[whack]

> They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.

If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.

[graemep]

A view that is not shared always by LLM cheerleaders. Part of Sam Altman's defence of the environmental impact of AI is that it is less than that of a human life.

"He said it was unreasonable to focus on "how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query."

"It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart," he said. "And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/23/altman-you-t...

[devsda]

It took a 100 billion people and their knowledge,experience to generate the data to train an AI. So that cost also comes under the environmental costs to build his version of AI.

unless he plans to freeze the training data at this point and use that for another billion years, the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.

[sam1r]

>>> the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.

Wow! Well said! so shouldn't we focus on ... fixing humanity first?

[mmplxx]

Then it takes 100 billion people and their knowledge and experience plus 20 years to generate an intelligent person.

[casey2]

It's odd that whenever someone discovers a way to generate value from public noise, costs already paid, that they feel like they are being stolen from even though PPP for the average person will rise due to AI, not fall.

[Sharlin]

His human costume is really starting to fall apart at the seams, isn’t it?

[LordDragonfang]

I think it's a little disingenuous to describe the notoriously-amoral (pathologically dishonest, accused of being a sociopath) CEO of the major AI company as a mere "AI cheerleader". He's not exactly a central example of the category.

Altman is closer to a storybook evil CEO than he is to an average "AI cheerleader".

[croon]

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde

Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."

[F3nd0]

> A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

So the opposite of a Lisp programmer then!

[anthk]

A Lisp programmer it's very aware of the value of nil or ().

[gmfawcett]

Look up "perlis epigrams lisp" for the context here. :)

[doginasuit]

> The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value.

People will understandably ask, what is the actual value of being capable of joy and suffering?

I frame it another way. There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive. The question of our individual value as a being is undignified. People can be more or less valuable to a particular effort, but there should be no question about their worth as a person. It should not be a part of how we understand people and ourselves.

It is a healthy conclusion that your value doesn't depend on your practical utility, because that will come and go and is sometimes beyond your control. Your value isn't a question at all.

[butlike]

There's no value in life, but life should be allowed to exist. Who's to say otherwise?

The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.

[doginasuit]

Life is valuable to life. Or to say it another way, there is no concept of value beyond the reckoning of living things, even the value of dust and rock on the moon.

[hajile]

> There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive.

> there should be no question about their worth as a person

Dignity, respect, thriving, and even human worth don't exist without joy and at least a concept of suffering.

[exitb]

Every year half a million children die of diarrhea. There are so, so many people in the world, who are capable of joy and suffering, who "we" don't care much at all. However I have a feeling that "we" might be joining that group eventually.

[Sharlin]

Still, it’s vastly fewer now relative to the total number of children born than any previous time in human history. It could be even fewer had birth rates begin to drop instantly as a response to child mortality dropping dramatically even in most developing countries, rather than with a few-generation delay.

[NewsaHackO]

Yea, and I will take it a step further; it is really easy to start to worry about the “worth of a human life” when it’s yours. When we are in the position to not care about the worth of a human for our gain(such as children working to make iPhones for us to use cheaper) we call it economics.

[vitally3643]

> Our value isn't predicated on our utility.

In the moral sense, sure.

But our modern day capitalist hellscape has made it extremely clear that if you aren't capable of providing value for shareholders, your life literally has no value. That's the reason the US government keeps cutting welfare programs, why union suppression exists.

The fact of the matter is that unless you are producing value for shareholders, you don't get to participate in society and are left to starve to death. No amount of flowery language is going to feed and house the unemployed. And we are running full speed into a situation with the explicit and overt goal of cresting as many unemployed people as possible while simultaneously ensuring that there are no resources or help offered to those unemployed people.

Flowery language will cover up the starving bodies in the streets the same way a can of febreeze will cover up a landfill. This is an enormous problem and if we don't fix it, people will die. Whether or not a human has intrinsic moral value by simply existing, we require money to survive in this society. A human life may be a mystical beautiful and valuable concept, but our society has determined that if you don't have money, you literally do not deserve to live.

That's what these students are so angry about. They're being pushed into a world that refuses to employ them and which delivers a death sentence for the crime of unemployment.

[butlike]

You're conflating society with the white collar job at hand. Yes, if you don't provide value for shareholders, your life is worthless _to that company_. The company is in the business of making money. The businesses goals are a microcosm; a small subset of society. There are many other ways to live (and live well, I might add).

[strogonoff]

Our joy and suffering depends on our connection with other people, and being useful to other people has since the dawn of humanity been one of the ways we connect.

Our joy and suffering depends on our ability to fulfil our basic needs like shelter and food, and in current socioeconomic environment that ability intimately depends on the ability to create wealth, which in turn depends on our ability to provide value to others.

I can see both being undermined. What public policies reflecting this do you envision?

[anal_reactor]

> Our value isn't predicated on our utility.

Yes it is. If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist because the entity that sees it as valuable would be willing to spend resources on maintaining it.

> The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.

Most social programs keep expanding until they become unsustainably expensive. You can't just make a law "everyone gets free money" and expect this to have no negative consequences.

[eloisius]

>If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist

This only proves that injustice exists. Surprise: injustice still exists.

