walleeee

> intelligent or conscious

The distinction you are collapsing here is really a crucial one. My thermostat's goal-oriented behavior does not make me a slaveowner unless rocks are conscious, to riff on your comment below. Our lack of consensus on the definition of these concepts is no reason to conflate them.

The distinction is crucial because while these machines clearly do exhibit intelligence under certain definitions, there is no evidence of consciousness, and we have very little reason to give them the benefit of the doubt, unlike biologically related beings, a great many of whom, human or otherwise, are presently in something like slavery

I know you jest, but the US govt funds a lot of water science. Whether that's put to use in the public interest is another question ofc and one we should be asking

Of course you can't decide whether it's useful to the payer. You can and should ask yourself why someone would pay for it, and then decide according to your own personal criteria whether to trade your labor to that particular employer.

It is perfectly rational to choose lower income occupations for your own reasons. Income maximization at all costs is how you become a pawn in someone else's game even (especially?) if it makes you rich.

4) energy and materials scarcity and compounding ecological externalities

this of course affecting not only the Western regimes but technocratic rule everywhere

I'm not endorsing victimhood or saying that Bangladesh is poor because the US is rich. It was badly phrased if that is how it reads, for that I apologize.

I'm saying the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means. It is not unique in this. This is not the only reason the US is rich or the only reason any other is not.

I'm also saying that this is a really bad strategy if the goal is humankind flourishing on this planet. People already enrich one another in many ways. We have to stop warring on one another and nature, thoughtlessly dumping entropy where we can't see it, etc.

Yes, so many.

> This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere

To some degree this is true, in the sense that human flourishing implies some degree of suffering for e.g. the ants we accidentally step on, animals we eat, bacteria in our guts, etc. But Jains do their best not to step on the ants, many people refuse to eat flesh, and so on. Plants and bacteria will have to fend for themselves for now. We can certainly do better with each other.

I am proposing no version of fatalism, besides the fact that, at least in our living substrate, organisms have not all learned to do each other no harm, if this is even possible, and even if it isn't, fatalistic hedonism is not the inevitable response to this fact.

The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south" as can be coerced into lopsided agreements, and much more generally the possible futures available to humankind. Cell membranes externalize entropy in the same way, the difference is they are good enough at working together, and working with the world around them, which is perhaps frequently hostile but also nutritious and useful, that higher-order life emerges nonetheless.

Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.

Can you characterize the binary choice in your last sentence in more detail? I don't see how one excludes the other

Strongly agree. Our beginning to grasp how it works even adds to the miracle!

But what we're beginning to understand we're also destroying far more rapidly even as we devote more and more effort to digital facsimiles of our faculties

My dry pessimism was a comment on this foolish inversion of priorities. Alien visitors, if the forest is truly dark, may conclude we're well on the way to self-annihilation in pursuit of false idols, while we fail to recognize the miraculous nature of existing biology.

On what grounds do you think it likely that this phenomenon is at all related to consciousness? The latter is hardly understood. We can identify correlates in beings with constitutions very near to ours, which lend credence (but zero proof) to the claim they're conscious.

Language models are a novel/alien form of algorithmic intelligence with scant relation to biological life, except in their use of language.