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What about a future where only energy and resources are important leads you to think we’ll have less inequality? Brains are the only thing that don’t flow to th

What about a future where only energy and resources are important leads you to think we’ll have less inequality? Brains are the only thing that don’t flow to the wealthy right now

js8 4y ago
Human nature. If you're a part of the common tribe, people are actually pretty good. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit on the size of the tribe (although some people just wanna hate somebody). You can also look at it this way. The only real objection against socialist societies was that people are lazy, and don't care enough about producing stuff or resolving economic inefficiencies. But with AI, this objection is gone. Nobody really wants to be in a constant "resource competition" or whatever, it's an effort. People generally want to have fun and enjoy life.
- space_fountain 4y ago
  Humans ability to push others out of the circle of concern is near limitless. We literally bought and sold people. I think there is reason for hope. We stopped doing some of those terrible things and only partially for economic reasons, but ai still fills me with some great fear. It shrinks the circle that the wealthy absolutely must keep in their circle, in their tribe, to go on and live happy lives and people of the past have been uncomfortably good at excluding people from the circle in the past. Basically it might not destroy us, but I certainly don’t see it as inevitable that it will bring us to utopia
  - js8 4y ago
    > Humans ability to push others out of the circle of concern is near limitless In theory, yes. In practice, the circle has been continually expanding with technological progress. Stated differently: What's the point of being powerful if you cannot rule over other people? What's the point of having thousands of empty palaces, when no other humans see them or care?
    - space_fountain 4y ago
      > In theory, yes. In practice, the circle has been continually expanding with technological progress. Only if by continually you mean in sum. The holocaust and the genocide that have come since were pretty huge back slides and the tran Atlantic slave trade was a fairly new innovation in scale and kind even if slavery had existed before. Both of those seem if anything enabled by technology. And certainly the rich and powerful are unlikely to to kill absolutely everyone else, but I thought earlier you were arguing that AI would see the end of the rich and powerful. Now you're just saying they'll want to have pets
- Vecr 4y ago
  I think that's dubious, most people's motivations are only loosely coupled with the goal (if there really is one) of making the world a more efficient place. I guess that's what's good about capitalism, at least in the End of History sense[0]. Gets more people more aligned with general efficiency. Anyway, guess what's not efficient, at least in the standard economic sense? Stockpiling for a pandemic. Got to have a bit of a balance there. [0]: i.e. the system in the US and western Europe that prevailed over the USSR at the end of the cold war, technically not "real" capitalism.
  - js8 4y ago
    > most people's motivations are only loosely coupled with the goal (if there really is one) of making the world a more efficient place That's my point! Your personal AI (in collaboration with other AIs) can take care of figuring that out as needed. You don't need capitalism anymore.
    - Vecr 4y ago
      Right, but one of my points above is that AIs would quite possibly miss things or fail in general to make the comprehensive and sophisticated tradeoffs between efficiency and fragility on one side and inefficiency and robustness on the other. They could also miss cases where being less efficient is more fragile and being more efficient is less fragile. I really don't think leaving everything to AIs is a good idea, and having a whole lot of them could cause weird interactions to develop that would need to be monitored by humans.
      - js8 4y ago
        Ever heard of reinforcement learning, AlphaGo, AlphaStar? AIs can already make that trade-off and rather well. AlphaGo was actually better than humans to play robust moves that cement its victory than riskier moves that increase the winning margin.
        Vecr 4y ago
        Right, but then you go back to the whole "AI alignment" thing and you need to make sure you reinforce the right things during training.

What about a future where only energy and resources are important leads you to think we’ll have less inequality? Brains are the only thing that don’t flow to the wealthy right now

js8 4y ago

Human nature. If you're a part of the common tribe, people are actually pretty good. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit on the size of the tribe (although some people just wanna hate somebody). You can also look at it this way. The only real objection against socialist societies was that people are lazy, and don't care enough about producing stuff or resolving economic inefficiencies. But with AI, this objection is gone. Nobody really wants to be in a constant "resource competition" or whatever, it's an effort. People generally want to have fun and enjoy life.

space_fountain 4y ago
Humans ability to push others out of the circle of concern is near limitless. We literally bought and sold people. I think there is reason for hope. We stopped doing some of those terrible things and only partially for economic reasons, but ai still fills me with some great fear. It shrinks the circle that the wealthy absolutely must keep in their circle, in their tribe, to go on and live happy lives and people of the past have been uncomfortably good at excluding people from the circle in the past. Basically it might not destroy us, but I certainly don’t see it as inevitable that it will bring us to utopia
- js8 4y ago
  > Humans ability to push others out of the circle of concern is near limitless In theory, yes. In practice, the circle has been continually expanding with technological progress. Stated differently: What's the point of being powerful if you cannot rule over other people? What's the point of having thousands of empty palaces, when no other humans see them or care?
  - space_fountain 4y ago
    > In theory, yes. In practice, the circle has been continually expanding with technological progress. Only if by continually you mean in sum. The holocaust and the genocide that have come since were pretty huge back slides and the tran Atlantic slave trade was a fairly new innovation in scale and kind even if slavery had existed before. Both of those seem if anything enabled by technology. And certainly the rich and powerful are unlikely to to kill absolutely everyone else, but I thought earlier you were arguing that AI would see the end of the rich and powerful. Now you're just saying they'll want to have pets
Vecr 4y ago
I think that's dubious, most people's motivations are only loosely coupled with the goal (if there really is one) of making the world a more efficient place. I guess that's what's good about capitalism, at least in the End of History sense[0]. Gets more people more aligned with general efficiency. Anyway, guess what's not efficient, at least in the standard economic sense? Stockpiling for a pandemic. Got to have a bit of a balance there. [0]: i.e. the system in the US and western Europe that prevailed over the USSR at the end of the cold war, technically not "real" capitalism.
- js8 4y ago
  > most people's motivations are only loosely coupled with the goal (if there really is one) of making the world a more efficient place That's my point! Your personal AI (in collaboration with other AIs) can take care of figuring that out as needed. You don't need capitalism anymore.
  - Vecr 4y ago
    Right, but one of my points above is that AIs would quite possibly miss things or fail in general to make the comprehensive and sophisticated tradeoffs between efficiency and fragility on one side and inefficiency and robustness on the other. They could also miss cases where being less efficient is more fragile and being more efficient is less fragile. I really don't think leaving everything to AIs is a good idea, and having a whole lot of them could cause weird interactions to develop that would need to be monitored by humans.
    - js8 4y ago
      Ever heard of reinforcement learning, AlphaGo, AlphaStar? AIs can already make that trade-off and rather well. AlphaGo was actually better than humans to play robust moves that cement its victory than riskier moves that increase the winning margin.
      - Vecr 4y ago
        Right, but then you go back to the whole "AI alignment" thing and you need to make sure you reinforce the right things during training.