This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm pretty optimistic about our odds at finding meaning, because we find it successfully in such crap, it can't be very hard to find more – once crap is cleaned away. Likewise for sustenance: I don't particularly care how the financial side works out. So long as the critically capable technology proliferates enough to prevent unilateral power grab by some supposedly benevolent overlord like the USG using OpenAI as a front, it'll work out fine.
We're too used to stuff not working out. So much work is done just to tread water in this world of scarcity. It's immensely miserable. People all around have to toil, burn their lives, just to keep the civilization from decaying, to grow and deliver food, to fix the pavement, to write and debug code, to analyze datasets, to prescribe antibiotics – and that's still honest labor, still the ennobling sort; because many others, paradoxically often the well-off folks directly threatened by this technology, fight over the surplus value and create problems that have to be fixed (the inane issue of sales calls and spam-and-filter arms race comes to mind, scammy startups, much of finance… but that's just scratching the surface). To find meaning in this, to not contemplate suicide daily… Tens of thousands of years of selection under agricultural pressures sure have hurt us.
I think sometimes of Scott's review of that book about Indigenous Americans who looked with pity and disgust at the settlers, and settlers who «went Indian» and refused to recivilize themselves once «rescued». Sure, it's easy to mock the noble savage stereotype when you have all but exterminated these peoples and graciously allowed the remaining dregs devolve into alcoholic underclass, but that's speaking power to truth; with the truth being the fact that we've worked ourselves into a dead end and the only saving grace, the only possible redemption for the cursed route that Jared Diamond says has started with grain, is the possibility to hand the nightmare over to our ultimate tool, the universal solver, artificial general intelligence. This is a scenario Uncle Ted never anticipated, that he wouldn't recognize as desirable, but it's the best answer to his challenge that we can produce and likely will.
Suppose AGI works as intended. We first commoditize entire categories of high-end labor-intensive solutions, then de facto close markets for those solutions when their wares become cheaper than dirt and ubiquitous. Sure, it's not impossible that this will fail, for normal Molochian reasons, that AI will simply up the ante; but also not impossible that in the race between the rapidly improving universal solver – perhaps universal solvent too – and human greed/stupidity/incompetence the former achieves supremacy. Imagine a world where no code is buggy because bugs are found and patched faster than they are written. Then software begins to grow better, less bloated, optimizing on all axes including those the market had to discard, moving the entire multidimensional Pareto surface toward perfection. Then, imagine this applied to everything you deal with. Fewer and fewer problems. Fewer and fewer people employed to make them go away, coping that they would feel useless and meaningless without applying themselves to those Augean stables, that they'd just become deadbeat junkies or worse. Fewer and fewer copes to be heard.
We're in a dysfunctional codependent relationship with the festering undying corpse of our industrial civilization, the needy monstrosity that has to be fed our lifetimes. It's nice for people who feel happy with their «jobs» I suppose, but in the end, for the vast majority a job is something you wouldn't do if not paid for. If our tools fix all problems that require payment to make people bother, what will be left? Truth, perhaps. High-grade challenge that is somehow not amenable to automation. Relationships we actually want be part of and care about. Games. Self-expression. Contemplation. Philosophy. Things people turned to whenever they managed to escape the peasant-civilization hell for more than one generation. And new things too: things we are afraid to think of now because of how brow-beaten we are into normality.
It's pathological to fear the separation from our current regime of incentives. We'd have left much earlier if we could, but we couldn't, not without getting exterminated by those who stayed; and so we grew into the shape of our cope. The sooner this ends, the better and less painful.
The example of Saudi Arabia doesn't make me very .. optimistic. Maybe AI could somehow prevent people from getting ..decadent even if they aren't forced not to be by circumstances.
More options
Context Copy link
Death. What will be left is death. As you phrased it, the ultimate solver is also the ultimate solvent, and it will dissolve us. Not by its malice or our ennui, but by our obsolescence - once we cease to be relevant to the production of value and remain as merely consumers, we will be gone sooner rather than later. Other posters have pointed out that automation and unemployment aren't to be feared, that other avenues can be found for human utility, that humans are kept alive even though they cease to contribute to the whole edifice, but I think there is a limit to these things. I think it has been as it was so far because even unproductive humans are very similar to productive ones, and can theoretically become productive, and are enmeshed in relations with productive ones. Once AGI produces all value, once humans are entirely separate from the source of value, we will go out. With no justification for our existence, the universe will find a way to wipe us out.
A very German thing to believe. I weep for your people, but really you've been cooked since before both of us were born, so this revolution adds nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I take it you're saying - if AI will destroy the current civilization in its current form then it's good actually. Fine, sure. But then how are you optimistic that it can actually happen is a mystery to me. The current elites haven't even started to show their powerlevel, they could easily implement Yuds plan to stop any AGI development if they wish so. The only hope is that they'll be too late, or their own AGI development which they won't cease to do no matter what will outsmart them at some point.
