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Great article that exposes many college-educated blind spots, in particular that education is not a panacea for inequality. But the proposed solution of more de

Great article that exposes many college-educated blind spots, in particular that education is not a panacea for inequality. But the proposed solution of more democratic workplaces — somehow convincing capital-holders that investing in human labor rather than automation is in their own self-interest — feels like swimming against the tide of history. Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so dearly. IQ is partially genetic, and with a low ceiling — sooner than we’re ready to accept, nobody’s brain will hold a candle to AI. Equating our economic value with moral worth will only lead to further cultural division, despair, and anarcho-primitivism. Instead, let’s try to build a culture, society, and government that takes the intrinsic value of human life as an axiom, before it’s too late.

commandlinefan 7y ago
> nobody’s brain will hold a candle to AI Nobody can outrun a car, either, but cars haven’t made humans obsolete. Instead, we use them as tools to accomplish our goals: just as we will with AI.
- Proziam 7y ago
  I'm very undecided about AI, but this argument doesn't feel right to me. The ability to run fast was never the 'unfair advantage' of being human. Cars are a tool to help us overcome physical limitations. But what happens if a general AI is capable of outdoing us intellectually? I'm not of the opinion that AI will just decide to destroy us all or anything particularly extreme. Still, I find it very hard to believe that humans could actually 'control' entities that are smarter than we are. Anyone making high-confidence predictions about how that would play is worthy of some skepticism, I believe.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    While AI topic today is all fearmongering essentially, I agree with you that we can’t actually or should actually control something that’s smarter and more advanced than us. I’ll give the wheel to them, like how I trust my doctor to know what’s best for my body. They might not be the best for me but could be better for the Earth Civilization.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- vegetablepotpie 7y ago
  But cars have made horses obsolete. Although horses aren’t extinct, owning one is more of a hobby in the western world. AI is cognitive automation. Not only will blue collar jobs be replaced, but so to will white collar jobs as well. We’re approaching the point where capital alone (without labor) will be able to generate wealth in more general cases. When that happens, employing people will be a hobby. When that happens, humans will need other ways to make income than with their labor.
  - dantheman 7y ago
    Deal with it when it happens. How much time was spent worrying about what would happen when energy was too cheap too meter? It didn't happen. It's easy to come up with problems to worry about that don't actually exist.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  We haven’t even made baby steps with AI yet. All electronics as of today have 0 cognitive ability because they are all deterministic in nature. That’s right, exactly 0 cognition.
  - inimino 7y ago
    This is ridiculous. Essentially all modern machines have access to sources of "true" randomness, and determinism is certainly not what is holding back advances in AI.
    - Aperocky 7y ago
      It is not, all of the machine learning software existing do not truly implement randomness at all. Just because such exist doesn’t mean much. You had single celled organism since 3.5B year ago, does it infer AI to you?
claudeganon 7y ago
Is meritocracy a belief really held by elites though? It seems more a propaganda for the professional class to keep them from acting in solidarity with everyone else. In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy. Those at the top seem to embrace a much more base instrumentalism of “might (by proxy of wealth) makes right.”
- esoterica 7y ago
  >Is meritocracy a belief really held by elites though? It seems more a propaganda for the professional class to keep them from acting in solidarity with everyone else. > In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy. Why do you think that the members of the professional class would personally benefit from more solidarity with the working class? Many high-earning professionals own millions of dollars worth of "capital" (shares, rental properties) and would not benefit from any kind of revolution that would tank the value of these assets. They also already possess many of the benefits that the working class are agitating for (good benefits, high pay), and don't need an overhaul of the economic structure to obtain those. I'm not saying solidarity is bad, I'm just saying your derisive view of high-income professionals as dumdums brainwashed by the rich into acting against their own interests when they decline to participate in the revolution is not an accurate reflection of their actual incentives.
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  >In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy. Uh... I think that's the wrong argument. The people making "high salaries" (let's say... >= $100k/year, base salary) at FAANG companies really are, de facto, petty bourgeois. They don't just get "stock options" that never materialize. They get annual bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars, plus stock options or RSUs that vest to create further paper wealth. In the Bay Area with its stupidly stratospheric housing prices, maybe we can talk about these people being "middle class" in the same way my parents are (ie: as white-collar employees making middling salaries). Maybe. But really, just about anywhere outside the Bay Area, most of those high salary FAANG employees are building capital far faster than they lose money to living expenses, and provided they're willing to live cheaply and far away, a secure early retirement in middle-age is a strong possibility. Given some moderate but successful investments, they could even get truly rich. Working class is when you convert labor into money into commodities. Owning class is when you convert money into commodities into money. But what's correct to point out is that the vast majority of programmers, software engineers, and IT staff aren't high-salary FAANG workers. They take home a median income, in fact, of about ~$65k/year.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
The article convinced me that UBI would likely be a more meaningful policy position. Some people (the majority, in reality) just aren't cut out for college. Co-determinism seems D.O.A if companies like Uber are planning on autonomous transportation: the underemployed working class is but a stepping stone to creating a company that depends on exclusively highly skilled, upper middle class laborers. Truthfully, there may be not much of a place for low-skilled labor if the service sector will be inevitably automated. UBI is too far left; education for all is palatable policy. And that's why the Democratic establishment is where it's at.
allovernow 7y ago
>Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so dearly. IQ is partially genetic, and with a low ceiling How can you possibly allocate resources efficiently if you don't consider whether those you are allocating to are competent? What do you propose? Derisk with massive government bureaucracy?
- austhrow743 7y ago
  Why do we need to allocate resources efficiently? People having lots of resources hasn't really made us any happier. If lots of resources made a difference everyone in developed countries would be euphoric 24/7. Yet we're chock full of anti-depressants and still sometimes intentionally kill ourselves.
  - allovernow 7y ago
    No, I'm talking about the manpower and materials that are necessary for food, water, transportation, medical care, and all of the other thousands of things that make society work. Ultimately, scarce resources, which take their own industries to produce, need to be allocated so the many goods and services we need and want can be designed, built, and/or executed/delivered. If you do not rely on merit to decide who does what, everything will absolutely collapse.
    - salt-licker 7y ago
      To clarify, I believe in allocating work based on competence, and even incentivizing such behavior when necessary with some monetary reward, which our current markets do an okay job at. By “meritocracy” I mean the idea that it is morally just for people to be rewarded in money or social status proportional to their economic usefulness — an idea most people implicitly hold to some degree and which some libertarians trumpet as a core tenet. I think the implied inverse to this belief — in the extreme, that lack of economic usefulness deserves poverty — is morally repugnant and dangerous.
nradov 7y ago
What is the IQ score of the best current AI and what is the rate of increase?

