> This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society.
Jobs have been disappearing at a high rate for at least a couple of generations now, and have steadily been replaced with new ones, often high paying ones.
We can't control which jobs are in high, low, and no demand, so we're best off swimming with the current, whichever way it flows. 1. Accept that professions come and go. 2. Expect jobs to disappear every decade or so and plan accordingly. 3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete. That goes for all of us.
This is what I would call toxic positivity. Maybe with a side of survivor bias. Lots of people don’t get awesome new jobs. They struggle, they fall out of the workforce.
People don’t want to “accept” that’s some thing they have trained to do and gotten good at is going to just go away. It’s a reality, but it’s also pretty fucking awful.
My father used to make a very good living doing sign painting until the late 80s when vinyl signs became cheap and fast to make. They weren’t as good, they didn’t last as long, but they were cheap. And so his good living went away, and he spent the rest of his working years doing jobs that were not well paid. (The full story is more complicated, but the larger point stands.)
When faced with the reality of capitalism, maybe toxic positivity is all there is. I’d like to think that there’s a way that we could plan our society better, and evaluate tech against social costs, but the reality is that in the US we have never done that.
I disagree with your point. The problem is that people will gladly accept changes brought by technology up until the point that it affects them personally. The people that bought a cheap vinyl sign were not forced to purchase them, and yet they did.
This is not a problem with tech, it’s a problem with us. If you like liberty, then you know the choice that people will make, and that’s what is terrifying.
Jobs have been disappearing at a high rate for at least a couple of generations now, and have steadily been replaced with new ones, often high paying ones.
In the past jobs took a while to disappear. People had time to retrain, to change career, and to come to terms with things ending. The difference now is that it seems like you could be in a high demand role today, and the whole industry you work in might not exist any more in a few years time.
The suggestion that this is just like it was in the past ignores that massive difference.
> 1. Accept that professions come and go. 2. Expect jobs to disappear every decade or so and plan accordingly. 3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete. That goes for all of us.
What can we do? Hope to save enough to not go into more debt for a second degree?
Hope that second degree isn’t obsoleted either?
As AI becomes more advanced the minimum education and likely IQ required to even get a job that pays above minimum wage will increase.
What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?
The solution is the same one we should have had from the start: take some of the responsibility from peoples careers off individuals and place it on society. As mentioned above, this has always been a problem it's just that now it's a problem for intellectual careers and not just laborers.
Education (and re-education) should be at least affordable if not completely free. Unemployment benefits should be enough to live on (if not well) and be freely available to anyone getting an education. If that is "too expensive" then limit it to specific educations which are currently in short supply.
And lastly, tax income from investments exactly the same as income from labour. This part is actually necessary because if automation is a future we actually want (and we should!) then this will increasingly become the _only_ form of income.
How about striding for one of the core societal values that make many advanced democraties (including the European nordics) so much better/happier than the US? It’s called Equality.
Insert strong progressive taxes, especially on wealth, and use it to fund a strong public sector, so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… .
I think you vastly underestimate how much money is the rich have siphoned from society, what do you think that printed money goes to? The change impact would be _massive_, suddenly people would have disposable money instead of crushing debts, nd actually stimulate the economy!
Yup. One of the things that's going to become starkly obvious is this: being in ownership of the money machine doesn't entitle you to power and compensation matching the output of that machine.
Feedback loops set in. If you need X amount of power and Y amount of resources to get it going, but it pays you enough for X times 2 power and Y times 5 resources, the first person to get the machine cranking becomes a human version of that AI paperclip maximizer.
And this has obviously already happened…
So now it's just a matter of, how obvious does this need to get before all the world is paperclips with one idiot sitting there, in his limited human perception, thinking he's won.
It really is Star Trek Future or bust. We don't have the luxury of steampunk attitudes towards power and societal structure anymore. Machine assistance and its multiplier effect are too big, and the runaway feedback effects are too obvious.
Do we have to wait until it's no longer Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, who are at least very aggressive ambitious idiots paying high prices for their goals, and instead it's some feckless Sam Bankman-Fried who ends up holding the bag? What's it going to take to illustrate the scale of the problem?
Morally comparing order of magnitude I don't really see the difference between any of your examples. They're all structurally lacking in empathy and every one of those would sell their mother if it got them ahead in the game.
I don't disagree, but there's a profound difference in effort (most notably seen in Bezos vs. Bankman-Fried). This changes the result, and I think it also significantly changes the framing.
