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Comment by pton_xd | Hacker News Reader

> We envision a world with widespread flourishing at a level that is currently difficult to imagine

Help me imagine it, what are some examples of widespread flourishing we can look forward to?

SamA becoming more powerful and wealthy.

SamAs hypothetical friends - not sure if he has any _real_ friends as that requires trust, which is famously antithetical to interacting with SamA - becoming more powerful and wealthy.

Need any more examples of flourishing?

In a simplified world with 1 trillionaire and 99 people who have $1 each, the average person has ~$10 billion. The average person is flourishing!

Also, if you kill 10 people a year, you will have an accelerating rate of average wealth growth!

Just take away their jobs by replacing them with ai and have them kill themselves. So much cheaper :(

This is the key, every AI company makes a big deal about how AGI will be transformative but we're just supposed to take it on faith that this transformation will be good.

absolute underpants gnomes reasoning

Yeah considering we're somewhat far along the maturity curve with LLMs, and diffusion, we can kind of extrapolate where this is going, so unless there's another gamechanging breakthrough, I can't connect the dots between what we have now, and what's being described here.

Not succumbing to being cynical I can imagine total elimination of food shortages by completely making farming robot driven, AI driven gene therapy to end most disease, robot driven scalable power generation through building solar panels in an automated fashion, installation and maintenance, one robot at home that can replace all tradesmen etc. There is a lot of stuff that could be possible if the promises pan out and they don’t seem completely out of reach at this point.

The reason for food shortages is not scarcity of food, nor the reason for shelter, clothing, or transportation.

We have enough technology and resources to make it a heaven for everyone except for unpreventable diseases or similar.

Yet we do not because we did not crack the human-alignment problem.

That’s the problem we need to solve, not the resource problem.

If we solve the resource problem before the human alignment problem, we will cause unimaginable suffering.

It will sort itself out over time. It will be painful. Probably not over our lifetime.

This is the kind of attitude that is the reason it won't happen

I’ll take it over whatever Luddite fucking nonsense the progressives have going on right now. I’m a progressive and will fight whatever short term nonsense perspective vociferously. It’s progressive because it’s forward looking, not some regressive bullshit like we have now.

The billionaires controlling this aren't going to save us no matter how much wealth and power they gain.

Billionaires are the ones making paradigm shifting progress because they are the only ones that can afford it. I’m all for taxing billionaires but not understanding how paradigm shifts have worked in the US for 80 years you’re just going on gut feel not evidence.

> It will be painful

you are choosing the pain of the masses over the pain of the wealthy.

Today more than one million people die annually of TB, a disease that is completely treatable with a fairly inexpensive medicine. We could pretty much eliminate TB from the entire world if we just distributed this medicine differently than we currently do. Yet still there will be thousands of deaths due to TB today.

Why would some fancy new gene therapy be different? We already know what happens when we have a treatment for a deadly disease. People without money still die from it.

I read "widespread flourishing" as referring to a scope of influence and "at a level that is difficult to imagine" as referring to an amount of accumulated wealth.

But surely the people who aren't committing to not use technology for autonomous death deserve a more charitable reading.

I'm not super optimistic personally, but isn't the optimistic outcome obvious? If AGI takes over, solves robotics, (and doesn't kill us all,) then we could see the elimination of all human labor for the purposes of meeting necessities.

Do you think our economic system is prepared to cope with that?

Unless AI can solve the "people with access to capital would prefer to keep it rather than share it freely" problem, this doesn't actually lead to human flourishing. You need to pay for the labor-bot and you don't have any money to do so because there are no jobs available for you.

Given that AI doesn't seem to be solving the allocation problem even for things like distributing fairly inexpensive TB drugs to people who need them, I'm not holding my breath.

Maybe something like swarms of autonomous killer drones invading Greenland and Canada?

There are people that will call you a luddite for this.

"The world is going to be so much better! We're not really sure how, but, trust us, definitely better!"

And give us money, do not put any regulation in place, actually ignore when we break the law, and for sure, no taxes please!

The more specific the better

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