simianwords

the post was clearly sarcastic

You said this

“ My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. ”

I just showed how it’s not true.

In your Neanderthals example: would you have chosen to negotiate with Neanderthals to stop making tools and coordinate and stay technologically backward? Thats what you seem to suggest here.

No one realistically thinks that though so I’m not sure who you are attacking

False, Sam Altman has repeatedly said that he doesn't want AI to automate everything and that AI will destroy jobs and bring different, new types of jobs.

But if AI can do everything we can do and better, its strange to argue that we still deserve to do that job. Who will pay you and why would they pay you if they can get it done cheaper? Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?

> The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.

False, Karl Marx himself says that technology improves wealth for all the masses and doesn't leave people destitute.

Edit: I was wrong. Marx makes both claims because his theory is just not that great.

Here’s my bet: open weights AI will become powerful enough that it will be used by adversaries to create havoc.

This is the main risk that the labs OpenAI and Anthropic have called out for and asked for slowing the frontier.

Almost all people thought that this was fear mongering, hype marketing and regulation capture.

The same people will blame OpenAI and Anthropic for creating this.

that's not a coherent view, i'm sorry.

You need to clarify whether you are a doomer or a denier/truther? Doomer = p(doom). Denier/truther = Ed Zitron.

The comment said this

> If we believe the doctor's oversight is required, the AI introduces a dangerous potential for error

This assumes that the doctor won't verify what the AI said. This is a fallacy.

"Lets not use linters. We can employ humans to do the linting"

"Lets not write unit tests. We can hire developers to write good code that doesn't break"

This is such a low quality comment that I wonder whether people even know how AI is used!

I see this same fallacy repeated all the time when we speak about AI.

"I want AI to be 100% accurate and not 99.999%"

"If AI makes even one mistake, why would I even use it?"

"What's the point of using AI if I have to verify it anyway?"

Here's how it could work.

You could always have a CI sort of thing for doctors prescriptions where you run the prescription through AI and it can flag any potential error to the doctor.

The LLM can be accurate enough that it only flags things when necessary

There are two camps in this industry and I have the chance to meet both.

- There are those for whom coding is a hobby, an art project, an identity. These are the people who debate tabs vs spaces or use Vim.

- There are those for whom coding is a way to build things. Their dopamine comes from the end product and seeing people use it. They couldn't care less about tabs vs spaces.

I'm in the second camp. Vibe coding has removed all the shitty parts of coding. Like I hate figuring out how to do this esoteric thing in this library. Wading through docs and hitting the CI constantly - its a pain. Not fun.

> I don't think they're making it better, that's the whole debate.

How not? Their contribution is around 300k+ lives saved.

> That's just an example, referring to the Rohingya genocide or the Palestinian genocide, both of which have been more than facilitated by tech companies.

Do you think EA's would advocate for this? Or you suggest that some EA's merely working for a company that does this is already making them so evil and irredeemable?

> for example, slavery abolition or women's right to vote in the Global North was not achieved by advocating to work for plantation owners and then giving away money to charity

Do you then think that the only way to make change in society is to create revolutions and protests? Anyone who tries to help in any other way is not useful?

Could you answer these?

Why is inequality bad when material wealth has been increasing for decades and centuries? And do you think we have more inequality now or in the last centuries?

(BTW EAs are the ones redistributing their wealth so I wonder why you'd oppose them)

Why is resource extraction bad? Because of climate change? Almost all EA folks want to help with climate change. And no, climate change wouldn't cause human extinction - there's a very small chance of it happening. p(doom) climate change is lower than p(doom) of AI is what EA would argue.

OT but: I'm giggling thinking of these researches caring about animal welfare for their study and then eating meat for dinner

there's this notion that things are so arbitrary and beings are so different that one can't understand eachother. I find this fascinatingly wrong.

No, we can't understand lions because lions are kinda stupid. We can't understand lions also because we haven't researched them enough.

My bet: once "beings" cross an IQ threshold, they can start to understand each other.

Financial was only one part of your argument, you made sweeping arguments about the technology itself. I made no claims about financial.

What profound question do you want them to ask? I’m asking sincerely.

Please don’t suggest something like revolution or class warfare. Maybe you had something else in mind?

No I don’t think these companies made everything quantifiable worse.

But you started with most evil corporations. What did you mean by it and why did you bring it up?

Is your problem with EA that they work within the system and try to incrementally make it better? And you snide at them because of this?? And I have no idea what you mean about genocide.

This confirms my point that a lot of EA critiques come from literal extremists who think doing good within the system is “evil”.

Actually we bet the other way around. History always under estimated technology.

1869 Scientific American [Major mainstream American science publication]

“When man can make a structure as strong, as rigid, as elastic, as light in proportion to bulk as a goose quill, the problem of flight will be nearly solved.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-a-flying-machi...

1888 Joseph Le Conte [Prominent American scientist and UC Berkeley professor]

“A flying-machine… is impossible, in spite of the testimony of the birds.”

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volum...

1902 Lord Kelvin [President of the Royal Society and one of the most prominent physicists of his era]

“No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful.”

https://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/interview_aeronautics_and...

1903 The New York Times [Major mainstream newspaper, 69 days before the Wright brothers’ first powered flight]

“Nature is more successful in applying the law of compensations to the correction of errors of design or development than man has ever been or is ever likely to be.”

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times/1903/10/9/...

The way I see it is this

- if AI is so powerful that it is a superset of human capabilities in that it can not only solve questions but also come up with useful abstractions, then we just simply don't need mathematicians!

- if AI is not that powerful but can automate in-distribution tasks, then that allows mathematicians to explore concepts much faster. Overall positive thing for mathematics

We are obviously in the second camp (at least for now). Your job as a mathematician is to offload as much in-distribution task as possible to the LLM and just focus on the rest.

I rather think it might fail because it adds not much above what Codex or Claude already adds. What won't happen is kids not using LLMs to learn. I doubt anyone would disagree with this.

is this an excellent LARP bait or someone with these sincere views?

He's not that stupid but value according to Labor theory of value is zero-sum. He knows that wealth is positive sum but his followers don't..

I'm willing to have a public bet that the number of tokens (or whatever the equivalent is) would increase by more than 10x in the next 3 years.

(for equivalency of tokens I'd use something like "tasks done by AI")

This is a fallacy and it is known as non-central fallacy.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...

I find it sad that people don't generally think about non zero sum possibilities.

I think it comes from a misreading of Marx because Marx considers value coming from Labor which is purely zero sum.

In my bubble within friends and family, practically everyone uses AI and has fun using it and gets value out of it.

Wow I don't feel this at all. This post is also very low quality and low in substance.

Today I have a lot of options and things work well enough. I have Reddit where I post comments on my local things. I have LinkedIn, WhatsApp.

I can get almost anything I want and understand how to do anything.

There are good critics of EA but I’m speaking about the parent critique which is taking the extremist stance.

Which EA works in Lockheed Martin?