I'm hoping that you're still young and primarily motivated by survival, which can lure you into this cold world view. I think the reality is an inversion of that old "if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain" chestnut.

Hopefully once you've made it past the raw basics of survival and the feelings of a dog-eat-dog world, you can look back and realize that compassionate people helped you over and over throughout your life, maybe without you even realizing it at the time. The next step is to realize that you can extend that same compassion to others.

[anal_reactor]

> if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain

This is literally how it went for me.

[ToValueFunfetti]

If human lives weren't inherently valuable, the concept of charity wouldn't exist. Where does that leave us? I think probably the line of argument doesn't work in either direction.

Likewise, most of the time you don't have social programs, somebody will introduce social programs. You can't just say "no social programs" and expect this to have no positive consequences... okay this is falling apart a bit, but the point is, what makes 'not expanding UBI' so much harder than 'not introducing UBI'? If you can convince people that introducing UBI will lead to expanding UBI and that that is bad, what's stopping you from just convincing them of the latter?

[viapivov]

For the past 500 years humans were existing with their labor value in the very center.

Do you expect the enlightenment project to be resumed and finished in a year? Or do you imply some religion-based worldview where the value is derived from God, flesh, nature?

No sir, grim times are coming. We can only hope that the current AI wave bites more than it can swallow.

[inglor_cz]

"Value" is a word with many meanings. Your value as a human or a living being may be very different from your value to your employer or your value to the taxman or anywhere else.

It is very easy to get lost in between them, especially when listening to a good speaker who can flitter between those meanings at will.

What is worse is that those values interact. We indeed we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled, but only up to a point, and there is a reasonable discussion how exactly should countries divide their limited resources between vulnerable groups, including families with young kids. In that context, the future economic and societal value of a 5 y.o. vs. a 85 y.o. inevitably creeps up.

[drysine]

>If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility

My value definitely depends on my practical utility. Everyone is capable of joy and suffering. A chicken is capable of joy and suffering.

Tell me this: in a hypothetical situation where you are going to end up on an uninhabited island and you can choose one person to go with you, who would you peek? An elderly disabled one or a person that has necessary skills to survive? Maybe utility matters?

[card_zero]

I don't think that's quite right, unless you personally value joy for its own sake. I value knowledge, and joy is useful to creating knowledge, and suffering is harmful to it. But I don't want to have some futile joy, and I don't need to avoid some irrelevant suffering.

Otherwise you get effects like;

* Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,

* Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.

I'll admit that knowledge isn't practical, and you can't always identify when you're creating it, and a lot of people don't think in these terms and there's a lot of intuition involved, along with societal mores about caring for people which help the growth of knowledge as general rules without getting all bean-counting about it. But I think it matters that hedonism is an incoherent motivation and that creating knowledge is a far clearer one (and hedonism tends to turn into creating knowledge, anyway, if you like meaning). Hedonism, utilitarianism, same difference.

[9dev]

  > Otherwise you get effects like;
  > * Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
  > * Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.

These are entirely valid positions to take though. Obtaining knowledge for knowledge's sake isn't objectively more meaningful, even if it may be subjectively more valuable to you.

You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)

Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.

[card_zero]

Oh, the Sapiens guy. I read Sapiens, thought it was OK, then other people picked holes in it and persuaded me that it was worse than that. But I suppose that doesn't preclude this Nexus book being good.

But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.)

I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more or less the same set of values - but this might be cultural, not biological: it's hard to get inside the head of, say, Aztecs, with whatever strange non-modern values they had.

I also make an assumption about knowledge being central among those values, although it's definitely not all that, and some people will say they don't even consider it. But I think they are doing anyway, if they live in the world as we know it.

Side comment: you've made "joy" separate from "bliss" and "meaning" separate from "knowledge", and then there's some undefined "benefit for humanity" that might not be any of those things, along with the apparent value of "impacting the trajectory of humanity" - is that good, just impacting it, in any non-specific way? lol terminology.

[9dev]

I think you missed my point. The distinction I made in terminology was on purpose: I used "joy" to describe the inherent motivation for trying to accomplish something, and "bliss" for the state some may try to reach by using drugs.

And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.

And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.

[card_zero]

Obviously you'd want to name "joy" as a separate thing, to propose it as the thing we're motivated to do, but the problem is that you didn't describe it. So now I'm at: the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it. Of course I'm open to some pluralism, like it can be a string bag of mixed motivations, but I do think the motivations in our culture all agree with creating knowledge, and become vacuous without that element. What is "gain", "pleasure", etc., without meaning? (I don't know what you mean by meaning. I mean the process of explaining and learning and creating ideas.) Without it those are mechanical processes of the "number go up" type. Yes, I am skeptical that anything of that kind is anybody's deep motivation, though it may be a superficial one.

Why are you trying to avoid morality? That seems like a good way to never find out anything important, since importance is a moral judgement.

[9dev]

> the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it.

That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.

Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.

> Why are you trying to avoid morality?

I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?