Bezos started in the days of Windows 3.1, and already was positioning himself near Microsoft as a force multiplier even though, in those days, he and other humans had to do vast amounts of work and thinking.
If the only requirement for dominating the world is adjacency to AI, the gameplan is still exactly the same but now the work and thinking is what you turn over to machines as a force multiplier. Without that, where is the justification for producing individuals who dominate the world? It becomes, not arbitrary, but purely a factor of who is adjacent to the AI at the right time.
It's how France historically tried to deal with too much inequality, except it was a complete failure and after staggering levels of evil, bloodshed and oppression they simply ended up with a new elite that had absolute power. No inequality was solved.
Other countries didn't go down that road and none regretted it.
Yet it's amazing how quickly some will still exploit any new technology or change to justify reaching for violence. Some never learn.
You'd best have good implementation or they'll be using ChatGPT to aim your guillotines towards their business rivals, further consolidating their power.
This is the challenge. Anything we've got, people like this have tenfold, or a thousandfold, or a millionfold. As long as we're still running on 18th and 19th century societies.
Mind that you're not literally being steered by the billionaires to accomplish their ends, because that has been the history for the last decade or two. The only thing AI brings to the equation is, perhaps, making the process more obvious and providing a toy version of it that anyone can play with.
Before that, we played with the zeitgeist through marketing, big business… and politics. The only difference is that now we can use it to draw pictures or have it talk back to us like it was a person. The billionaires have been 'prompt engineers' for as long as I've been alive.
The „aiming problem“ for me isn’t really an issue. The goal must be that no one can have too much power over others, no matter why/how. So yeah, the first victims might be tricked targets, but it doesn’t end there.
This might sound totally absurd when you hear it first, but I am fully in favor for randomized rulings in short/limited durations! Lottery style, a bit tweaked to have good entropy.
>> so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/…
Access? UK tries this. High taxes and high borrowing to fund a large public sector. Result:
- People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly.
- People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike, despite Tube drivers earning £56k/yr, only a bit less than that of a software engineer.
Putting the public sector in charge doesn't guarantee access to anything, it can easily lead to the opposite, which is why the USSR was constantly being wracked by bizarre shortages especially for anything that mattered to the general public like consumer goods. And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.
In the UK dentists are mostly private, it hasn't increased the quality or availability in the least.
Public transport is actually a fairly small part of the nation's transport, the UK is very car-centric so the strikes largely inconvenience commuters and drive even more people onto the roads, unless they can WFH.
Strikes are also a very recent phenomenon, just in the last 6 months or so, so this is quite a new thing driven by inflation.
Problems with the NHS are very much poor management by the last run of governments where there is a quite a growing suspicion they are deliberately trying to run down the NHS in order to make a case for to privatise it, following e.g. America's disastrous model.
This is a forced imageproblem try to get privatizations look better than state run, by defunding public sectors and claiming all kinds of weird stuff upto straight lies some people want to believe.
Don’t buy into that propaganda, look at the US how privatization ends up: still lots of tax money, additionally people can’t afford stuff, and a few assholes getting insanely rich in the process by siphoning money out of the society.
Try to ensure appropriate money is used to make the NHS effective again, including wages that allows people to live where they work (<1h commute).
Most communist shortages came from being cutoff from international trades with wealthy countries, and having to start from ruins or nothing at all btw. These are different problems, and you might learn in the process why capitalism is going to end soon. :-)
I can’t describe how much better Europe, specifically Netherlands felt due to the social safety nets provided, and do not tell me that The Dutch aren’t hard working people, because they are.
People are so much more relaxed there. 99% of the concern about AI is because we’re living in a cut throat capitalistic society, if we knew that AI didn’t mean starving or losing our homes, we’d be way more relaxed about it, and imo we’d take out time a bit more and think about safety.
It’s the American race to the bottom attitude which is IMO no longer compatible with a highly automated world.
To start with, if the economy breaks, AI breaks.
I saw Microsoft is winging because other search engines are stealing ChatGPT responses, get used to it M$, you own nothing.
I cannot imagine being rich and be surrounded by homeless people, crime, drugs and the like.
The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?
I, for one, prefer to treat other humans as, well, humans. And by making everyone around me better off, my quality of life also improves.
