a) it's not twenty years from now, it's much less than that.
b) you cannot prevent that future, because the incentives are huge and enforcement is extremely hard, at all levels, from the superpowers to the individuals.
c) besides, imagine a world where most jobs are still being done by paid humans, all knowing that their work could be done much better and cheaper by a machine. Basically a world where your daily labour isn't really necessary but just a proof-of-work to get a monthly salary. Isn't that awful? I would rather take a pay cut on my last salary and use my time in a different way.
d) how will they make ends meet? Nobody knows. It might be a combination of everything being much cheaper and/or heavily subsidized, and some form of basic income.
> "you know, it’s to your advantage to agree with me because otherwise you’re making slaves"
That's quite a strange remark coming from an ethicist of any kind. It seems that he's inviting others to believe what suits them most instead of what is right. Yet somehow it doesn't surprise me much given the country he comes from.
I find it rather questionable, especially considering that he's suggesting to switch from a position that in any case is safe to one that, if wrong, might cause great suffering.
And for example, which "incentives" would you consider to stop thinking that animals are capable of suffering? Is feeling better when buying meat a good enough incentive for reconsidering your position?
From what I understand, the methodology is pretty questionable. Essentially they looked for studies mentioning "gender bias" or "discrimination" in their abstracts, and collected the results. This means that they inherited the publication bias of research on discrimination- no discrimination found, less chances the results would be published. Most of the research in the field of course focused on groups perceived as disadvantaged, so there's a further publication bias against fundings going in the "wrong" direction.
You need to factor in the cost of training all those PhDs that never end up producing much of interest though you don't get to pick the best afterwards and claim all it took was to train him/her. Plus, once trained, it's productive only for 6 subjective hours per day (including weekends and holidays). Might have costed gazillions to train a frontier LLM but it works for millions of hours/day.
By saying "becomes", I was intending to leave open the possibility that, by somebody's definition, a baby might not be conscious. But they aren't going to stay a baby forever.
The universe is dense with people that could have been but never was. For example all the children that would have been conceived in replacement to a previous aborted pregnancy. It becomes a problem for us only when we make a picture of that possible person in our head (starting, for example, from a fetus). But it's our imagination, not something that ever existed.
The sun will become a red star in 5 billion years. We have voids in our universe which are not crossable.
From my pure nihilistic view, it doesn't matter, never has, never will. From an idealistic view: we are humans, i value the uniqueness of mine and the complexity and uniqueness of everyone else being part of my experience.
I think we agree. Humans are conscious, intelligent, remember their past, plan and dream their future, suffer and hope, have friends and family and partners they care deeply about. And are each a fundamental part of the lives of others around them. That's why I feel that statements like "human beings should be protected because they have human DNA" are inadequate as they focus on something that is neither necessary nor sufficient.
b) you cannot prevent that future, because the incentives are huge and enforcement is extremely hard, at all levels, from the superpowers to the individuals.
c) besides, imagine a world where most jobs are still being done by paid humans, all knowing that their work could be done much better and cheaper by a machine. Basically a world where your daily labour isn't really necessary but just a proof-of-work to get a monthly salary. Isn't that awful? I would rather take a pay cut on my last salary and use my time in a different way.
d) how will they make ends meet? Nobody knows. It might be a combination of everything being much cheaper and/or heavily subsidized, and some form of basic income.
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