter artists have good reason to be scared. Art jobs are already being impacted by AI. Living off art commissions might actually be straight up impossible in the near future if it isn't already. Standing firmly against a clear threat to your livelihood is reasonable.
Yes, it's reasonable, in that I can articulate reasons for it. But the reasons are ludditism and anti-progress, this isn't hypoerbole, this is what the luddites preached and practiced. We ought want labor to be automated, this is how all progress has happened. We should also demand that some of these gains be redistributed to those replaced at first and the population in general in time. But once we can replace toil we ought to. Work is not an ends, it's a means to an ends. Demands to spend a third or more of your life doing labor to survive when a machine could do it instead is insanity. Work will not set us free.
The fact that it hasn't, shows that the builders of datacenters are not yet bidding high enough.
The demand of the anti-datacenter group is not "bid higher" it is go away and die. The propose moratoriums, not taxes or standards. If all the demand was was that AI companies be taxed at some reasonable rate then I'd have absolutely no problem with the demands.
aqouta
9hr ago
Clearly people saw more benefit in opening local factories than they do in opening local datacenters.
Is this because of a rational calculation or because communist twitter artists have been throwing up a nonstop alarm since the second stable diffusion was able to generate furry smut art for pennies undermining their only marketable skill? Ok, maybe a bit of a specific case but it's clear that the position has been in from certain quarters that AI is to be opposed and these narratives have expanded from those quarters. If anything the out of the way town that has a datacenter being built is the last group of people who will have their labor automated. It's us white collars in urban areas that are in the first few waves.
Yes, data centers don't particularly bring long term employment(although notably not zero), the main case is property tax revenue. But it really can be a lot of revenue, and the capex is so massive that you can for a rounding error demand they employ a comparable number of security staff or whatever to a factory workforce if you really want to. Not that it wouldn't be more efficient to just demand more tax revenue. Of course they'll bid around and the towns will bid competitively, it's a market like anything else. My objection isn't that the towns shouldn't be playing hardball and looking out for themselves, it's that rather than letting them do this we've turned it into some kind of insane moral panic.
I'd even be behind outlawing the whole NDA practice, seems shady and isn't exclusive to data centers. The Datacenters bring a lot of potential wealth to the table and the towns have some leverage, this should be allowed to play out in an open market to a positive sum outcome. But it's really obvious that the people pushing back most aggressively don't give a single shit about these towns. They hate AI and that is the motivation.
aqouta
9hr ago
Ok, but you can't even make this criticism yet because they haven't even built the stuff. You're just assuming no one is sponsoring the local little league team.
aqouta
9hr ago
The solution to someone building infrastructure in your town for exporting, in this case bits, is that you get property taxes and some amount of job revenue. No different than if someone in your town sets up a factory selling widgets. Like these rustbelt towns that were hollowed out by sending jobs over seas sold a rounding error of their own car products to locals. All these same arguments could be made against building anything ever, they're fundamentally degrowth arguments.
aqouta
10hr ago
On the very local level it's a matter of case by case decisions. The NDAs were a bad decision from the beginning and it sounds like basically everyone recognizes that now. Obviously if they're venting diesel exhaust on your home then I'm not going to defend that, but these problems are no different than any conceivable industrial buildout of any sort and they have mundane solutions. The promises ought to be in enforceable contracts.
None of these concerns can account for the super majority of people who oppose construction of datacenters anywhere and statewide moratoriums.
aqouta
13hr ago
I know people who genuinely oppose data centers for real reasons. I think their reasons are mostly incorrect, and sometimes I argue with them, but they do really believe these things, they are not lying about their opposition, and they are not (all) degrowth luddites.
I'm not accusing them of lying, I'm accusing them of being full blown in the middle of moral panic. Like someone raving that D&D is an initiation into a secret satanic cult. The internet is flush with arguments against their insane ramblings, ironically a query to free chatgpt will rebut all the claims with many sources. They don't care and are immune these arguments because the arguments aren't the point. I'm not generally a fan of bolverism but what do you do when the afflicted sees your D&D starter box and start howling in a way that no offer to let them examine the contents can quiet?
I can embarrass a bad faith liar by rebutting their points, but those in a moral panic? They don't spread their ideas by making good arguments. Nothing anyone says to the OP with convince them that Datacenters are not only fine but a sign that our nation finally has the will and energy to build things again. It's not even about them as individuals, it's a sickness that I'm helplessly watching consume my society. The woke surge followed by the Trump backlash and now a socialists backlash to the backlash. I'm losing faith that the fever will break and that we don't have a fatal auto-immune disease.
