keybored

What a movie. Act like religious whackjobs (A) who want to consume the world. In secret you have a bag of world-changing causes. The setback in the middle of the plot is the supercomputer answering something mundane to a serious question. Everyone feels defeated. But one underling is chatting with his pal subagent 3495. And he mentions the mundane answer. Then the subagent makes a critical connection; the answer is not mundane, it just needs a proper interpretation. Then they send the answer out (15 minutes later) cancer is cured. They use the patents to pay off the debts and then give them away to the public. The CEO moves to a shed on Más a Tierra with a talking parrot companion.

AI might ruin all white collar labor power and drown the world in useless work via things like expand-message-with-AI --> summarize-message-with-AI. Meanwhile with cryptomemes you can remain unaffected unless someone manages to ransomware you.

Technologists as a professional group are beyond weird. You usually expect rational critique (either positive or negative) from professionals, but the good technologists are supposed to just uncritically accept whatever supposed technological progress as an unalloyed good. Employer or Silicon Valley says it’s good, therefore think it is good. No, that’s a bit on the nose: Silicon Valley says it is good which means that it would be “good for my career”, therefore it is good. But are there any ill effects for society? Those are Luddite questions.[1]

But in this case Amish is not really an insult of course. I guess they are a hard-working people. Self-sufficient. And allow their young to take a sabbatical from the primitive life to see if it’s really something that they want to dedicate their life to.

On the other hand, of course there won’t be some Amish split. You can’t just pick and choose modernity. You can’t form a subculture of No AI. That’s why people are critical of AI; we live in a society.

[1] Being ahistorical and using Luddite as an insult also helps.

> I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.

Ah, the shut up it’s too late gambit.

That was a rhetorical question kind of response to you saying that they don’t work, except dock/port workers. By extension I have no trouble believing that those dock worker unions work.

Unions still work? They exist and do real work for their members. They can also coordinate and cooperate which is, I think, how some unions managed to put pressure on Israel. Was it maybe Italian dock workers?

That globalism has made unions not-work is just Capitalist Inevitabilism. Yeah okay I’ll give up when the billionaires have fully autonomous robot brigades. But not over globalism.

> capital

* capitol

I have heard about a few things that the 300K a year SC proletariat have done. I can’t remember offhand right now, but they did apparently force management to go back on some unethical stuff.

But on the whole we see the world that we live in. I guess it would be ten times worse without their quiet protests?

What I do know is that SC is the capital of Effective Altruism, which contains the idea that the best way to do good in the world is to earn a lot of money and then give it to “effective causes”. And I expect no holistic or systemic action from those of such convenient, myopic beliefs.

Big Tech can offer a high salary for non-managers, for people who cannot impact the organization other than through extra-hierarchical means (organizing). Wy would they leave?

They have options. People here spend enough time glazing each others’ 200,000 lumen minds and abilities. And judging by extra-curricular activities, no lies are told as far as I can see. That means that they can just find other employment.[1] There is enough IT that the rest of us work on, IT that doesn’t want to become a global Panopticon. None of it is perfect. You might have to work on software that just makes some previously flexible and okay procedure into a rigid, somewhat buggy, but streamlined and legible to management kind of procedure. You might earn more than the cleaning personell who have unalloyed-good jobs, just removing dirt.[2] But it’s better for the soul.

And you can earn a normal wage. Not a bad wage.

But the horde of luminous minds in Silicon Valley and I guess the Seattle Area (and maybe urban Texas and I dunno) have showed us what they can do with all the demand for their labor, their high salaries, and the pliable management who know that they have to put up with the nerds.

[1] Yes. Some workers have many options. Many have some options, many have few. Most people can’t make principled employment choices.

[2] Now someone with 30 years of experience managing cleaning personell will tell me all the dirt on what cleaning personell get up to.

Nah, it wouldn’t even make them uncomfortable. But there are enough underlings that need to believe this in order to comfortably perpetuate the system.

> Capitalism emerged when people began discovering that wealth could be created rather than merely captured, and that ordinary people could be sources of demand and initiative rather than merely labor to be commanded as a factor of production.

A worker under capitalism is exactly just another commodity commanded by capital. Only competing power centers like unions makes it not one-sided.

I dunno about “demand and initiative”. Is this how capitalism started, or are we jumping ahead to the post-WWII USA where the socialists and capitalists had won concessions from the bougies so that a “middle class” came about?

> The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible.

The weekly working hours increased for many who moved to the factories of the cities. Labor organizing is what lead to the two-day weekend.

> We are moving toward a world in which an ordinary person can command quantities and varieties of intelligence that would previously have required teams of highly trained specialists. Just as I can enjoy food without knowing how to farm, I can increasingly enjoy the products of intelligence without knowing how to produce them myself.

Some people are incapable of seeing power dynamics. An ordinary person might fear AI because of the explicit threats against his or her job.

How does power work? In this case it works by concentrating compute and access to the vaunted frontier models.

Another thing is the part about “hoarding”. AI is exactly about hoarding. Labor built the intelligence of centuries. Now AI wants to close that off.

HN’s love for the Platonic autodidact meets HN’s agreement with whatever tech SC is shoving down our throats (mudulo “sad but true” or whatever value judgements which still agree with the investor trajectory).

I’m to take for granted the BASELESS ASSUMPTION that it is more than just marketing and that they care?