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What would be a groundbreaking great leap technology that wouldn't immediately result in articles that say "x will make our society even more unequal"? Viable

What would be a groundbreaking great leap technology that wouldn't immediately result in articles that say "x will make our society even more unequal"? Viable AR/VR? Fully autonomous vehicles? Fusion power? Edit: I'm confused why this question is garnering all these downvotes. Could anyone please help me understand why this is controversial or disliked?

sharemywin 4y ago
tor?
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  Not exactly a "great leap" technology if most people have never heard of it and less than 0.01% of people have ever used it or benefited directly from its use.
anonzzzies 4y ago
I would say an (in practice; even if in theory it runs in 5 billions years or so) unlimited, low/non polluting power source that is easy to copy and roll out. Unlimited power solves many issues. But most leaps would not result in ‘x will make things unequal’ if the people making would give everyone access to them in an affordable manner. That’s why an unlimited source of energy has to be easy to make and copy and not be hampered by patents on hurdles that prevent that. Otherwise these articles are absolutely right.
- animuchan 4y ago
  But the current generation AI is readily accessible to everyone, either for free or very affordably priced.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    To be fair, the current generation isn't public. The previous generation is. The current generation is whatever is behind closed doors right now being tested by OpenAI and partners and quietly demo'd to big corps so they can prep. Say the version that can solve captchas with better than human accuracy.
  - tivert 4y ago
    > But the current generation AI is readily accessible to everyone, either for free or very affordably priced. I think the "accessible to everyone" rubric is more complicated than the GP described. It's more like provides similar economic benefits to everyone. ChatGPT may be "readily accessible to everyone," but if it and similar technologies allow significant automation of knowledge work it will not provide similar benefits to everyone, since it will allow the elimination of entire categories of jobs. At least in the short-term "elimination of entire categories of jobs" benefits the ownership class and no one else. If these "AI" technologies also inhibit the ability of those masses of laid off workers to retrain an switch jobs to something with equivalently high wages, then they will make our society even more unequal in the long term.
    - animuchan 4y ago
      To me it sounds like an impossibly high bar to clear: even plainly giving a person $100 in cash, no strings attached, doesn't provide similar economic benefits to different people.
  - gl-prod 4y ago
    If you're talking about OpenAI, then nope, it's not accessible to everyone. OpenAI is blocking poorer countries from using its services.
- abecedarius 4y ago
  There was a classic sf novel that started with the discovery of a matter duplicator which is able to duplicate itself. The society in the story world evolves to bring back slavery. Now, this was totally made up, but it's not too hard to solve the puzzle of how such a response could logically happen. You can basically always find an angle for the story you want to tell.
  - tivert 4y ago
    > There was a classic sf novel that started with the discovery of a matter duplicator which is able to duplicate itself. The society in the story world evolves to bring back slavery. What's the name of that story?
    - abecedarius 4y ago
      Damon Knight, A For Anything. There's a different story by another author where a similar machine brings on an economic depression, but I forget the title.
- techdragon 4y ago
  A patent monopoly on that hypothetical power generation device would have the potential do a lot of harm actually… Bankrupt many companies, causing the loss of jobs generally around the world and a potential expanding economic shock matched to the rate of production of the new devices Cause the complete devastation of smaller sized communities (villages and towns, very small cities) where the majority of employment is directly in an energy related resource extraction capacity or in supporting jobs maintaining equipment for or supplying services to these primary resource industries The lack of externally needed power supply like diesel fuel or surface supplies for solar farms would enable more people to take up mobile or alternative living situations (van life, mobile homes, camping with appliances) as the need for a house to plug in appliances is one of the anchoring factors in real estate economics which could be the best thing for people in general but also another potentially large scale economic shock.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hackinthebochs 4y ago
These low effort historical comparisons are really insidious. It turns out we can do better than an obtuse comparison of the present circumstance to past cases and increase our ability to predict outcomes. Yes, the current case of AI rhymes with past cases of technological progress. But the actual features of the cases show core differences that imply a very different result in the case of AI. Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. Productivity and wages largely remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate as the use of AI proliferates. This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. The fact that few people are considering what society looks like in a future with widespread AI and whether this is a future we want is baffling. This is humanity's new agriculture moment; those that are positioned to become the new ruling class are resisting any ideas of slowing down. While the rest of us are oblivious to the approaching calamity. The tech crowd with a boner for the supposed techno-utopia imagined in sci-fi needs to ask what costs we should be willing to pay for a chance at that future.
triceratops 4y ago
Fusion power would probably make society more equal. Especially if a government cracked it.

