We’ve seen decades of growing wage gaps and erosion of labors strength. The current elites don’t really care to enrich the people. Why would they care to do anything about this problem? They likely don’t see it as a problem at all.
If they did actually stumble on AGI (assuming it didn’t eat them too) it would be used by a select few to enslave or remove the rest of us.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It's spot on. You see folks like Dario et al. raising the alarm bells about what they claim is coming... while working as hard as they can to bring that gloomy future to fruition.
No one in power is going to help unless there's money in it.
It's being downvoted because it's a ridiculous premise. "The Elites" are human too. This attitude is nonsensical and child-like. Nobody is out here trying to round up the hippies and force them to live in some kind of pods to be harvested for their nutrients or whatever.
This technology, like every prior technology, will cause some people to lose their jobs and some new jobs to be created. This will annoy people who have to learn new skill instead of coasting until retirement as they planned.
It is no different than the buggy whip manufacturers being annoyed at Henry Ford. They were right that it was bad for their industry, but wrong about it being the death of... well all the million things they claimed it would be the death of.
And just like Henry Ford and the automobile, one of many externalities was the destruction of black communities: white flight that drained wealth, eminent domain for highways, and increased asthma incidence and other disease from concentrated pollution.
Yet, overall it was a net positive for society... as almost every technological innovation in history has been.
Did you know the 2/3rds of the people alive today wouldn't be if it hadn't been for the invention of the Haber-bosch process? Technology isn't just a toy, it's our life support mechanism. The only way our population gets to keep growing is if our technology continues to improve.
Will there be some unintended consequences? Absolutely. Does that mean we can (or even should) stop it? Hell no. Being pro-human requires you to be pro-technology.
I don't think this argument is logically sound. The assertion that this (and every other!!) technological innovation is a "net positive" merely because of our monotonic population growth is both weakly defined and unsubstantiated. Population is not a good proxy for all things we find desirable in society, and even if it were, it is only a single number that cannot possibly distinguish between factors that helped it and factors that hurt it.
Suppose I invent The Matrix, capable of efficiently sustaining 100b humans provided they are all strapped in with tubes and stuff. Oh and no fancy simulation to keep you entertained either -it's only barely an improvement on death. Economics forces everyone into matrix-hell, but at least there's a lot of us. Net positive for society?
Human fecundity is probably not actually the meaning of life, it's just the best approximation most people can wrap their heads around.
If you can think of a better one, let me know. Be warned though, you'll be arguing with every biological imperative, religion, and upbringing in the room when you say it.
I don't need to prove anything. You folks are the ones claiming harm. That said, AI is more akin to the invention of antibiotics than it is to the invention of any specific drug. Name any other entire category of technology from which no good has ever come. Just one.
I doubt you can. Even bioweapons led to breakthroughs in pesticides and chemotherapy. Nukes led to nuclear power, and even harmful AI stuff like deep fakes are being used for image restorations, special effects, and medical imaging.
You're just flat out wrong, and I think you know it.
You are speaking in tautology. Yes we know that technology investment often leads to great advancement and benefits for humanity, but it is not sufficient to obviate the need for consciousness and reduction of harm. This technology will be used to disenfranchise people and we need to be willing to say, "no, try again." Not to stop advancement, but to steer it into being more equitable.
We should be trying to optimize for the best combination of risk and benefit, not taking on unlimited risk in the promise of some non-zero benefit. Your approach is very much take-it-or-leave-it which leaves very little room for regulating the technology.
The GenAI industry lobbying for a moratorium on regulation is them trying to hand wave any disenfranchisement (e.g. displaced workers, youth mental health, intellectual property rights violated, systemically racist outcomes, etc).
> We should be trying to optimize for the best combination of risk and benefit
I 100% support this stance, it's good advice for life in general. I object to the ridiculous Luddite's view espoused elsewhere in this thread.
>The GenAI industry lobbying for a moratorium on regulation is them trying to hand wave any disenfranchisement (e.g. displaced workers, youth mental health, intellectual property rights violated, systemically racist outcomes, etc).
