You best start believing in ghost stories

From my perspective keeping people working in unneeded jobs is the actual evil.

The issue here is mostly with the age old hyperrealism humans operated under, as a group. Truth works (at least worked) worse. The way reality was shaped had a clear productivity purpose, which one can argue is for a greater good (of the group). At the same time, this meant we took a road which might have very well landed us on a local maxima, and now it's quite hard getting down from it. We do not know how, as a group.

So we arrive at such funny situations, where the Pope is low key signaling people who have the power to, should come up with a new story to avoid chaos and pain, but disguised as "truth". Or signaling that humans cannot coexist without being busy working, since they've been pretty much bred into it across the ages, and they cannot function if this suddenly stops. Small groups might, but large scale it's bound to get ugly. But he calls this unemployment thing "evil", which in a sense isn't wrong, there's a serious risk of evil manifesting as a side effect of that, sure.

So keeping them busy is mostly a need to deal with the side effect of breeding humans into working units, across the ages. Evil if you don't, evil if you do.

I guess my point is that we do not know how to interact without it being need based, fundamentally. Because we and the environment selected for this. And the core issue here is we will stop needing eachother, basically, and we don't know what to do at that point. I mean as a group.

Edit: To add a bit more, one must understand that religion developed to consider as many as possible, everyone, and make it work. Fitting everyone and extracting value. Large scale pragmatism. Where techies are optimizing down, doing most with least possible people. The incentives are at odds, in this regard.

And neither of these two perspectives look great for us a group.

Since this guy really loves Michael Levin, thought I'd share a little anecdote.

I had the unhappy privilege of attending one of his academic talks during his xenobots era, where he claimed his artificial living systems could seek and sense food based on local gradient. He was asked during the talk whether he'd controlled for mechanical effects, after all maybe the xenobot was just preferentially diffusing towards the food rather than sensing it. Levin responded by calling the guy an idiot, and seemed to suggest that there was no difference between these explanations.

Charming guy.

I'm still hopeful that this ends up being mostly "normal" technology. Time will tell!

missed "Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man" from Antigone.

“Equal rights for ‘AI’ are indeed an issue humanity will soon have to confront, but it seems absurd for the issue to be raised by a decaying symbol of clerical authority—one that has itself been subjugated by ‘science.’”

> This is a common issue with any thinking that emphasises some type of ‘strengthening organisations’ i.e. it assumes someone is in charge. Put it this way, not only is Dario Amodei more powerful than Donald Trump, but systematised incentives are a hell of a lot more powerful than Dario Amodei.

The reality that Leo is pretending not to live in is that nature of collective truth simply will change as a result of this technology. The challenge for someone interested in human wellbeing is to work out how we thrive in a world where you cannot tell whether the things you see or hear actually happened. Or whether any of the people you encounter via technology actually exist. How does meaning operate in that environment?

AI is a force of nature and the companies who are pouring billions into its development are actually powerless to do anything about it...

The e/acc bro manifesto in a nutshell, I guess.

Seems like the same logic used to argue against climate action nowadays: "There is nothing we can do, so we better learn to live with complete ecosystem collapse"