I don't know what the cure is, but I do know telling people who have already heard it a thousand times that datacenters do not obliterate water from the universe won't do it because I've witnessed too many times that they'll nod along, change to a different point and 5 minutes later you'll catch them repeating that datacenters are going to cause droughts.
aqouta
16hr ago
Na, I'm guilty of this one. Can't accuse people of being barely sentient. a couple too many old fashions last night celebrating the wife's birthday left me without the patience to put it more softly.
aqouta
17hr ago
I can invent some, like the exercise of trying to invent reasons to believe in flat earth. But nothing I invent will be something they actual believe and what they actually believe makes them enemies of our civilization. At some point you have to interact with the degrowth luddite in front of you rather than some invented Yuddite that has been genetically engineered with an inability to think 4 seconds and realize that AI won't be stopped just because the data centers aren't able to be built locally. What they actually believe, as demonstrated by the OP are insane theories about water loss, that actually nothing should ever be built again, damn the economy(also they are very mad about the bad economy and deinitialization[they would of course have voted against industrialization in the first place given half a chance]), or fracking style fake videos of tap water that lights on fire. There are of course going to be some instances of datacenters, like all infrastructure, being rushed and poorly planned/constructed and they'll pretend that this represents all data centers.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter, they wrote the bottom line first and are reasoning backwards. This is clear. They hate tech, progress and change. To ascribe to them a rational arguments would be to lie about what they believe.
aqouta
1d ago
Anti-datacenter people are barely sentient. It's the fiery hot center of the populist brain rot of America. There aren't any arguments on the level of decoupled and rational justifications, it's all either complete misinformation that the CCP wish was a psyop because it would prove them far more capable than they are or friend enemy distinction with barely even a fig leaf of being about the actual building on the actual ground. I apologize for any doubt I had for Elon Musk's orbital data centers, the cold vacuum of space is clearly more hospitable than anywhere the american voter can influence.
aqouta
4d ago
This kind of condescension is part of the reason I don't like you.
Condescension? In this thread? Heaven forbid!
Maybe you could enlighten me, as deficient as I clearly am in modeling your worldview. How capable do you think these things are going to get approximately? A nation of geniuses in a datacenter, to use a phrasing I'm sure grates you, seems capable to me of determining your intentions with your stepmother without even reading your mind whether it be in your skull or delegated to GA. Likewise they'd seem able to dispatch a drone or whatever to place a bullet basically wherever they'd want.
aqouta
6d ago
I don't know how you so consistently misunderstand my position.
It brings me no joy that every path forward besides scaling suddenly ceasing to improve capabilities or a miraculous alignment victory seems to lead inescapably to human disempowerment
I'm pretty careful to alyways point out that if the systems don't get much better then my diagnoses of doom doesn't hold. My p(doom) is only ~20%, which just seems like plenty chance to be concerned with.
If GAs are just fable or even mythos in a box then sure, a neat product. The first thing I did when llama first released its open weights was buy a macbook with enough unified memory to run it locally.
If you think we're not going to get meaningful recursive self improvement and an intelligence explosion then the big difference is that you think the pause I advocate for will basically happen naturally. It's a fine thing to believe, I've always thought it was plausible there's an end to easy scaling, although I thought that several massive scaling improvements ago and have no confidence in anyone's ability to predict when an end might come.
Why wouldn't you support a pause if you think the models aren't getting much better from training anyways? Do you think mythos but cheaper tokenomics is basically as smart as it gets?
aqouta
7d ago
‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’
‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in.
‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’
‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many - yours not least. In any case we did not kill him: he is very old and very wretched. The Wood-elves have him in prison, but they treat him with such kindness as they can find in their wise hearts.’
This man, as deeply flawed and as wronged by institutions as he wronged them, has left behind children and wife. Do not blacken your heart by thinking this is a good outcome. Do not celebrate misery.
aqouta
7d ago
This is bad for your soul man. Don't be like this, not for them but for yourself.
aqouta
7d ago
Dear god, please format your links, my text to speech just did violence to me.
aqouta
8d ago
While those numbers are high it should be noted like only 4.4% of those MAID deaths are "track 2" which is to say didn't qualify as having a natural death "reasonably foreseeable". The median age of "Track 1"(death reasonably foreseeable) was 78, 64% percent of which had cancer and 76% of which were receiving palliative care. This is like how gun homocide numbers are propped up by suicide by gun counting and confusing people's intuitions. The vast majority of MAID deaths have more in common with when my grandfather hit the morphine hard in hospice than someone choosing death of a long life.
aqouta
10d ago
The status quo is not "absolute surveillance" fyi. Not even China has perfect surveillance. These are, again, silly false dichotomies.
I meant status quo default path. Leaving the centralized labs to do their things and not bother with the whole GA project. It's the same destination. Creating little personalized AIs that are able to be surveilled from the centralized AIs delivers no agency that isn't illusory. Your little private AI will walk you through the steps to kill your step mom and the centralized AI will materialize a bullet in your brain one pico second before you do anything irreversible. Sounds like a fine product though, I'm sure people will enjoy the illusions they provide.
aqouta
10d ago
I hope to see you publicly distressed all the way to the endgame.
I suppose if this fantasy keeps you grinning vacantly into the eschaton then it will have had some utility.
No such inherent inability exists, so that's wrong.
That inability is baked in gwern's plan explicitly. If I'm fighting a straw man then gwern is made of straw. What's left of GAs that are entirely under the surveillance of the centralized powers? Even grok already offers customized companions. The agency you're willing to risk human extinction for is a hollow skinsuit over the status quo.
aqouta
11d ago
I appreciate the thoughtful reply.
Was the GWOT Iraq War populist?