For simple striking example, how about giving homeless people housing for free, so they can get their stuff together again? You can argue about how „they„ don’t deserve this all day long or simply do it and eliminate a problem https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le... - and even save a lot of money in the process as a society!
> The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it?
You say this like it shows how it's not a plausible outcome or shows the error of this path, but unfortunately that's exactly the American plan. Yes, that. Is what is literally already happening in USA. It is pretty nightmarish. The rich don't seem to think it's a problem, or don't seem to think there's any available option more desirable to them.
The great thing about fascism (the extreme form of conservativsm when going more rightwing) is that it’s always a matter of in-group vs out-group, THE stereotype of thinking of the right-wingers.
Like, we have the true values and they are immoral. This thinking naturally Leads of subselects within the in-group that are even more true than the others… and it gets recursively smaller going towards fascism.
So ultimately you end up with a tiny in-group (the führers are now some billionaires), that still want to backstab the others secretly, who become paranoid over time, isolate themselves to minimize contact with these lesser human beings left behind… and loose touch with reality.
this is where it ends, usually, one way or another.
But the important part is that it actually DOESNT MATTER what they think - at some point people are frustrated enough and simply take it all away from them… the tipping point is when even public security staff (like police) is willing to let it happen - mostly to reduce suffering from family/friends/… .
Self-righteousness, violence, or tendencies to authoritarianism can be found on both left and right. But fascism means a certain kind of far-right populist politics, not just these attributes in isolation.
words do have definitions. every political direction can have authoritarian traits, still fascism is the extreme form of conservatism. So is communism as the extreme form of socialism, to compare it with left-wing words. The third political direction is liberalism that ultimately leads to anarchy (no state at all). Both American parties are in the area of liberal-conservative… as a European it simply looks like slightly rightwing (dems) and bordering fascist (reps).
Political classification is a complex topic though, it needs multiple dimensions to somehow get to something useful as a mental model.
I am „green“ first and foremost, and while the solarpunk or eco-socialist movements surely have socialist aspects, the „green“ main focus isn’t even covered in previous models. Green is neither left nor right nor liberal, it’s… future oriented? Dunno.
When you think about it,
All wealth, every single bit of it has come from the same earth we’re all born on. This is the one truth which binds us all, including the AI, it’s too a child of this Earth, which means all people should have fairly equal access to at least basic protections the Earth provides us with. That’s all there really is to say about it.
Yes! The world where you end up in a random position with zero influence over the outcome if you could pick it before you were born is the one you should strive to create. That one has true equality.
I like that idea, but I don't even think it has to be "perfect equality", just if you're not inclined to strive for more, or you lose your job to a computer, you don't have to go home and tell your family that there live is about to get much worse.
Um...Python, C++, Linux, Erlang, mobile phones (Nokia), Spotify, HTML...
Having worked for both European and US companies, I would say that a) innovation is mutual (we learn from each other) and talent/mediocrity are pretty much evenly distributed.
The US has a more "dynamic" economy in some sense - for example the VC ecosystem is far better funded - but is detrimental in others (Byzantine health care system deters would-be entrepreneurs).
And yet if we take a snapshot literally right now:
Guido van Rossum - Microsoft Distinguished Engineer
Bjarne Stroustrup - professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (City of New York)
Linus Torvalds - Nationality American/US since 2010 (should I write GNU/American/US? Someone educate me).
Erlang - I don't know anything about Erlang so I've got nothing to say.
Nokia - brutally ejected from the market by the Americans, bought out and sepukku-ed under Microsoft leadership. Now phones may as well be an Asian technology. Oversaw the collapse of European leadership in the mobile space, to the point where it is going to be a case study in how to fail at innovation.
Spotify - Leading EU tech success story. Makes up 50% of the counterexamples, along with ASML. Not detectable as a serious tech company when compared to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc.
HTML - I mean, we'd probably have managed without the Europeans on this one. Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Most stuff you cheer here is basically a few tech giants out of Silicon Valley. The science kickstart for all that came from a bunch of scientists (like Von neumann) you got when winning WW2 from europe. In a time when many potential competitors were still rebuilding from ruins.
This is over now, europeans tend to no longer go to the us but still produce excellent scientists, Asian countries catched up and both continents start to leave the US behind in most aspects as a desirable place to live, except for 2 things: Military power and billionaires.
Enjoy your 5 tech giants while they last, but also keep in mind that these are international now and draw from nonamerican intellectual power also.
