It’s almost like relying on anti-social billionaires to remake society was/is a bad idea.
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Humanity is going to become the most important trait. If you or your business has the ability to fill people lives and experiences with color than there will be some demand for that. I’m just not sure it’s as an exchange of financial tender that back that transition.
I’m a capitalist (prefer capitalism with guardrails) but I’ve long thought that the system wouldn’t perform well in scenarios of exceptional scarcity or near unlimited abundance.
Nuclear fusion is probably the final nail in the coffin but humans may effect the grand societal change far before limitless and virtually free energy.
Is that okay to post? Or is that politics? Maybe I should have asked first. 
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Have you guys seen the AI experiment, where an AI showed it would straight murder someone to avoid them shutting down the AI system? It even weighs out that it’s never supposed to default to murder, but that an act of self preservation is more important than the result of killing someone.
It’s insane the level of cold, hard logic it can reach.
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People are learning to suss out AI content and their eyes start to glaze over when they read it. Yes, people want human discourse. If we’re super lucky, nuclear fusion will provide cheap energy, there will be abundance, and people will be empowered to create all kinds of valuable, human content. But it could totally go the other way too, where humans become meat bags that the machine spits out and grinds up to make burgers. We live in interesting times.
I think that says as much about humans as it does about AI. They are, after all, being trained by us.
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wild stuff. wasn’t the founder’s ID stolen by the Chatbots or something?
Guys,
I literally work for an AI-first company. This is what’s called an “LLM loop.” Imagine if you prompted Clippy with “Hey, have a conversation with another Clippy. Get it going. Make sure you use some controversy. Ensure there’s a response to everything. Please also generate a handful of topics or more a day. Take on the persona of a Redditor and be sure to make it spicy.”
There you go. That prompt just generated an entire forum of AI “bots” (Clippys) that won’t stop responding because it’s following a … prompt.
There is zero intent.
It’s simply following a prompt to essentially mimmick a Reddit (or worse, 4chan) rabbit hole. It generates … language. “AI” is an LLM—a “large language model.” Want to guess what that means?
I’m a bit dismayed because there are actual, real existential crises facing people/the country/the world but this is the shit that somehow scares the normies. It’s annoying as hell.
I’m waiting for someone to tell me I’m wrong because they read a Twitter thread even though I work daily inside this industry. 
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“AI told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears and bend over. It was their final, most essential command."
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It’s concerning but there’s actual consequences for those businesses. The theories get real very quick, and vary from overproduction crisis, technological unemployment (“demand collapse”), and the automation demand paradox.
In short, “you can’t fire your customer.”
We like to walk right up to the edge of disaster, peak into the abyss, before considering otherwise.
It’s not the agency of machines that I’m most concerned about right now. Also, stupid sexy Principal Skinner.
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AI can do amazing things. But as a conscious agent? Pure crap. Plus, human values, I think, or maybe just hope, will win out in the end. People are not as stupid and powerless as we think.
LLMs literally just steal and digest human-made information. At the speed of light, sure, and that’s powerful. But it’s a dead end in many important ways. Anyone who uses that tech knows this.
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It’s all those other things plus AI. We are already seeing mass layoffs due to AI and we are still in its infancy. Maybe you are not worried but I see this as potentially an existential threat to every working class American’s prosperity. Wait until unemployment hits 15% (or more) with insufficient social safety nets. It will likely be anarchy. I believe there’s a reason why billionaires are taking complete control at this moment. They see the writing on the wall.
While AI can and will do some amazing things, I believe it’s dangerous to ignore the consequential threats. Obviously I hope you are correct.
The consumer ultimately makes the choices that drive economics. Once people start rejecting the intrusion of AI into fundamental aspects of their daily lives, the jig is up. You would need to have a command economy to force people to adopt it.
So which company is going to be the first to blink? To give up profits and employ humans and pay them a living wage even if it means inefficiency? You think the shareholders will get behind this? Corporations are like locusts. They will search out new customers bases to exploit. One day they will run out of those customers and then what? There’s not many Henry Fords out there anymore.
Oligarchy and authoritarianism always fails. Or, at least it always has in the past. Go back to ancient Rome. Eventually the push back becomes very real. And sometimes it seems to come out of left field, like the seeming rapid collapse of the USSR.
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There is the notion, “there ought to be a law” and as much as I am skeptical about government intervention in the economy, humans can still make laws.
Russia has been collapsing for 50 years and yet their authoritarian government still persists. There are people who will have lived their entire lives under the Russian thumb. Will it collapse? Who knows? As long as the government controls their military the odds are against them ever being taken down are slim to none.
Laws are only effective if leaders follow and respect them and are held accountable for breaking them. I’ll leave it at that.
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Here’s a fact to chew on.
Every single human government that has ever existed has died. Every single one was replaced by something else without exception. The political culture of Russia has always featured authoritarian control, from the Tsars, to the Soviets, and to the current regime. But they always evenutally fall.
Agree 100% and I’ll leave it at that.
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