I'll accept your analysis on this, it seems broadly correct. I don't think populism is the sole source of bad ideas. But I think you're muddying populism with something like grass root support and those are, to me, different things. Albeit I acknowledge that they might resemble each other if you squint.
But this appears to me to be straightforwardly untrue. Humans inevitably make mistakes, but it does not seem to me that there is a "base rate of bad governance". Specific policies are good or bad. Specific ideologies encourage specific bad or good policy choices. Elite rule, technocracy, whatever label we're applying to anti-populism, is supposed to deliver superior policy choices and thus superior outcomes, and if it doesn't actually do that, I think it is extremely important to be able to recognize that fact!
But the 90s you say was better was a far less populist time by your own analysis. It was a time of much greater gatekeeping in the halls of power and the media. Maybe you disagree? My read is that things have been getting more populist over the last 20 years, starting in a proto stage around Obama's first run and reaching a fever pitch under Trump.
My understanding of Populism is essentially wisdom of crowds as opposed to relying on institutional knowledge production of Elite Rule/technocracy/rule-of-experts. Institutional knowledge production can be very powerful, but by its nature it is resistant to accountability, self-critique and self-correction, such that it can easily decay into serious tyranny. If elites homogenize around a bad set of ideas sufficiently to insulate themselves from all contrary evidence, critique or consequences, what alternative is there but Populism? Knowledge must be generated somehow if we are going to cooperate together.
This is the populist conception of how politics works but I think it's not correct and in fact harmful. It's a false dichotomy, essentially "we are the 90%" as an ideology. It sees "the elites" as some kind of cohesive class that looks out for itself when that's never really been how things work. The Democrats and Republicans have always fought each other and been responsive to the opinions, represented via votes, of the populace. The conservatives would say this is why we're a republic and not a democracy because our system relies on the demos electing trusted elites to represent them and fight/make deals with other elites on behalf of their constituents. The balance is in the conflict between the representatives on behalf of the electorate, not the representatives and the electorate.
Populism breaks this because it conceptualizes the representative structure as damage and because the representative structure is our entire government populist rage acts as an acid that destroys everything. We keep sending "outsider" politicians into Washington to tear the whole edifice down and are shocked when they accomplish nothing. The wisdom of the crowds is supposed to be in selecting the representatives.
Democrats have not all or even mostly been Communists. The overwhelming majority of Communists in America have either been democrats, or have been allied with democrats, or have drawn support and political cover from Democrats, and that support and cover has been voluminous, both in the past and right down to the present day. Explicit campaigns to protect Communists have been part of the Democrat auto-hagiography for my entire life, and continue to be treated so long after the general principles those campaigns supposedly enshrined have been torn down and trampled out of existence. At some point, this ceases to be tolerance and becomes complicity. I believe the Democrats passed that point some time ago, and I do not believe that they have had or will have the capacity to meaningfully restrain the Communists they have nurtured and protected for so long.
You could replace communists with racists and democrats with republicans and you have the populist mirror. And it's true! Communists exist, are intensely politically active and favor the party that is more open to the influence of labor unions. Racists are politically active and favor the party that most lets them keep the their racially segregated communities away from the urban youths. These are real constituencies of the two parties and their voices are present among the representatives. Still they've been relatively minor factions in both parties. The communists have recently been trying to make a play at greater representation and I can not express to you how much they despise the "establishment dems".
True, the establishment dems have treated them with kids gloves to their shame, many of them are waking up to this now and there's a real fight for the soul of the democratic party. I promise you that you do not want the communists to win this fight.
Politics runs on hope. You cannot organize political power without offering a narrative about how that power will improve the lives of the people providing that power. Since narratives are just words, narratives can be lies, and lies are generally easier to sell than truths in the short and even the medium and long terms. The only defense available against the advantages of deceit is trust built up by reliable behavior long-term, of good governance and good policies reliably leading to good outcomes.
This pessimism is self reinforcing. I don't know exactly how to break the cycle but politics can and should be more boring actually. positive sum work often is. It's true that people are likely to get excited over big promises backed by lies but the only remedy for this is to expect more for the electorate. We should distrust the politicians who promise us utopia.
One of my formative political experiences was watching the federal government burn dozens of men, women and children alive on national TV, cover it up, have the cover-up fail, and nonetheless escape any meaningful consequences. I'm not sure I agree that the Democratic party is in fact getting worse; I am not willing to endorse the old version either.
I think you can push to have those people face justice without falling into the populist framing. Many of these things you oppose, and largely I oppose too, were in fact broadly supported by the voters. You can't just blame the elites for them, that's us, that's the doing of our fellow citizens. As a republic we have to take some responsibility. And we also have to be willing to forgive each other and live with ourselves even when it's hard. The alternative is that this grand experiment in democracy will end. We've only had it for a few hundred years, it really could have been a fluke that it lasted this long.
It is already the case that half of all people are not net tax payers. Where is the culling?exist
Organizing against local datacenters, or worse American data centers in general, will do less than nothing against xrisk. It's acting frantically impotently to discharge your anxiety. We don't e on a sprectum where relative resistance to American data center buildout moves any levers on chance unaligned ASI is reached.
More options
Context Copy link