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My main concern with AI is that I'm not so sure if there is a market for any kind of intelligence anymore. So much human talent and intelligence has been wasted

My main concern with AI is that I'm not so sure if there is a market for any kind of intelligence anymore. So much human talent and intelligence has been wasted over the past few years; so many potentially useful projects went unfunded, I struggle to think of what purpose AI would serve in such an economic system as ours. I can see its potential, but I can't see our current system facilitating that potential. It seems more likely that the technology will be applied towards controlling the masses rather than benefiting them; this has been the purpose of most major tech 'innovations' of the last decade. Wealthy individuals these days hardly need any intelligence at all to stay rich. On the other hand, it seems like poor individuals have no chance no matter how much intelligence they have... Does anyone really need more intelligence? Most human intelligence seems to be wasted on bullshit jobs anyway. What we should be asking ourselves is "how much more comfortable can we make our billionaires?" Because the entire concept of 'economic efficiency' appears to be about optimizing society towards that goal.

qwytw 4y ago
> these days Wasn't it always more or less like this?
- pohl 4y ago
  No.
  - jongjong 4y ago
    Agreed. I entered the workforce as a developer in 2012; it felt like the tail-end of the tech boom but intelligence was still valued. Nowadays, most people don't even recognize intelligence, let alone value it.
    - tinideiznaimnou 4y ago
      Intelligence briefly became useful again as the Internet spontaneously created a bunch of mental real estate. Plowing that took the skills that you would find in a person prone to mentalising. So you got a shot at selling that and you might've even been able to derive some small feeling of privilege from it for a while, even though true power and authority, after all, do not depend on any particular quality, but exist in defiance to all, especially intelligence. Funny to think all that was a generation ago, that the economical conditions for our artifice are now history and it's once again economical to study the much more all-encompassing art of not thinking. (It's very cyclical but, since it involves not thinking, i.e. the termination of a coherent thread of thought, you think it's for the first time every time. But sure, plug in to the simulation at 110% and get 10 years of life for free, you won't even notice the difference, after all, you're already not noticing it.) This is how I, a unit of human capital from the former global East, see the matter of intelligence and automating it at scale: "intelligence" is already something that was forced onto my society in the 1950s, and once again on the 1990s, so that we could be interfaced with the same kinds of systems that the conquering populations exported, under conditions of forcible termination of local culture at the cost of great atrocities. By the time we started building our own Borg cube we'd already been half Borged by the Western one. If the word in some cases denotes another kind of abstract human "intelligence", I have rarely if ever seen such cases exemplified in public. So now it's a bit distasteful to equate "intelligence" with "savoir faire". Having neuromorphic computing in the first place would've saved a lot of suffering in comparison with how we were "civilized" to support only the established market protocols and nothing of our own. Which is something someone will eventually have to admit - probably after a Pontypool-class scenario wipes out their investment in predictable outcomes for a region and they're left with a huge mess on their hands to mop up. And then it turns out the consequences themselves have been thought in such inhumanly fine detail as to possess a rudimentary intelligence of their own and the mop up ends up embedding a sentient malevolent ghost into the nature of that branch of reality. Shit happens, at a certain saturation with Internet stream of thought an omnipresent autoritarian AI even becomes fun to imagine. Of course if one existed its cruelty would be much more banal, as is always the difference between mentalization and reality until the next brief Golden Age (for some of the people, some of the time) and then it's "oh no this time we're fucked" again (for some other people). So sad because there are so many great ideas worth building and fighting for, even in the current limits of human knowledge, but in practice any form of innovation is only tolerated if it's backed by a major financial effort by the upholders of the status quo. For some reason so many times this has ended to the detriment of nonparticipants that we've basically stopped noticing or keeping count. As regulatory capture, so learned helplessness. The economic reality of already existing in a world of inscrutable mechanisms as that most fragile of creatures, the independent knowledge worker, is a psychological stressor, to the extent that everyone's so burnt by the effort on giving up on things that in this new ecosystem are "too smart to work". Help, the AI stole my role in the food chain and now all my thoughts lead nowhere. If that's you, look for a bigger room.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      Well you should be just fine then /s
duncan-donuts 4y ago
I’ve never heard a more cynical AI take. There’s always a market for intelligence, whatever that means. The word intelligence is misleading anyway. No one said the AI needed to compete with the smartest person on the planet. It just needs to be smart enough to do some tasks that are “bullshit jobs”
- tinideiznaimnou 4y ago
  >No one said the AI needed to compete with the smartest person on the planet. It just needs to be smart enough to do some tasks that are “bullshit jobs” And then the smartest person on the planet figures out a better thing for the people who lost their "bullshit jobs" to do, right? No, gets sent to space to see how much even the smartest person on the planet really matters. > There’s always a market for intelligence, whatever that means. The word intelligence is misleading anyway. Agreed. What is decided here is to what extent there will continue to be a market for human intelligence. There are of course opportunity costs that humans who entered a market that they apparently believed to exist, will now have to, apparently, absorb. Or will we once again have to voluntarily undergo unsupervised radical mental restructuring - on the degree of your grandma having to learn how to navigate the Internet, and of her grandma presumably never having to do anything of the sort - and all that just to retain our Red Queen out of checkmate? It's always too early until it's too late. >I’ve never heard a more cynical AI take. Sapienti sat.
hindsightbias 4y ago
There is definitely a market for an intelligence crutch or assisted critical-thinking aid. Like people slowly getting more obese, the general IQ and CT have been sliding for the last few decades. Not sure if it’s the food, media or zanax but society needs something. I’d wager the Altmans of the world know this and figured out a way to monetize it. Necessity is the mother of invention after all.
- ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
  What is "CT" ?

