Looks like we are the paper clip optimising narrow AI we’ve all been afraid of after all…
We don’t make paper clips though, we’ve optimised to make money and turn everything into it.
So ashamed to be part of of it,
We don’t make paper clips though, we’ve optimised to make money and turn everything into it.
So ashamed to be part of of it,
Everything else can be sacrificed as long as the line keeps going up (GDP, stock market, revenue, profit, share price - take your pick). No politician will risk doing anything that makes the line go down even if it boosts 'non line' metrics like happiness, health, social connections, free time, any environmental measures, home ownership, min wage)
Paperclips are at least real objects.
Money doesnt even exist if everyone isndead, its not real.
That we have issued credits for energy and materials that we cannot actually claim at the volumes needed.
It is a compelling idea and that looks fairly plausible. Nate does a great job of walking the fine line between pessimism and optimism, something which Cory Doctoro describes as both side being defeatist.
There is this theory that we've peaked with our net energy extraction in the 1970s, and the graphs that start to diverge that year sure are plentiful and puzzling. It may just be that the last 5 decades have just been us deluding ourselves into believing there's value where very little or none exists, and we only keep afloat because there have been marginal efficiency gains along the way.
I think where we've made the mistake was deferring everything to technological solutions, which arguably created the problem in the first place.
This is not to say technology won't help, or even eventually solve it, but we should work harder on the people and governmental problems.