commandlinefan 7y ago

> nobody’s brain will hold a candle to AI Nobody can outrun a car, either, but cars haven’t made humans obsolete. Instead, we use them as tools to accomplish our goals: just as we will with AI.

Proziam 7y ago
I'm very undecided about AI, but this argument doesn't feel right to me. The ability to run fast was never the 'unfair advantage' of being human. Cars are a tool to help us overcome physical limitations. But what happens if a general AI is capable of outdoing us intellectually? I'm not of the opinion that AI will just decide to destroy us all or anything particularly extreme. Still, I find it very hard to believe that humans could actually 'control' entities that are smarter than we are. Anyone making high-confidence predictions about how that would play is worthy of some skepticism, I believe.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  While AI topic today is all fearmongering essentially, I agree with you that we can’t actually or should actually control something that’s smarter and more advanced than us. I’ll give the wheel to them, like how I trust my doctor to know what’s best for my body. They might not be the best for me but could be better for the Earth Civilization.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
vegetablepotpie 7y ago
But cars have made horses obsolete. Although horses aren’t extinct, owning one is more of a hobby in the western world. AI is cognitive automation. Not only will blue collar jobs be replaced, but so to will white collar jobs as well. We’re approaching the point where capital alone (without labor) will be able to generate wealth in more general cases. When that happens, employing people will be a hobby. When that happens, humans will need other ways to make income than with their labor.
- dantheman 7y ago
  Deal with it when it happens. How much time was spent worrying about what would happen when energy was too cheap too meter? It didn't happen. It's easy to come up with problems to worry about that don't actually exist.
Aperocky 7y ago
We haven’t even made baby steps with AI yet. All electronics as of today have 0 cognitive ability because they are all deterministic in nature. That’s right, exactly 0 cognition.
- inimino 7y ago
  This is ridiculous. Essentially all modern machines have access to sources of "true" randomness, and determinism is certainly not what is holding back advances in AI.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    It is not, all of the machine learning software existing do not truly implement randomness at all. Just because such exist doesn’t mean much. You had single celled organism since 3.5B year ago, does it infer AI to you?