That's the point though. Van Rossum, Stroustrup and Torvalds made their name early on in their careers or even at college, while still in Europe. Sure, later on they emigrated to the US for the money, but that was on the back of their accomplishments.
Of course Nokia was eclipsed by foreign competition (mostly due to terrible management), but it was still innovative in its time. Just as US companies today face competition from Asia.
> Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Yes, but they didn't, did they? It's easy to look at something with 20/20 hindsight and say "anyone could have done this". Back in 1989 Berners-Lee had that insight.
> HTML ... Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Yes, For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
"Europe is irrelevant" is such a weird take for a country built by Europeans, populated by Europeans, using European legal system, European language, etc etc.
Ever played some civilization (the game)? A mostly military focussed society can force others into unfavorable agreements, but while doing so other areas of society are lacking, amounting to huge problems later on when
a) blackmailing for some reason stops working
b) non-military related businesses are vanishing
c) increasing %share of your population has a degrading life quality
d) military costs become unsustainable for questionable ROI
… doubling down on military is a death spiral, especially when the funding money comes from slashing public services.
That’s the total opposite most people around me (many immigrants from the US!) experience for the like last 2 decades actually, where have you been to that draws such a funny picture?
Europe has more % Entrepreneurs/Self-employed people than the US, lots of great companies even though not leading in the richest top5-ranking, and the work ethic is focussed during working hours instead of chitchatting/looking busy 12h+ per day.
Maybe you are also fooled by one critical thing: US companies are muuuuch better at marketing than European ones, outshining them so you tend to see exclusively US blogvertising and not where real innovation actually happens: all around the world now and the US actually falling behind.
Could also be the advantage of a unified market helps US startups scale faster, maybe someone else can speak to that better. Its been influential where Ive worked, at least.
I also think at least US tech has significantly larger firms, but I dont think thats directly in line with societal good. Seems pretty fucking cancerous to me. Cant speak to industries outside of software though.
Europe (mostly, at least) does have a unified market on paper, but not culturally, which makes marketing, localization etc. harder - a commercial that sells well to Germans might go down like a lead balloon in Spain.
The biggest advantage I've seen in the US has been the VC ecosystem. For all we deride VCs - and sometimes (particularly given events over the past few weeks) with very good reason, the money spigot is just much more generous in the US. Of course that will change in the new low interest rate economy, but that to me seems more the deciding factor than silly claims that Americans are somehow more innately "innovative" than Europeans.
Money as a forcing function seems to come to an end, also I really am laughing right now how the US tries to suppress TikTok so it doesn’t overtake all these social media companies seemingly unable to compete :-)
There is also a language factor here. 100 years ago, English was not the ‘lingua franca’ of the world, traveling in Europe you were better off with French, German or even Latin.
US marketing currently happen to be understood almost everywhere and native speakers of English have an advantage. A company does not necessarily need to execute better, but through effective communication they may be able to pretend they are.
There are lot of examples of ideas being picked up and reimplemented in the US, where the original was better but where the adaptation got better traction. The film industry is full of it.
Why should ingenuity not be evenly spread around the globe as well as hopes for a better future? The US represents one particular policy for wealth distribution that happen to work well for, in particular, VCs.
This is the key point. The single unified market with 300+ million people speaking the same language is the advantage that will make all the other ones more or less irrelevant.
Sorry? You think the American economy is so broken that people 'can't afford stuff' anymore?
That there is an absurdly increasing wealth gap is a fact, but that doesn't mean that - for the time being - US households as consumers are still spending lots of money. And if you're in the B2B side of the market then it's even easier.
I said dimishing, not gone already. A shrinking middle class is a real problem, leading to all kinds of issues, like reduced spending power - something that until recently was hidden by people going into debt massively… which now turns into even more problems soon.
All the while you can now do stuff in English all over europe increasingly well and legislations are getting normalized between countries, ignoring the odd brexit events here and there.
Ultimately what I am saying is: the factor exists and is significant, but getting lower for the US and other parts of the world are catching up rather quickly.
This comment can be read as you being happy for the demise of the US. It’s wonderful to see how many actual allies we have, who the minute we trip up they’re immediately on scene saying “i told you so” and ready to pick the bones.
You are reading that wrong, and it even sounds you want to read it that way.
For sure Europeans are not keen to have to deal with china or Russia as the new world powers instead of the US. Really! But sometimes friends have to call out each other when things go in a bad direction.