There must be a balance certainly. We can't "kill it before it's born", but we also need to be practical about the costs. I'm all in on debating exactly where that line should be, but object to the idea that it provides no value at all. That's madness, and dishonesty.
Henry Ford didn't make his cars out of buggy whips. He made a new industry. He didn't cannibalize an existing one. You cannot make an LLM without digesting the source material.
Cannibalizing a <product/industry/etc.> is a common phrase to describe the act of a new thing outcompeting an existing thing to another thing to the degree that it significantly harms the market share, sometimes to the point of figurative extinction. Redundancy is a very common reason for this to occur.
Digesting is a weird way to say "learning from." By that logic I've been digesting news, books, movies, songs, and comic books since I was born. My brain is great big 'ole copyright violation.
What matters here is not the source material, it's the output. Possessing or consuming copyrighted material is not illegal, distributing it is. So what matters here is: Can we say that the output is transformative, and does it work to progress the arts and sciences (the stated purpose of copyright in the US constitution)?
I would say yes to both things, except in rare cases of bugs or intentional copyright violations. None of the major AI vendors WANT these things to infringe copyright, they just do it from time to time by accident or through the omission of some guardrail that nobody had yet considered. Those issues are generally fixed fairly promptly (a few major screw ups notwithstanding).
It's because people rub shoulders with tech billionaires and they seem normal enough (e.g. kind to wait staff, friends and family). The billionaires, like anyone, protect their immediate relationships to insulate the air of normality and good health they experience personally. Those people who interact with billionaires then bristle at our dissonant point of view when we point at the externalities. Externalities that have been hand waved in the name of modernity.
People should vote for more socialist governments pushing for UBI and automation tax on the companies..but which this comment get downvoted because of the capitalism religion.
> Imo socialism isn't the solution, but we probably can all agree that capitalism looks dangerous at the moment.
I believe some socialism aspects while being georgist and expanding the definition of rent seeking to include large hyperscalers or internet attention farms in some sense too.
As a young person, I can't afford to buy a house and some of us even wonder if we would be able to afford rent in such a shaky economy. Even migration towards different countries I feel like rent becomes the most major aspect imo.
Mr beat's video on georgism genuinely changed how I perceive things ngl.
> For example, Steve Yegge's "beads" system is over a quarter million lines of allegedly vibe-coded Go code. But developing a CLI like that may be a sweet spot
I haven't looked into it deeply, but I've seen people claiming to find it useful, which is one metric of success.
Agentic vibe coding maximalists essentially claim that code quality doesn't matter if you get the desired functionality out of it. Which is not that different from what a lot of "move fast and break things" startups also claim, about code that's written by humans under time, cost, and demand pressure. [Edit: and I've seen some very "sloppy and poorly implemented" code in those contexts, as well as outside software companies, in companies of all sizes. Not all code is artisanally handcrafted by connoisseurs such as us :]
I'm not planning to explore the bleeding edge of this at the moment, but I don't think it can be discounted entirely, and of course it's constantly improving.
I'd say it is a success at being useful, but yeah it does seem like the code itself has been a bit of a mess.
I've used a version that had a bd stats and a bd status that both had almost the same content in slightly different formats. Later versions appear to have made them an alias for the same thing. I've also had a version where the daemon consistently failed to start and there were no symptoms other than every command taking 5 seconds. In general, the optimization with the daemon is a questionable choice. It doesn't really need to be _that_ fast.
And yet, even after all of that it still has managed to be useful and generally fairly reliable.
> much less time for me to review the plan and output
So typing was a bottleneck for you? I’ve only found this true when I’m a novice in an area. Once I’m experienced, typing is an inconsequential amount of time. Understanding the theory of mind that composes the system is easily the largest time sink in my day to day.
I don't need to understand the theory of mind because I don't have the LLM design the code, I tell it what the design is. If I need something, I can read the functions I told it to implement, which is really simple.
If they did actually stumble on AGI (assuming it didn’t eat them too) it would be used by a select few to enslave or remove the rest of us.