claudeganon 7y ago

Is meritocracy a belief really held by elites though? It seems more a propaganda for the professional class to keep them from acting in solidarity with everyone else. In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy. Those at the top seem to embrace a much more base instrumentalism of “might (by proxy of wealth) makes right.”

esoterica 7y ago
>Is meritocracy a belief really held by elites though? It seems more a propaganda for the professional class to keep them from acting in solidarity with everyone else. > In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy. Why do you think that the members of the professional class would personally benefit from more solidarity with the working class? Many high-earning professionals own millions of dollars worth of "capital" (shares, rental properties) and would not benefit from any kind of revolution that would tank the value of these assets. They also already possess many of the benefits that the working class are agitating for (good benefits, high pay), and don't need an overhaul of the economic structure to obtain those. I'm not saying solidarity is bad, I'm just saying your derisive view of high-income professionals as dumdums brainwashed by the rich into acting against their own interests when they decline to participate in the revolution is not an accurate reflection of their actual incentives.
eli_gottlieb 7y ago
>In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy. Uh... I think that's the wrong argument. The people making "high salaries" (let's say... >= $100k/year, base salary) at FAANG companies really are, de facto, petty bourgeois. They don't just get "stock options" that never materialize. They get annual bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars, plus stock options or RSUs that vest to create further paper wealth. In the Bay Area with its stupidly stratospheric housing prices, maybe we can talk about these people being "middle class" in the same way my parents are (ie: as white-collar employees making middling salaries). Maybe. But really, just about anywhere outside the Bay Area, most of those high salary FAANG employees are building capital far faster than they lose money to living expenses, and provided they're willing to live cheaply and far away, a secure early retirement in middle-age is a strong possibility. Given some moderate but successful investments, they could even get truly rich. Working class is when you convert labor into money into commodities. Owning class is when you convert money into commodities into money. But what's correct to point out is that the vast majority of programmers, software engineers, and IT staff aren't high-salary FAANG workers. They take home a median income, in fact, of about ~$65k/year.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

The article convinced me that UBI would likely be a more meaningful policy position. Some people (the majority, in reality) just aren't cut out for college. Co-determinism seems D.O.A if companies like Uber are planning on autonomous transportation: the underemployed working class is but a stepping stone to creating a company that depends on exclusively highly skilled, upper middle class laborers. Truthfully, there may be not much of a place for low-skilled labor if the service sector will be inevitably automated. UBI is too far left; education for all is palatable policy. And that's why the Democratic establishment is where it's at.

allovernow 7y ago

>Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so dearly. IQ is partially genetic, and with a low ceiling How can you possibly allocate resources efficiently if you don't consider whether those you are allocating to are competent? What do you propose? Derisk with massive government bureaucracy?

austhrow743 7y ago
Why do we need to allocate resources efficiently? People having lots of resources hasn't really made us any happier. If lots of resources made a difference everyone in developed countries would be euphoric 24/7. Yet we're chock full of anti-depressants and still sometimes intentionally kill ourselves.
- allovernow 7y ago
  No, I'm talking about the manpower and materials that are necessary for food, water, transportation, medical care, and all of the other thousands of things that make society work. Ultimately, scarce resources, which take their own industries to produce, need to be allocated so the many goods and services we need and want can be designed, built, and/or executed/delivered. If you do not rely on merit to decide who does what, everything will absolutely collapse.
  - salt-licker 7y ago
    To clarify, I believe in allocating work based on competence, and even incentivizing such behavior when necessary with some monetary reward, which our current markets do an okay job at. By “meritocracy” I mean the idea that it is morally just for people to be rewarded in money or social status proportional to their economic usefulness — an idea most people implicitly hold to some degree and which some libertarians trumpet as a core tenet. I think the implied inverse to this belief — in the extreme, that lack of economic usefulness deserves poverty — is morally repugnant and dangerous.

nradov 7y ago

What is the IQ score of the best current AI and what is the rate of increase?