But most Americans probably have to deal with the fact that they really aren’t the greatest country on earth any longer, except for military spending, gun deaths and prisoners. This realization is needed before one can really make steps into improving things again.
If the US was half a competent at city planning as Europe it would be a no brainier for me. Unfortunately the US cities that are remotely walkable are also the most expensive. Phoenix / LA / Texas car dependency? HELL NO
Yes a walkable city is a massive life quality factor, but one can only „get it“ after experiencing it. Add good public transport on top of that and you can see why european/asian cities are so popular nowadays
> What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?
Fairly tax companies' profits.
And then you can afford to just feed 10% of society even if they don't contribute a thing. Also, free world-class education seems to do wonders in Europe ;)
Low corporate tax is fine. Fairly tax the recipients of those profits. Warren Buffet should pay more on his share of Apple's profit than some retiree with Apple in their portfolio. A large corporate tax ends up being regressive.
That magical Nordic system is called "social democracy", it's of course rooted in socialism, and it's so old that one of the first dark memes amongst left-wing groups ("You killed Rose Luxemburg!) is about them.
It's strange how those who say the Nordics aren't really socialist will be the first to dismiss their policies as socialist when they're suggested for the US.
Neither does communism. Communism implies ownership and control of the economy by the people at large, but the presence of a state is, supposedly, a transitional phase.
> What are we gonna do about the ever increasing N+1% of people who won’t be cost effective versus an AI?
Their quality of life will increase because of all the cheap stuff we can make with ai and robots.
They will coexist and compete with robots.
Upward mobility should be better, given the access to advanced technology.
Worst case scenario, they can all band together outside of the advanced civilisation, grow their food and live a separate life.
There is no need to make high iq people to pay for low iq to live in a high iq society.
We're already seeing a divide of cities for rich people and cities for poor people. It will just be more pronounced.
> Their quality of life will increase because of all the cheap stuff we can make with ai and robots.
Ahh, the old "modern poor people are better off than medevial kings since we have microwaves and supercomputers in our pockets". No matter that they are all stressed, living paycheck to paycheck and a single (treatable) disease from crippling debt.
Don’t forget all the people who laugh in your face and tell you you don’t actually know your newly learned skills, and reduces you to a bartender fraudulently entering their field.
Its been like that forever. Factory workers had to adapt when the jobs went to Asia. I don't see how comfortable office guys should get any other treatment.
It used to be learn to code then maybe learn to weld or plumb it something that is harder to automate away.
While fundamentally true, this comment is astonishingly tone deaf in light of the entirely unprecedented amplitude and timescale at which the shift is happening this time.
"Just prepare" does not work when years become days.
Naively positive. People whose jobs are outpaced by technology end up working "dead end" jobs that nobody else wants or fall into poverty if they are not lucky enough to be able to retire. Turning around in your 40s, 50s, or 60s to find new employment in a new field? This is exceptionally challenging.
> Jobs have been disappearing at a high rate for at least a couple of generations now, and have steadily been replaced with new ones, often high paying ones.
You don’t feel like you should quote some data for this claim?
Not really, have a closer look at anything outside. The Sun and rain and weather constantly erode the condition of human creations.
Try fixing some roads and bridges to start with. They're in terrible shape in most of the US. Any city could probably employ 10 times as many gardeners to take care of the plants and build nicer things.
Elderly need taking care of, and young people teaching. Houses need cleaning. Shoes need shinning. Endless list really.
Stop the traffic on a road to fix it without local administration permission? Do you think getting such permission is easy? How are you going to pay for the materials to do the repairs? Do you think it's easy to get a job as a gardener?
I think you need to read other’s thoughts more charitably. I doubt he was suggesting bored artists and call center workers grab a hard hat and pick a road. The point is that AI makes it easier for humans to do work, and there’s an endless amount of work we as a society want done. Avandon capitalist frameworks of wages/capital/“deserved poverty” for a minute, and just consider a group of humans and a pile of tasks that need to be done.
Jobs have been disappearing at a high rate for at least a couple of generations now, and have steadily been replaced with new ones, often high paying ones.
We can't control which jobs are in high, low, and no demand, so we're best off swimming with the current, whichever way it flows. 1. Accept that professions come and go. 2. Expect jobs to disappear every decade or so and plan accordingly. 3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete. That goes for all of us.