But sure, the AGI uprising won't be worse than the current humanity trajectory. In fact it's the closest scenario to "die with dignity" i can imagine.
But most likely we'll keep seeing those corporate commercials with smiling people of all colors and genders with the soothing background voice "...we know you don't really want to destroy the system, you just want it to work!" till the end of our days. Extra humiliation points for smiling Yud being in one, enthusiastically shaking hands.
More options
Context Copy link
As weird as it sounds, I think space exploration might well answer most of these problems. As far as meaning— what can possibly be more meaningful than going to space, building new civilizations, dealing with challenges nobody’s ever dealt with? With exploration and seeing things nobody ever thought possible? And it would ease issues of overpopulation much like the new world did for Europe. Just send the excess population to mars or Ganymede or Europa. Build, explore, become more than what we were.
More options
Context Copy link
As always your descriptions are on point, and I don’t disagree that our current situation is far from ideal assuming we have working AGI. I don’t have any sort of Stockholm syndrome about the status quo, in fact you could certainly put me in the effective accelerationism camp. (As much as that’s a coherent camp.)
My concerns are twofold - one, what if AGI does not ‘work as intended?’ What if we reach scaling limits soon, and only replace vast swathes of white collar work but don’t get into the recursive ASI machine god territory you seem to take for granted?
In that situation we could rapidly have a large class of people who are dispossessed, both economically and from a perspective of purpose, with our society. In the past these labor revolutions have primarily touched the underclass, but now we’re talking intelligent, well connected, moneyed classes being hit by massive layoffs all at once. Even if we do get ASI in 10-15 years it will be a brutal transition period.
Second, what if we do get ASI but TPTB succeed in regulating/controlling the systems to the degree where we do get a UBI, but everyone not owning a piece of the machine lives in gray square tenements the rest of their earthly lives?
Just because ASI holds promise doesn’t mean it automatically tears us from the embrace of ‘the festering undying corpse of our industrial civilization.’ Those poor incentives could well haunt us into the next era. I see no guarantee that ASI always decides to break our chains.
I do not actually assume recursively improving ASI in the true sense: returns from debugging and modest data engineering seem to have a ceiling, and we're not sure about much else working. But I also don't have to assume that.
Specifically my conservative prediction is something like this: near-term (<2027) AIs based on LLMs will have the general reasoning capability of a 130-140 IQ person as assessed either by success on real-world problems not loaded on esoteric knowledge or motor/perceptual abilities, or by long-term economic productivity; all the while being significantly cheaper to employ than such a person (say, <$3/hr, or <$3/amount of inference equivalent in output to 1 hour of such a person's labor).
What I do take for granted is that we have not exhausted the already published literature, to say nothing of in-house advances. Even GPT-4 is very likely far from the bleeding edge of research. Thus, I confidently say that it'd be asinine to expect the wave of progress that has carried us from GPT-2 to GPT-4 in four years to stop right about now, on white-collar midwit level – except by political fiat.
This conservative result would still be sufficient to blast through our current economic paradigm. Imagine multiplying the population of +2-2,5SD people in the world one hundredfold, but they only work and do not consume. Almost inevitably, in a few years we'll commodify human-level autonomous robotics, and that's, well, that's endgame.
It sure will. I don't expect much finesse even from well-meaning regulators.
Well, I basically buy that OpenAI is a new Manhattan Project, so that's not my biggest concern.
I’m glad you expect progress to continue. I do as well but I’m heavily biased so I try to temper my hopes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's always possible to say 'what if' . We have centuries of data to draw upon regarding new technologies. the track record for job destruction is poor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You and everyone else here (including @DaseindustriesLtd) are way too optimistic. You envision the failure mode of a UBI program as some recipients choosing a half-time job as a cashier over composing poems. The absolute worst possibility is them playing video games all the time.
We have had multiple attempts at UBI already, even if they weren't called that and differed in various unimportant aspects. Paris banlieues, US projects where 95% of inhabitants are on the dole--oh how you'd want them to play vidya all day instead of filling their upper levels of Maslow hierarchy with doing drugs, selling drugs, murdering other drug sellers, theft, robbery, general destruction of property, rape, riots, arson, every antisocial thing you can come up with they actually do. And they form a generationally unemployed underclass, a lot of people with no respect for labor and nothing but contempt for the hand that is feeding them. And they vote, besides burning up cars for fun.
This is the hard problem that any UBI-like proposal has to solve, not the pedestrian stuff like not preventing people from having part time jobs or removing unnecessary barriers to getting healthcare.
Simply put, I do not believe this behavior generalizes to all unemployable people. The current crop is heavily comprised of, well, genuine scum. The assumption that their antisocial outcomes are expected for people who can get employed now, but not necessarily tomorrow, is a cope for the necessity of labor.
More options
Context Copy link
I absolutely hate such people. There is a reason Dante placed traitors to their Lords and Benefactors in the lowest depths of the 9th circle of Hell along with Judas Iscariot, lower than traitors to family and country even. In a very real way biting the hand that feeds you is the worst possible of all crimes on a moral level, worse than everything else.
