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by mbgerring 34 days ago
The people who are faced with this question are so far removed from the idea that losing your job means not being able to eat or pay rent that it seems pointless to ask them.

Whenever I try to get serious answers to this question I get far-future projections about how much better people’s lives will be in the aggregate, at some point in the future, on the assumption that their baseless, faith-based projections about AI materialize.

They literally do not care if their own neighbors starve, or become homeless, or lose any ability to plan their own lives more than a few days in advance.

This is the predictable result of the deep inculcation of spreadsheet-based “utilitarianism,” frequently paired with heavy drug use and paranoia-inducing science fiction horror stories, that certain communities of Bay Area tech workers were exposed to (inducted into, groomed into, whatever word you want to use) in the last decade or so.

This toxic soup taught many people that individual lives literally do not matter when weighed against the importance of creating AGI. This set of beliefs already has a body count, and it will grow before this train crashes.

4 comments

The "I got mine, fuck you" mindset is genuinely going to be the death of the USA. It's genuinely astonishing how many people are willing to burn everything including their own house to spite random strangers.
That's how envy looks like. I made it, so now let's remove the ladder for the others.
I don’t disagree, but the actual beliefs of the AGI cult are much worse, and much more dangerous, than “I got mine, fuck you”
Should also be noted that many people buying into this belief system have connections to Y Combinator.
It's more like "I'm Holy and All, bow before me. Why don't you like me? I don't understand" type.

I mean at least Jesus gave free wine and bread.

> I mean at least Jesus gave free wine and bread

And flogged those that tried to do commerce in a sacred place. And hanged out with prostitutes and poor. And stated that those focusing on hoarding money without concerns for other stuff won't enter his kingdom.

I mean, whatever you think about Christian doctrines, Jesus himself was based AF.

conversation around nationalization i think is useful.

the people building AGI benefit so much in the long run from its creation, they would be willing to build it with no ownership or control over the result, and continue to pour billions un with no return.

Elon Musk is a great example of what happens when you lose grasp on reality. He's been spouting post-scarcity nonsense for some time now like humanity is anywhere close to achieving it. And worst of all, his grand plan is to build expensive sentient humanoid robot slaves to achieve it. The timeline to achieve it is really short, like 20 years.

It's like the ultimate end-game of capitalism. Once Elon has every single last dollar he has "won" and humanity can transition to a post-market economy. This is why you never let game theory guys anywhere near positions of actual power.

Why is capitalism innovating itself into irrelevance and ending the need for toil a bad thing? We can redistribute resources differently when that's the economic reality. If Elon wins capitalism and we change to a different economic model isn't that progress?
Elon winning means everybody else loses. The different economic model you get afterward is corporate feudalism.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that this will eventually be leading to violence. This kind of selfishness has historically fueled movements like Marxism across many countries. It feels like the Industrial Revolution repeating itself, except now the pressure extends across far more of the so called society classes as well.

I do not wish for it but humans have ugly trait to prevent fires only when it is burning all around them.

It already has led to violence, by the cultists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians