[hahahacorn]

We agree for the first few sentences! I’m a huge proponent for AI displacement taxes because of the rapid pace of acceleration and a lack of confidence that our economies reabsorption mechanisms are adequate.

If your claim is that in the short term there are negatives caused by innovation, then… well yeah! There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it’s exceedingly rare to ever have pure upside in anything ever. Life is a series of trade offs and hard decisions. The Industrial Revolution literally lifted a significant portion of the population out of poverty, and also hurt children in the beginning. I’m very glad we have child labor laws that are strict and well enforced. If your claim is that the Industrial Revolution was a net negative because children died, I would like for you to pull up the chart of child mortality from before and after the Industrial Revolution and go ahead and tell me what you see.

On the other hand, I think lots of people over index on the harms caused because it’s so easy to. You’ve clearly thought at length about quantifying the harm of big tech and your work. But have you ever quantified the positive impact? You can rationalize the tradeoffs of your actions without moralizing the harms you caused.

It’s not okay for children to die in factories, but without those factories far more would’ve died from illness, hunger, etc.

[Silagi]

I think we're roughly on the same side here? I'm explicitly against moralizing about AI by people who benefit from other forms of tech exploitation, e.g. using Amazon for hosting; I'm not against the idea of AI as a whole; I think it's an inevitability.

I just believe all of us should be willing to accept our own responsibility for the state of it. I also believe it could eventually work out to be a net benefit to the species; but in the short term, it's going to hurt us badly, as most technological revolutions have. I'm saying everyone involved, directly or indirectly, should be willing to accept their fraction of responsibility for the people who are suffering in the interim, and that moralizing about it is disingenuous.

I'm pretty sure we're not disagreeing at all. Over time, most technological revolutions have benefited society. That doesn't mean they didn't exploit people, though. Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been. People are still being exploited by technology. It's just more diffuse, and (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down.

[hahahacorn]

Yes, I think we have the same beliefs largely - my point is that the lens of economies of scale == exploitation is a very silly one that would naturally lead to conclusions such as "Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been."

That is absolute utter nonsense. Like beyond nonsense, much closer to fiction than a differing view of reality. But understandable through a lens that innovation and productivity gains are a means of exploitation. Modern systems and societies are not slavery. They're a default opt-in system of incentives that drive people to contribute more to society if they wish to extract more from it - and we even support a growing class of individuals who contribute far less than they extract, happily.

Unless you're talking about the literal slavery that still happens in developing nations, in which case, there are less total slaves and orders of magnitude less slaves per capita than (I think close to) the majority of written history.

From my perspective you're moralizing against technology in the same silly way people moralize for it, and a significant portion of that is well captured with this one statement: (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down. - If you make yourself ignorant to the positive effects of technical innovation and instead view it primarily as a mechanism of exploitation that "eventually very far from now _maybe_ brings benefits", that's no different than making yourself ignorant to the negative effects and viewing it as a mechanism of great benefit to which you should enrich yourself for bringing to the masses and "maybe hurts a few people but everyone benefits so much overall it doesn't matter".

I'll make my position very clear. Technology and innovation are the driving forces of quality of life improvements and are so obviously a moral good for society and mankind. However, innovation is never perfect, so it's necessary to have competent policy makers and governance structures that can regulate away the negative externalities of new systems that innovations can spawn, as rapidly and efficiently as possible.

If you disagree that technology and innovation are inherently an extremely obvious moral good, please look up the following graphs over the last 200 years, noting the year ranges of the industrial era and information age while looking at these graphs. 1. Life expectancy 2. Infant / Child Mortality 3. Extreme Poverty 4. Literacy Rates 5. Average years of schooling 6. Food Supply / Calories Per Person / Crop Yield / Famine Deaths