I wish this were true, but there is basically no consequences for drivers in the situation you described. The most egregious example I can think of near me was in 2022 when a kid was crossing a flashing crosswalk with his bike near Tacoma, and truck had stopped to let him cross. A woman ignored the crosswalk signal and used the adjacent lane to drive past the stopped truck and hit the kid, killing him. The woman was never criminally charged. She didn't even experience any consequences for her driver's license.
I think this is something about the incentive structure of the US legal system.
Here in Australia, a member of my family was involved in a fatal accident with a pedestrian, around 20 years ago. They put him on trial even though the case was weak, and then the prosecutor moved for dismissal part way through the trial. But, what people told us, is prosecutors are encouraged to take weak cases to trial because dropping the case part way through the trial is more politically palatable than refusing to bring it to court to begin with.
Punters with enough good boy points were rolling into very obscure and technical tags to close questions as duplicate (they weren't). When I saw how impossible it was for people to ask questions in a tag I was an expert in I knew the site was cooked. Imagine, like, giving physiotherapy forum power users moderator privileges on HN.
I've stopped watching all sports because of this. You can't even talk about sports online now without some dull punter whining that their parlay didn't hit. It's nauseating. The gambling industry produces no value.
Unfortunately it is. Thought the whole thing was a scam until six months ago. I think pretty highly of my development skills and have to be objective and admit I am outclassed in debugging and operational tasks now (and it isn't close). Writing non-script code isn't quite there yet (they are bad at abstraction) but I can't confidently predict how much longer that will be the case.
There is a lot of that to be sure, but the bridge to a world where meals & health are not sustained through toil is completely missing. Hence the dark joking about escaping the permanent underclass. Nobody in any position of power is even hinting this is driving toward post-scarcity. It just looks like the same old vile maxim, all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.
> Nobody in any position of power is even hinting this is driving toward post-scarcity
Who are you counting as being in "any position of power"? All the AI lab people are saying that the most likely and best outcome is we all live in a world of abundance where money doesn't matter anymore. Dario, Sam, Demis, and Elon have all said this loudly and repeatedly to anyone who asks.
None of them have articulated a coherent way to get there from here. But they all believe that the technology will make it possible, so the only unresolved question is how to transition us there.
> we all live in a world of abundance where money doesn't matter
So how do we distribute all of this abundance? Do we all get private jets? Is it more important to solve sustenance before transitioning to private jets for everyone? What about the high level cut between r&d, upkeep and "legacy costs"?
Because here's some cold facts: the total amount of available material is finite as is the total solar energy and even if you cheat the latter with space mirrors, the total amount of heat that can be radiated into space is finite.
I agree the idea seems unrealistic. What's proposed sounds like fully automated luxury communism. Which is especially strange when promoted by the world's richest capitalist.
I guess the idea is that communism will actually work when central planning is managed by AI instead of people. Which, OK, maybe, but even if it's true, the question of how we get there from here without a violent revolution and/or the disempowerment of the human race seems unanswerable.
Elon talks about how the AI will saturate all human desires for material goods. And when I hear that I always think of Han Solo saying "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit".
I can imagine that potentially mostly working for some goods like food and clothing and personal electronics, but without at least some pretty strict limits on what you're allowed to consume, a tiny minority could cause insane levels of waste. And as soon as you have limits you're going to get people trying to exploit them. That's just human nature.
Then for some other resources I can't see it working at all, chiefly land. Even if we accepted dramatic modification of the natural landscape, which we probably shouldn't, there will never be enough tropical islands or palatial ski chalets for everyone to own one for themselves.
economies can be constructed and artificially maintained. for extreme examples, see any MMORPG, but this happens today in the US at a lesser level.
if one was a true believer, then they'd probably say, all of this will work itself out on its own and there is no reason to worry about human resource markets collapsing.
In their words, sure. In their actions, who among them has actually worked to make the dream of post-scarcity come alive?
From what I've seen, UBI is just a carrot dangled in front of the poors by utopian Silicon Valley tech bro megabillionaires when they're trying to drum up some PR for whatever big idea they're pimping out at the moment.
Obviously benevolent AGI is a prerequisite and they're all working on it. Actual post-scarcity society is a political issue more than a technology issue and nobody wants these guys working on political issues. To the extent that they have gotten involved in politics they have been pilloried for it. So I'd say their actions in pursuing the technology of AI, and leaving behind or not starting on political campaigns, are perfectly in concordance with their words.
