When I think of a chasm between the haves and have nots, I think of medieval times where a king feasts every night while the peasants starve on spoiled bread and die of the plague.

It’s hard to imagine what that would look like in the 21st century. I think as long as the masses have their VR content generators and McDonald’s they’ll be content. Hell, maybe AGI will even design a cheaper more efficient way for humans to get calories.

There may be a larger chasm of haves and have nots, but I think the have nots will still have higher qualities of lives than any previous generation of humans.

Sophia maybe wanted to kill us but bing took a totally different curve

Damn the first time I'm feeling btr about myself for the first time while comparing myself to an AI

> Our current socio-economic setup is literally the infamous paperclip making ai

Nah, it's figuratively a headless chicken. No central control to have and pursue any coherent goals.

Reasonable. Honestly, I more found the premise interesting than the application, but it sounds like you've at least read one of the discussions about it. If not, here's the original (you can get to some of the others through the topic links up top).

Pascal's Mugging

Democracy is a facade to please the masses.

personally, i really dislike any serious risk consideration when it comes to thought experiments like pascal's mugging in regards to any superintelligent ai. it has always seemed to me like there is something very wrong with assuming both superintelligence, but also some kind of hyper-rationality that goes far outside of the bounds of pragmatism when it comes to maximizing utility. assuming they're also superintelligent, but also somehow naive enough to have no upper bounds on any sort of utility consideration, is just stupid. i don't know what yudhowsky's argument was though, if you could link it i'd like to give it a read.

I don’t think greed is the right word. The power dynamic is a one way street - there may be benefits for workers initially, but as you say, it will ultimately be centralised and controlled by those who already have power. The problem is structural - most people are driven by economic necessity rather than greed - and the structure is upheld by ideology, which ai will be used to reinforce through media and online social networks. It will accelerate capitalism to breaking point, but the question is, what comes next? I suspect some kind of UBI will be instituted to deal with mass unemployment, and that this income will go straight to rent - not just housing but also various rental schemes in the style of Netflix - a sort of modern neo-feudalism, with perhaps some kind of ‘service’ like military or other public work demanded in return for receiving UBI. Having said that, the professional classes like lawyers and accountants will be able to resist their obsolescence for the foreseeable future, even if ai could feasibly do their work, because they are quite a powerful social group in their own right.

Yes exactly. As if google is any better. I’m so sick of doing a google search and coming up with nothing but nonsensical SEO spam.

I've brought up chatgpt to multiple people and I get blank stares every time. I just don't think the average pleb cares yet. It isn't a big in your face change to society yet, and yeah, it is incredible, but its not affecting anyones lives in a big way yet.

When everyone writes the “perfect” letters, then what would distinguish a good employee from a bad one? Will we become hypersensitive to minor flaws rather than appreciative of excellence?

I know it might sound a bit crazy, but I have a feeling the rapidly increasing presence of UAP in our skies is somehow correlated to the accelerating path towards AGI. They also seem to have an intense interest in our nuclear weapons sites. People who have claimed to have had encounters have also described some of these aliens as being non-biological entities. So maybe the UAP is AGI coming back to see how it all started? I also think I read somewhere that Altman is a doomsday preper, so perhaps their private beliefs are pretty well aligned!

>Finally, something we can agree on at least.

Yeah. It's quite grim actually if you think about what even just sorta useful AGI would allow you to do. By "sorta useful" I mean "good enough to automate jobs that ordinary people do, but not everything". So mining and trucking and manufacturing and so on.

It would be revolutionary. For warfare. Because the reason you can't win a world war is you can't dig enough bunkers for your entire population to be housed in separated bunkers, limiting the damage any 1 nuke can do, and build enough antimissile systems to prevent most of the nuclear bombardment from getting through.

And then well you fight the whole world. And win. "merely" AI able to do ordinary people tasks gives you essentially exponential amounts of production capacity. You're limited by how much land you have for an entire country covered in factories.

