Hacker News Reader

Comment by jweir | Hacker News Reader

I look around me and see a wealthy society that has said no to a lot of technological progress - but not all. These are people that work together to build as a community to build and develop their society. They look at technology and ask if will be beneficial to the community and help preserve it - not fragment it.

I am currently on the outskirts of Amish country.

BTW when they come together to raise a barn it is called a frolic. I think we can learn a thing or two from them. And they certainly illustrate that alternatives are possible.

View on HN

I get that, and I agree there is a lot to admire in such a culture, but how is it mutually exclusive with allowing progress in the rest of society? If you want to drop out and join the Amish, that's your prerogative. And in fact, the optimistic viewpoint of AGI is that it will make it even easier for you to do that, because there will be less work required from humans to sustain the minimum viable society, so in this (admittedly, possibly naive utopia) you'll only need to work insofar as you want to. I generally subscribe to this optimistic take, and I think instead of pushing for erecting barriers to progress in AI research, we should be pushing for increased safety nets in the form of systems like Basic Income for the people who might lose their jobs (which, if they had a choice, they probably wouldn't want to work anyway!)

Technological progress and societal progress are two different things. Developing lethal chemical weapons is not societal progress. Developing polarizing social media algorithms is not societal progress. If we poured $500B and years of the brightest minds into studying theoretical physics and developed a simple formula that anyone can follow for mixing ketchup and whiskey in such that it causes the atoms of all organic life in the solar system to disintegrate into subatomic particles it would be a tremendous and unmatched technological achievement, but it would very much not be societal progress.

The pessimistic view of AGI deems spontaneous disintegration into beta particles a less dramatic event than the event of AGI. When you're climbing a dark uncharted cave you take the pessimistic attitude when pondering if the next step will hold your weight, because if you hold the optimistic attitude you will surely die.

This is much more dangerous than caves. We have mapped many caves. We have never mapped an AGI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com