sharemywin 4y ago

tor?

unsupp0rted 4y ago
Not exactly a "great leap" technology if most people have never heard of it and less than 0.01% of people have ever used it or benefited directly from its use.

anonzzzies 4y ago

I would say an (in practice; even if in theory it runs in 5 billions years or so) unlimited, low/non polluting power source that is easy to copy and roll out. Unlimited power solves many issues. But most leaps would not result in ‘x will make things unequal’ if the people making would give everyone access to them in an affordable manner. That’s why an unlimited source of energy has to be easy to make and copy and not be hampered by patents on hurdles that prevent that. Otherwise these articles are absolutely right.

animuchan 4y ago
But the current generation AI is readily accessible to everyone, either for free or very affordably priced.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  To be fair, the current generation isn't public. The previous generation is. The current generation is whatever is behind closed doors right now being tested by OpenAI and partners and quietly demo'd to big corps so they can prep. Say the version that can solve captchas with better than human accuracy.
- tivert 4y ago
  > But the current generation AI is readily accessible to everyone, either for free or very affordably priced. I think the "accessible to everyone" rubric is more complicated than the GP described. It's more like provides similar economic benefits to everyone. ChatGPT may be "readily accessible to everyone," but if it and similar technologies allow significant automation of knowledge work it will not provide similar benefits to everyone, since it will allow the elimination of entire categories of jobs. At least in the short-term "elimination of entire categories of jobs" benefits the ownership class and no one else. If these "AI" technologies also inhibit the ability of those masses of laid off workers to retrain an switch jobs to something with equivalently high wages, then they will make our society even more unequal in the long term.
  - animuchan 4y ago
    To me it sounds like an impossibly high bar to clear: even plainly giving a person $100 in cash, no strings attached, doesn't provide similar economic benefits to different people.
- gl-prod 4y ago
  If you're talking about OpenAI, then nope, it's not accessible to everyone. OpenAI is blocking poorer countries from using its services.
abecedarius 4y ago
There was a classic sf novel that started with the discovery of a matter duplicator which is able to duplicate itself. The society in the story world evolves to bring back slavery. Now, this was totally made up, but it's not too hard to solve the puzzle of how such a response could logically happen. You can basically always find an angle for the story you want to tell.
- tivert 4y ago
  > There was a classic sf novel that started with the discovery of a matter duplicator which is able to duplicate itself. The society in the story world evolves to bring back slavery. What's the name of that story?
  - abecedarius 4y ago
    Damon Knight, A For Anything. There's a different story by another author where a similar machine brings on an economic depression, but I forget the title.
techdragon 4y ago
A patent monopoly on that hypothetical power generation device would have the potential do a lot of harm actually… Bankrupt many companies, causing the loss of jobs generally around the world and a potential expanding economic shock matched to the rate of production of the new devices Cause the complete devastation of smaller sized communities (villages and towns, very small cities) where the majority of employment is directly in an energy related resource extraction capacity or in supporting jobs maintaining equipment for or supplying services to these primary resource industries The lack of externally needed power supply like diesel fuel or surface supplies for solar farms would enable more people to take up mobile or alternative living situations (van life, mobile homes, camping with appliances) as the need for a house to plug in appliances is one of the anchoring factors in real estate economics which could be the best thing for people in general but also another potentially large scale economic shock.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hackinthebochs 4y ago

These low effort historical comparisons are really insidious. It turns out we can do better than an obtuse comparison of the present circumstance to past cases and increase our ability to predict outcomes. Yes, the current case of AI rhymes with past cases of technological progress. But the actual features of the cases show core differences that imply a very different result in the case of AI. Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. Productivity and wages largely remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate as the use of AI proliferates. This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. The fact that few people are considering what society looks like in a future with widespread AI and whether this is a future we want is baffling. This is humanity's new agriculture moment; those that are positioned to become the new ruling class are resisting any ideas of slowing down. While the rest of us are oblivious to the approaching calamity. The tech crowd with a boner for the supposed techno-utopia imagined in sci-fi needs to ask what costs we should be willing to pay for a chance at that future.

triceratops 4y ago

Fusion power would probably make society more equal. Especially if a government cracked it.