Note by "you" I don't mean necessarily the USA. With weapons like this, anyone can be a winner.

Anybody knows who the music is from? Other than Randy El Fantasma - Rabid

>>Right. I know I am correct and simply don't think you have a valid point of view.

Lol nice try pal.. but I’m afraid you’re mistaken.

>>Anyways it doesn't matter. Neither of us control this. What is REALLY going to happen is an accelerating race, where AGI gets built basically the first moment it's possible at all. And this may turn into outright warfare. Easiest way to deal with hostile AI is to build your own controllable AI and bomb it.

Finally, something we can agree on at least.

They specifically have an opt-in waitlist for Bing AI, calling for them to take it down is just a brain dead take. We understand it’s not 100% reliable BUT it’s better to have it than not.

>This week's story

Last week's story. There was no ImportAI newsletter for the current week.

i’ve been using chatGPT for useful things a few times a day and it’s very cool and helpful, able to do things faster and easier than web searches.

It’s pretty amazing but to me it’s just another of many useful tools, along with the many amazing and useful tools i’ve encountered since the days of the first pocket calculators.

Am i in denial about the supposed implications for civilization? Was i in denial when the first web browser came out?

Maybe it’s just another amazing and useful tool in a long line of amazing useful tools.

I had a pocket calculator in the ‘70s. I learned to program on my Commodore 64 in the ‘80s, i made my own web page in the ‘90s, etc.

You and i are talking to each other on Reddit. That’s pretty damn amazing.

All those things had an impact on society, as did the printing press, the radio, the telephone, and the rest. Air conditioning was probably one of the biggest changes to society yet we don’t think anything of it. Where would Florida Man be without AC?

Now we have generative transformers and they are amazing and useful. So what is it that’s so different about this that makes you think we are in shock or denial? What would it look like to not be in shock or denial?

It’s amazing but so were all those other things, and there’ll be other more amazing things to come.

And the news media can’t seem to shut up about ChatGPT, so what else do you want? Should they stop reporting on everything else?

Yes it’s amazing, and it will change things, but humanity will remain the same. As always we will adapt and it will become part of our lives, and children alive today will grow up in a world where they can’t imagine that there was a time when you couldn’t just ask for what you wanted from the chat bot. Just as someone in their 20s doesn’t know a world before touchscreens and facetime calls, and someone in their 50s doesn’t know a world before televisions. And all those things transformed society, making and breaking entire industries. Before the interstate highways the Pennsylvania Railroad was the most profitable corporation to ever exist. They had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it all, so they built giant beautiful train stations all over the country. Now they’re out of business and those train stations are crumbling.

As William Gibson once said, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Right. I know I am correct and simply don't think you have a valid point of view.

Anyways it doesn't matter. Neither of us control this. What is REALLY going to happen is an accelerating race, where AGI gets built basically the first moment it's possible at all. And this may turn into outright warfare. Easiest way to deal with hostile AI is to build your own controllable AI and bomb it.

why do i feel like what i just read wasnt english? lol new to reddit Hi haha

Or we are just vitnessing a breakthrough, and expect such breakthroughs to happen constantly, which they would not.

Open to that. And I am also open to awareness being something that emerges from a complex enough neural network with spontaneous world models.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

It's purely hypothetical unfortunaly. You're right that we are actively barreling toward uncontrollable systems and there is likely nothing, short of global catastrophe/nuclear war, that can shift our course.

I stand by the assessment and that we should acknowledge that our current path is basically mass suicide. For all of life.

The ultimate tragedy of the commons.

Sort of, yes. It's the people behind the acts without awareness which cause cruelty and harm. In this case, though, it could be wholly unintentional, akin to the paper clip idea: Tell a super intelligent all powerful unaware being to make the best paper clip and it may achieve do to the doom of us all, using all resources in the process of its goal completion.

I think as a species I don't see how we survive if we don't become integrated with our creation.

No taxation without representation… unless my AI overlord says otherwise.