3 ms·

> Do you have sleepless nights because you know that the device you use right now required slave labor to be constructed? Yes. Literally yes. It sucks. I try t

> Do you have sleepless nights because you know that the device you use right now required slave labor to be constructed? Yes. Literally yes. It sucks. I try to minimize purchases, I research the most ethical sellers I can within the bounds of available information, and I try to reuse as much as is possible. > That's the main issue at play here and needs to be remedied by fair and empathic argument - not by railing against a group of people who you paint as unequivocally evil. When they stop acting like their mission in life is to drive everyone else into precarity and then to ruin, or even at least stop acting like it’s so horrible that people in their gunsights are upset about it, I’ll stop drawing from their actions the obvious conclusions. UBI is a great way forward. Never said it wasn’t! But. It is clearly not on the radar of the people bankrolling this. If it was? They would expend the money and the political capital to do it. They would be on that goddamned stump. But Sam Altman isn’t out there buying congressmen for UBI. Could! But isn’t. So why would I believe that it’s any kind of priority? But okay, that’s uncharitable, I’m sure. Altman is busy. So show me who should convince me that there is an argument at all beyond “you can’t stop us”, could you? Show me who is making fat stacks off of the AI craze and is also doing the political work, won’t you? Show me who is going “I am now making bank and I want us to give back structurally.” I have looked. I don’t see them. I want to push those messages. But I am reasonably confident they don’t exist. I’d like to be wrong. I never said that there is any expectation of putting the genie back in the bottle, either. We do need political action, we do need to be emphatic and we do need to push for solutions (and UBI is a good one), and in so doing we might even fix the problems they create…but that doesn’t change their souls. It just means maybe we can work around them.

Last5Digits 4y ago
My point was that you are strongly judging a group of people whose behavior is not that unusual. If you genuinely have a bad conscience about the things I outlined, then you are in the vast minority. 99% of people in developed nations don't care about the sacrifices made for their lifestyle, they feel no compulsion to give back or prevent the abuse of others in the name of profit. They may pay lip service, but they won't sacrifice anything to practice what they preach. Reading about modern slavery in cobalt mines will make them feel bad temporarily, but within days they'll be right back shopping for a new smartphone. That is the unfortunate reality - our intuitive sense of injustice is strongly biased towards locality. We care when something bad happens to the people near and dear to us, but suffering that is far away or somewhat hidden doesn't really register. We need to face this reality and work with it, instead of getting heated and self-righteous. Sam Altman's soul is neither worse nor better than the one of your average middle-class American. Instead of assuming evil intent, assume ignorance. Make convincing arguments, highlight the suffering, offer possible solutions - these are the actions that likely lead to improvement. And to just add a small reminder: AI isn't all bad. It's a disruptive technology, with great risks and great rewards as well.
- eropple 4y ago
  > Instead of assuming evil intent, assume ignorance. Make convincing arguments, highlight the suffering, offer possible solutions - these are the actions that likely lead to improvement. I'll be real: the actions that are likely to lead to improvement are buying Congressmen, and I don't have the money. The AI crowd does, and they are positioning themselves to collect ever more of it. If they are in fact Actually Worried about the people downrange of their guns, why is the onus on everybody else? Why are you implicitly holding that normal people are unreasonable for not wanting to be fed into the gears and that it's not the gear-owners' responsibility to not feed people into them? Don't misunderstand me--I can do a lot of stuff, both tech and not. I'm reasonably confident I'll be fine regardless; if push came to shove, I can enter my disappear-into-the-woods arc. I'm not going to begrudge those who can't refusing to go quietly, and frankly, you shouldn't either. I think you know as well as I do that this crowd isn't looking to talk to the people they seek to grind to dust. They don't think they matter, and if you seriously thought otherwise you'd have answered with examples. Discussion is a luxury afforded only when all parties are going to be okay at the end of the day. You are, for lack of a better term, tone-policing the scared and the harmed on behalf of the wealthy and the harming. And you are clearly more capable of insight than that.

Last5Digits 4y ago

My point was that you are strongly judging a group of people whose behavior is not that unusual. If you genuinely have a bad conscience about the things I outlined, then you are in the vast minority. 99% of people in developed nations don't care about the sacrifices made for their lifestyle, they feel no compulsion to give back or prevent the abuse of others in the name of profit. They may pay lip service, but they won't sacrifice anything to practice what they preach. Reading about modern slavery in cobalt mines will make them feel bad temporarily, but within days they'll be right back shopping for a new smartphone. That is the unfortunate reality - our intuitive sense of injustice is strongly biased towards locality. We care when something bad happens to the people near and dear to us, but suffering that is far away or somewhat hidden doesn't really register. We need to face this reality and work with it, instead of getting heated and self-righteous. Sam Altman's soul is neither worse nor better than the one of your average middle-class American. Instead of assuming evil intent, assume ignorance. Make convincing arguments, highlight the suffering, offer possible solutions - these are the actions that likely lead to improvement. And to just add a small reminder: AI isn't all bad. It's a disruptive technology, with great risks and great rewards as well.

eropple 4y ago
> Instead of assuming evil intent, assume ignorance. Make convincing arguments, highlight the suffering, offer possible solutions - these are the actions that likely lead to improvement. I'll be real: the actions that are likely to lead to improvement are buying Congressmen, and I don't have the money. The AI crowd does, and they are positioning themselves to collect ever more of it. If they are in fact Actually Worried about the people downrange of their guns, why is the onus on everybody else? Why are you implicitly holding that normal people are unreasonable for not wanting to be fed into the gears and that it's not the gear-owners' responsibility to not feed people into them? Don't misunderstand me--I can do a lot of stuff, both tech and not. I'm reasonably confident I'll be fine regardless; if push came to shove, I can enter my disappear-into-the-woods arc. I'm not going to begrudge those who can't refusing to go quietly, and frankly, you shouldn't either. I think you know as well as I do that this crowd isn't looking to talk to the people they seek to grind to dust. They don't think they matter, and if you seriously thought otherwise you'd have answered with examples. Discussion is a luxury afforded only when all parties are going to be okay at the end of the day. You are, for lack of a better term, tone-policing the scared and the harmed on behalf of the wealthy and the harming. And you are clearly more capable of insight than that.