elevatortrim
Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
If it only lives in an isolated sandbox, it can only act within the sandbox, then I would have to manually move what was done in the sandbox to real-life.
I am not saying it should have critical access, but this is more of a question: How can you get value out of AI if it can only act in a sandbox?
It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.
What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.
Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0b9a2a-4c6c-8394-8a66-7f86c510c8...
We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
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.
But when it comes to space technology, if it was possible to produce the same technology by targeting the required technology directly, we can’t say it was because of war only because some of the inventions of war were re-used. It eould be like saying we have a 45th president thanks to Trump - it would be absurd as we’d have a 45th president anyway.
So I do not think there is enough grounds to attribute this mission’s success to war - with some of the war’s budget, NASA could have invented the required technology anyway.
Because success is individual, inequality is statistical.
It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful.
But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful.
Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.
Even if yourself could argue that you’ve done a good thing overall, I’d rather not take your word on that and would rather not have you decide something so extremely impactful.
Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.
Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.
As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.