Fascinating. How will we live ok back in, say five years, at this very funny period from, 2018ish to 2022ish when our echo chamber made us believe ESG was going to save the world.
How far we’ve come. Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!
ESG ended up being a scam. Lots of these things are nothing but cover to make money off of people’s concern for the enviro.
All you need to look at is the carbon footprint of people who clamor and demonstrate for green policies. Including idiots gluing themselves to roadways —all the idle traffic they create and the manpower necessary to remove them and repair the damage. It’s a sucker’s game.
Saying ESG is entirely a scam because some ESG backers travel in airplanes is like saying climate change is a hoax because it was colder than usual in Peoria today.
ESG is a huge thing. Some of it is greenwashing, some is outright scam, some is legitimate pressure to make better environmental decisions.
But insisting that ESG proponents can’t make suboptimal individual choices is silly.
Ah yes. Some people use airplanes so we need to keep burning coal, who cares when the sea levels rise and the water wars begin! The important thing is that some people acted silly by gluing themselves to the road! Can't give in to them, even if it would save the world for our children.
You're not trying to convince the choir, you're trying to convince the masses.
Sure, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Branson, Albert Gore, Barrack Obama and high schoolers are impressed, but not the mom and dad working jobs that are teetering, driving beaters and facing pressure from cheap labor. They see these people jet-setting being hyper-overconsumers and think, what the hell? They see these people increasing their wealth promoting change, but they don't change. Why should I change, they're not changing, they're adding more!
> Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!
Or just hope. AGI is a capitalist's wet dream: it would completely undercut labor's power or allow it to be replaced completely, and it could also allow the developer to muscle out a large fraction of other capitalists from the economy.
Even though AGI would be terrible for the rest of us, it's got so much upside for VC types they can't help themselves.
It’s even worse. If you have money and are against deploying AGI once we get there you still want to be the first to achieve it, because it’s the only reasonable chance of stopping others… assuming you can even align it.
You're claiming it would be terrible for the rest of us, without supporting that assumption in any way. It's not a fact, pseudo scifi action movies don't count as facts.
> You're claiming it would be terrible for the rest of us, without supporting that assumption in any way.
I literally explained it. I straightforwardly applied the technology to our existing social/economic structure.
And changing the social/economic structure is probably harder than developing the technology and requires precisely the kind of power that a successful AGI technology would remove (e.g. workers can't strike to keep their jobs when the boss is planning to lay them all off).
> It's not a fact, pseudo scifi action movies don't count as facts.
Honestly, the "AGI will be so great/everything will be fine" assumption relies less on facts and more on sci-fi fantasy than anything I said.
> You did not explain anything, you just said that something would happen, without any reasoning why or why no counter effects would happen.
If you think that, the problem's on your end of the connection. The most charitable read of your comment is you're expecting a level of exposition that is not actually required, especially given the common context of what exists now.
Personally, I think you're actually doing more of what you're accusing me, for instance your sibling comment of:
> The economic system is not set in stone. If everyone is irrelevant to it, the economic system becomes irrelevant to everyone, and a parallel system gradually replaces it.
You're basically hand-waving a future and saying "everything will be fine." And you're also misunderstanding some significant things in a kind of black and white way. E.g. I never said "everyone [would be] irrelevant [to the economic system]," I said labor would be. That's a lot of people, but not everyone.
AGI in an internet connected world is capitalism end-game. Once you have AGI, labour (both physical and intellectual) becomes redundant, humans have a "value to the system" approaching zero.
Our economic system is built on a series of assumptions that fundamentally cannot survive AGI, and nobody is really even trying to grapple with that fact.
The economic system is not set in stone. If everyone is irrelevant to it, the economic system becomes irrelevant to everyone, and a parallel system gradually replaces it.
How far we’ve come. Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!