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Notes -
What impact?
I think the interesting question is who is going to have more impact on the discourse?
It seems manifestly obvious to me that the answer will be 2. Google engineers are often very smart people, but in the end Silicon Valley has always bowed down to Washington, and to some extent to Wall Street.
It's like, imagine some absurd new war breaks out in some corner of the world nobody cares about and that nobody expected. Who suddenly has power? Is it the one analyst at a dusty CIA desk or the two guys in some obscure think tank in DC who were the only people who cared before this incident happened? Probably not, it's everyone powerful who jumps in on the gravy train now that something interesting has happened.
I don't think so. For example, I think 'true UBI' will never happen. Which is not to say that I expect the Manna scenario (and indeed I've argued it makes little sense for elites to pursue here before). It's to say that stratification by resource distribution is key to all human hierarchies and it's hard to see this system being abandoned any time soon. Therefore UBI will be distributed according to how closely some individual or group fulfils the role the 'system' considers prosocial in that context. Social credit, belonging to the right group, participating in a certain way, all this varies, but the core structure will be similar - UBI if.
I also think you'll see huge cultural shifts, as huge amounts of ambitious young (particularly young male) energy that has been devoted into pursuing economic self-improvement must suddenly be redirected into some other avenue. It could easily be video games or weightlifting (some would say it already is), but it could be something else.
I also have become more and more sceptical that mass automation heralds some new age of leisure in general. We already live (as both you and I have argued) in a substantially 'automated' society. Even if FALC is technically impossible, in the richest countries it's likely a high standard of living could be maintained with only 20% or even less of the population in full-time employment, the rest work bullshit jobs as per (slighly modified) Graeber. I now consider it substantially possible that in fifty years time the majority of the working age population engages in some form of 'employment'. You really can legislate luddism, New Jersey kept gas pump operators employed sixty years after they ceased to exist elsewhere after all.
I do think e/acc is compelling, and there's no inherent reason why huge social problems can't be brute forced by creating a machine god. The problem, as ever, will be that the solutions the machine god comes up with won't be amenable to a large proportion of the population, including many e/acc types.
This is obviously correct to me too. If there's one thing I agree with Yarvin 100%, it's that Big Tech has no power at all, in the grand scheme of things. People who think Altman or someone has a reasonable shot at harnessing the power of the emerging technology for political gain are deluded. I am not sure what you're imagining here – that I am trying to build our way out of Mot's grasp, one commit at a time?
However, there exists certain wiggle room. Engineers can accelerate the proliferation of specific technologies which will make at least some politically cheaper forms of surveillance and restriction unfeasible; this is but a toy example. Businessmen can lobby for lenience, and their lobbyists need talking points; it's a bit surprising how low the bar in this domain is. Big labs can invest into making their offerings so indispensable to the laymen, political elites will falter in enforcing regulation early and hard; this is what I take to be Altman's gamble.
I am not very optimistic about the degree to which the final state of the game board before singularity can be influenced. But I am not a believer in superdeterminism.
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2s get a lot of ideas from 1s and so do their employees/followers, so 1s still have significant power (in a 'your actions have significant impact on the future' sense, if not a 'you can order a bunch of people around' one) in practice. Something something so-called practical men are slaves of long-dead philosophers. You say 'impact on the discourse', the discourse feels like it's dominated by people who've been around for a while, whether they're safetyist or not.
Yeah, but there are quite a few EAs in both places!
I wonder what absolute morality looks like for AGIs and their relationships with the material other AGIs, as opposed to just humans. That seems as, if not more, important than 'how will AIs relate to us', in the same way that how we relate to animals is of secondary importance to us.
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There are different grades of what we might call "post-scarcity", from the worst being something akin to modern welfare or even medieval charity, to the unbounded abundance if we somehow get infinite energy/negentropy (I'm not counting on that).
Thus, even if we don't all receive an equal share, given the sheer amount of resources out there, even just in the Solary System, I fully expect that even with a non-egalitarian distribution, we can all be wealthy beyond belief, or if you've got an exceptionally vivid imagination, leading the kinds of lives available to a modern billionaire or at least a multi-millionaire. That's still true even if the people with the lion's share are truly absurdly well off, the former represents a rounding error on available resources for a long, long time.
In other words, if they were motivated to maintain hierarchies, it could be on the scale of who has dibs over entire star systems or galaxies while the rest of us are merely filthy rich.
One can argue that, from the perspective of a medieval peasant or even nobility, we're already there, at least in the West.
Call me a congenital optimist, but I don't expect that the people who do opt to keep the rest of us alive after we're economically obsolete are likely to keep us at subsistence levels or even what we might call in hardship today if they wanted to cheap out, there's always VR, and I'm not one to turn my nose up at it. I'd obviously prefer a more equitable distribution, but there are plenty of ways to slice the lightcone such that the scraps provide eudaimonia..
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