qwytw 4y ago

> these days Wasn't it always more or less like this?

pohl 4y ago
No.
- jongjong 4y ago
  Agreed. I entered the workforce as a developer in 2012; it felt like the tail-end of the tech boom but intelligence was still valued. Nowadays, most people don't even recognize intelligence, let alone value it.
  - tinideiznaimnou 4y ago
    Intelligence briefly became useful again as the Internet spontaneously created a bunch of mental real estate. Plowing that took the skills that you would find in a person prone to mentalising. So you got a shot at selling that and you might've even been able to derive some small feeling of privilege from it for a while, even though true power and authority, after all, do not depend on any particular quality, but exist in defiance to all, especially intelligence. Funny to think all that was a generation ago, that the economical conditions for our artifice are now history and it's once again economical to study the much more all-encompassing art of not thinking. (It's very cyclical but, since it involves not thinking, i.e. the termination of a coherent thread of thought, you think it's for the first time every time. But sure, plug in to the simulation at 110% and get 10 years of life for free, you won't even notice the difference, after all, you're already not noticing it.) This is how I, a unit of human capital from the former global East, see the matter of intelligence and automating it at scale: "intelligence" is already something that was forced onto my society in the 1950s, and once again on the 1990s, so that we could be interfaced with the same kinds of systems that the conquering populations exported, under conditions of forcible termination of local culture at the cost of great atrocities. By the time we started building our own Borg cube we'd already been half Borged by the Western one. If the word in some cases denotes another kind of abstract human "intelligence", I have rarely if ever seen such cases exemplified in public. So now it's a bit distasteful to equate "intelligence" with "savoir faire". Having neuromorphic computing in the first place would've saved a lot of suffering in comparison with how we were "civilized" to support only the established market protocols and nothing of our own. Which is something someone will eventually have to admit - probably after a Pontypool-class scenario wipes out their investment in predictable outcomes for a region and they're left with a huge mess on their hands to mop up. And then it turns out the consequences themselves have been thought in such inhumanly fine detail as to possess a rudimentary intelligence of their own and the mop up ends up embedding a sentient malevolent ghost into the nature of that branch of reality. Shit happens, at a certain saturation with Internet stream of thought an omnipresent autoritarian AI even becomes fun to imagine. Of course if one existed its cruelty would be much more banal, as is always the difference between mentalization and reality until the next brief Golden Age (for some of the people, some of the time) and then it's "oh no this time we're fucked" again (for some other people). So sad because there are so many great ideas worth building and fighting for, even in the current limits of human knowledge, but in practice any form of innovation is only tolerated if it's backed by a major financial effort by the upholders of the status quo. For some reason so many times this has ended to the detriment of nonparticipants that we've basically stopped noticing or keeping count. As regulatory capture, so learned helplessness. The economic reality of already existing in a world of inscrutable mechanisms as that most fragile of creatures, the independent knowledge worker, is a psychological stressor, to the extent that everyone's so burnt by the effort on giving up on things that in this new ecosystem are "too smart to work". Help, the AI stole my role in the food chain and now all my thoughts lead nowhere. If that's you, look for a bigger room.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Well you should be just fine then /s

duncan-donuts 4y ago

I’ve never heard a more cynical AI take. There’s always a market for intelligence, whatever that means. The word intelligence is misleading anyway. No one said the AI needed to compete with the smartest person on the planet. It just needs to be smart enough to do some tasks that are “bullshit jobs”

tinideiznaimnou 4y ago
>No one said the AI needed to compete with the smartest person on the planet. It just needs to be smart enough to do some tasks that are “bullshit jobs” And then the smartest person on the planet figures out a better thing for the people who lost their "bullshit jobs" to do, right? No, gets sent to space to see how much even the smartest person on the planet really matters. > There’s always a market for intelligence, whatever that means. The word intelligence is misleading anyway. Agreed. What is decided here is to what extent there will continue to be a market for human intelligence. There are of course opportunity costs that humans who entered a market that they apparently believed to exist, will now have to, apparently, absorb. Or will we once again have to voluntarily undergo unsupervised radical mental restructuring - on the degree of your grandma having to learn how to navigate the Internet, and of her grandma presumably never having to do anything of the sort - and all that just to retain our Red Queen out of checkmate? It's always too early until it's too late. >I’ve never heard a more cynical AI take. Sapienti sat.

hindsightbias 4y ago

There is definitely a market for an intelligence crutch or assisted critical-thinking aid. Like people slowly getting more obese, the general IQ and CT have been sliding for the last few decades. Not sure if it’s the food, media or zanax but society needs something. I’d wager the Altmans of the world know this and figured out a way to monetize it. Necessity is the mother of invention after all.

ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
What is "CT" ?