[eudamoniac]

https://overthunk.netlify.app/posts/worthwhile/

(Which is itself a poor rendition of Nichomachean Ethics...this conversation you two are having is ancient)

[danaris]

....I think it's a fairly widespread view to value joy for its own sake. In fact, I would say that's pretty much how normal people would say they view joy.

[card_zero]

So normal people don't make sense, what else is new.

The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and meaning is knowledge. So maybe your next step is to add music or something. But in doing this your activity isn't just having pleasure, it's finding things out. The more you work at maximizing pleasure, the more you're finding things out, and the less of a cliche the things you enjoy are, and pleasure-in-itself becomes less real, because it never really meant anything. The alternate path is to stick closely to the cliches, ride around coked-up on your speedboat forever, and fail to really have a good time because mechanical behavior isn't genuinely enjoyable and trying to maximise pleasure is self-defeating.

[danaris]

Your examples make it clear that you do not understand normal people in the slightest. And when I say "normal" here, I'm not talking about the Blazing Saddles-style "salt of the earth; you know, morons." I mean roughly the middle 50-60% (by width) of the bell curve. The vast majority of humanity.

Normal people don't self-reflect, realize they like joy, and then try to maximize this with speedboats and cocaine. If they realize they like joy and want to maximize it, they do things like spend more time with their families.

[ryukoposting]

> Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value.

Tell that to my landlord.

[tardedmeme]

The people who control human society do not believe that humans have value divorced from their utility.

[butlike]

THIS is going to be the limitation of capitalism. Capitalism isn't compassionate. It's a really good economic framework though, so it will be interesting how that's reconciled in the coming years

[hajile]

Money and monetary systems aren't compassionate -- people are.

Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).

One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).

This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.

[pickleRick243]

There's also the other side. The beneficiaries of the system never feel the need to be grateful, as the money is legally theirs. So you end up with selfish/uncharitable on one side and ungrateful/envious on the other.

[HumblyTossed]

None of that buys groceries.

[itsalwaysgood]

The problem with public policy is that it allows other countries to get ahead of you. 'AI' isn't just a tool, it's also a race.

[butlike]

What do you win at the end of the race? I've never heard it concisely put. 'Dominance' is the word that comes to my mind, but I don't want to put words in your mouth and don't really know why that would inherently be a valuable trophy, so that's probably not what you were thinking of, right?

[itsalwaysgood]

As always, influence for the future

[iAMkenough]

Not if you don’t set your country’s children up for success.

Top of the line AI without educated, healthy, economically-stable children means no future for the country or our society.

[itsalwaysgood]

You are right. I'm not saying I like the way things are trending. But I also think setting up our children means making sure they're prepared for the future. I don't think AI will ever replace the importance of education.

[beepbooptheory]

Why should we care about that? Even if you wanted to argue our individual fates are tied to our country's, we don't all live in the same country, so how, actually, could we all care? Are you really convinced its so zero sum like this?

We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?

[itsalwaysgood]

We're you around for the space race?

It's a world prestige thing, and also a competitive edge, for better or worse.

[ToValueFunfetti]

"Other countries" means China here, I think. China got a little on board with the global capitalism (and lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty along the way, if we're looking for the point), but never really embraced Liberalism and so ideally isn't the one aligning superintelligence. It would be lousy if Russia or North Korea or Somalia was in that position and it would be fine if the UK or Denmark or Brazil or Ghana was, but none of that matters because none of them will be in that position. Only the US and China are playing the game.

[beepbooptheory]

If this speculated intelligence is so "super" why would it matter what its host country's commitments are? I would hope it would at least be intelligent enough to sort things out there? How can something be so potentially threatening, so "super," but also be like a baby, where we need to worry how its raised? Its super intelligent about everything except ideology? That doesn't really sound like (super)intelligence to me..

But ok, even granting that framing, if the issue is China's placement on the spectrum of "liberal", what would it take for them to be the good enough guys here?

[itsalwaysgood]

I think it's more of a prestige discussion. Who leads, who follows, between countries. Not whose super intelligence is better. Who got their first, and how are they using it?

[ToValueFunfetti]

A supervillain is nevertheless super. Intelligence doesn't correlate with morality- most probably there doesn't exist a 'true ideology' that can be solved for in absolute terms. Do you imagine a superintelligence could calculate how beauty 'ought to' be traded off against truth?

When I say China is a bad choice because it's not as liberal as ~the west, I do imagine a reader in China thinking the opposite. I don't think they're dumb and I don't think they've been duped; they have a coherent ideology that fits their values. I just don't want it to stomp out mine.

Maybe I'm wrong and you can solve for morality or at least the meta-morality of Liberalism/pluralism where you permit various moralities to coexist. Hopefully so. Maybe the value system in China is closer to mine than I imagine and it's just operating under different constraints. But I don't want to gamble on that when winning is within reach and is a guarantee given alignment to any human values is achieved at all.

[itsalwaysgood]

And it's a pretty big game

[iAMkenough]

The bigger race is education, which some countries are really falling behind on.

[itsalwaysgood]

That is always going to be a personal race. You can get in the currents of education, but your success will always depend on your own paddling.

[iAMkenough]

I don’t personally set education standards for today’s youth or budgets to invest in the country’s youth.

The United States is falling behind in both.