More options
Context Copy link
And being a woman disqualifies you from being involved in drugs or violent crime how? Sure, women aren't usually doing the actual shooting, but they're plenty involved.
More options
Context Copy link
What if we just
killedlocked up everyone who did that? Perhaps this is not politically feasible at the moment, but it could be solved in theory.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Contrast:
I'll commend you for being more of an equal-opportunity dehumanizer. But on the other hand Yosef at least allowed that some group of people be above beasts of burden, be meaningful ends unto themselves; the whole point of his not-exactly-marginal interpretation of Judaism is that Jews are such people. (An "effendi" is a lord, or a master, in Arabic, or so I'm told). And presumably he did more than eat, seeing his station. How about a deal: we appoint tool AI as «goyim», and be done with this ugly business.
I have never bought a Funko Pop, nor watched reality TV or played slot machine or a true gacha game for any length of time greater than needed to understand the principle. (This is not something to be proud of but more a consequence of boring behavioral rigidity. Also I basically cannot watch long-form videos, including podcasts and those vaunted American TV series that have replaced almost all culture for the middle class; this is a bit of a problem, another small problem a sufficiently developed AI will solve, opening up new troves of meaning. «Jarvis, boil down Yud's kvetching on Bankless, Fridman and Patel into a timeline of diffs with his previous eras, then superimpose on that substack about Extropia's Children!»).
Well, there have been some more addictive games I'll admit. But it's like with drugs: a perfect stimulant without burnout, or a psychedelic/opioid without tolerance, is a pipe dream. Our wetware that compels us to waste time on it also bounds the possible range of experiences, and thus makes it a finite journey. Even current games, trying to prevent disengagement, introduce additional mechanics almost as fast as humans grow tired of old ones and can learn new tricks (what fun is playing a game you can't grasp?), yet it still gets old, fast – faster than I can imagine any generative AI adapting. Even if it keeps up, at some not too distant point it will either saturate my bandwidth and close the category of «games» for good, like Tic-Tac-Toe, a fully solved space of behaviors; or, perhaps, it will deliver something that deserves a more serious term than a «game». And if I pursue richer modalities to appreciate new and fancier games – what's to stop me from modification in other directions, such as direct tampering with my reward system? Then, it's either switching off to exist in a pod as a wireheaded bugman, as you suggest, or evolution. Do we differ only in whether 0% or some fraction of humanity chooses the latter?
As for porn, it seems to me that its consumption drastically increases when I do not have fun and meaningful things to do and relationships to be part of. In any case, the same principle applies.
It also seems to me that I'm not exceptional. People who keep up the civilization around me from decaying do not watch reality TV only because they are bored out of their skulls: it's their cope. Like me, they have big or small real-world dreams – dreams they've put into the backlog and let them fall prey to decay. My backlog will plausibly span centuries if I can execute on it.
Even if theirs terminates on saturation with synthetic stimuli, I do not assert the right to condemn it. We – rather, Hajnali, East Asians and associates, for I have to remind you that «Работать западло» … oh God, I repeat myself so much – have evolved to condemn it out of necessity, to prevent slacking off and subsequent ruin. We don't have to do that anymore.
Have you read any Greg Egan? I think not. We usually discuss Iain Banks' Culture series (again series) as a portrayal of an advanced post-scarcity society. Anyway, Ehan's Diaspora is perhaps more in line with the good outcome I expect (with two the major caveats that a) my theory of personal identity does not allow surviving naive uploads and b) they do not have vastly superhuman AIs; but Citizens are for all intents and purposes AIs anyway, plugged into tools). The vast majority of Diaspora inhabitants are members of solipsistic «Polises», taken care of by AIs and having fun in their bespoke virtual utopias. This is fine. The self-selected minority explores physical universe. They, too, can turn back into virtuality or reach the end of their journey and accept expiration. This is fine as well.
Let us even be rain: the flight to the bottom is so long and exciting.
Diaspora is also close to my favored world, the journey of discovery is especially tantalizing. I also love the concept of the math mines.
I’m also skeptical on a personal identity level of totally copying the brain or uploading fully. I can’t quite bring myself to be sure that an uploaded me would be me, even with all the arguments about dreams unconsciousness etc.
I may choose to preserve my biological brain as long as possible for the safest form of identity transfer. Even once others have done it you can’t be sure they’re not just p-zombie copies. I imagine this could be quite controversial once these problems come up.
More options
Context Copy link
Effendi is actually a Turkish word. It's very Indo-European in its structure, I don't think it comes from Arabic. Perhaps Persian or maybe Greek.
Never trust a Christian Scientist I guess. Especially when looking up a Rabbi's quote.
More options
Context Copy link
The last term is related to English authentic.
Surely authority is a more probative example - but thank you for teaching me something
Authority is from latin iirc, based on auctor like author.
Authority:
Author:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#contamination
@SanDiegoJuryDuty
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Prince of the moonbeams, son of the Sun, the light of a thousand stars...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link