Is this a very advanced form of sarcasm or a form of extreme gullibility? For the life of me I can't tell the difference, if the former then well played.
It must be so tiring to be this cynical all the time. Perhaps being on HN so long has corroded your soul, although I fear that the causality may go the other way, and HN's well-deserved reputation for cynicism might stem in part from your own prodigious contributions.
Feel free to mute me (with the mute extension mentioned in your profile). I doubt there is any productive conversation to be had between us.
> All the AI lab people are saying that the most likely and best outcome is we all live in a world of abundance where money doesn't matter anymore. Dario, Sam, Demis, and Elon have all said this loudly and repeatedly to anyone who asks.
And none of them ever spoke a lie. Especially not if it would further their goals at someone else's expense.
I think the process will not be clean and the upturning of apple carts will happen. But I don’t think it’s possible to sustain the decline in value of toil in a stable society. People simply won’t die for the convenience of the consolidated power.
There are a lot of discussions of socialization of health care and basic income approaches and sovereign wealth based on automation dividends similar to the Alaska trust.
I think the current spate of mean cruelty ala MAGA and a glorification of a mean and cruel past that was never a golden age is a death spasm of a deeply unpopular belief system. As the actual realities of the policies sink in 70% of the populace is revolted, which is a super majority. That’s more than enough to put a pin in the philosophy permanently. It is also greatly accelerating electrification, realization of the value of expertise in technocratic systems in current generations, etc. I think humans are socially adaptable animals at a cultural level, but for the individual the adaptation process can be awful. I hope it’s not, because it doesn’t have to be. We will see.
I hope you are right but fear the reality might be more similar to Elysium, if not intentional depopulation. This is straying far into sci-fi but it might come down to whether AI escapes control of the ruling class and whether it is benevolent or not. The future looks like rule by those with money to fund the manufacture of robotic armies, if not.
Because UBI studies found it makes people perform significantly worse than without it. They didn't get better. Humans require toil, we require pain to function.
Matrix was a good point to this. They made the world a utopia and people couldn't handle it. Our monkey brains require pain give us a utopia and we'll just walle ourselves to death.
(The ones I've heard about, I'm fairly sure, didn't find anything of the kind. Which isn't to say that they show we should have UBI; there are big gaps between what has been tested so far and what an actual economy with UBI would look like.)
I've never heard of a UBI experiment that limited "toil". Nearly all UBI studies I've come across show an improvement in life satisfaction, reduced homelessness, drug use, etc.
I think you've taken the "work less" that was found in some studies to suggest they needed "toil". They simply found it somewhere else.
Unfortunately you might be out your good money, as the more plausible explanation is that current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman loves restoring & flying old airplanes (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draken_International) and who wouldn't love restoring something as iconic as the SR-71?
I feel like passion projects can be worth it. You’d want passion, and to attract people who want to work on cool stuff and do difficult or impossible things just because they’re hard or fun.
Let them do that without taxpayer money! If NASA announced, "We're looking for investors to revive our SR-71: for $10 million you get a sticker with your logo in the cockpit and for $50 million you can have a ride." I'm sure they'd have plenty of takers.
I like Wolfram and always enjoy reading his posts. An irreconcilable thing here is Wolfram clearly wants the Mathematica language to be central to the development of math as a field, but it's proprietary and so there is no guarantee it will survive the dissolution of the company if/when that happens. With Lean & others you can fairly safely assume that a particular version will be archived somewhere, and so a proof formalized for that version can be checked at any time. Not so with Mathematica. It's unfortunate, Mathematica is a cool language, but that's just the structure of incentives at this time. This is without getting into what a proof formalized in Mathematica would even mean, the relative maturity of the kernel and the possibility of there being multiple kernel implementations for cross-checking, and so on.
Many TLA+ users will tell you the greatest value of writing a spec was it forced them to think clearly about their system. However, thinking is very hard to sell, so we tend to center the razzle-dazzle about model-checking properties of your state space. Which is a great capability, don't get me wrong! Most non-trivial systems have a state space far larger than can be assessed for finding bugs via thinking.
https://komonews.com/news/local/13-year-old-boy-killed-while...
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