Basic income is the most counterproductive idea possible. We should have spent more on education over 100 years ago.
Or maybe it’s less counterproductive, more irrelevant, if some topic at hand is “what should we do about increasing automation [in the future]?”
If that's at hand, the answer is to let the rest of society catch up before increasing automation.
I agree some form of government intervention is needed because it's the government's fault in the first place. I'm just saying something that should not be controversial at all: throwing money at the problem is crazy.
It’s a time to be pro-human, across many topics.
Yes! Very much yes! Adam Smith himself noted that a capitalist enterprise, if not run according to good values (which to him meant Christian values, but it need not be that for everyone), would be a horrible thing. That hasn't really changed since. A business needs to have some values behind it other than pure profit-seeking, or else it becomes a serious ill for society.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-- John Adams
Moral people don't really need laws, laws exist to deter crime.
Frankly I don't get what John Adams was trying say? Can someone explain?
As an example in recent news Super Court justices have been accused of taking bribes. It is no surprise because there is now ethical rules the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court says it would have to follow, by law. I'm not sure if that is true but surely there could be such a law.
So we need laws, and we need better laws, which means laws that have fewer loopholes, and which apply to all, even Supreme Court justices and Presidents. Are we there yet? Not yet.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...
> Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by [...] morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or [amorous] galantry, would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-- Douglas Adams
"If Joe Biden is elected to the White House, there’s a good chance you will be dead within the year." "Republicans will be hunted, police will stand down."
-- Scott Adams
"Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens any more […] I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off."
-- Scott Adams
"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."
-- Scott Adams
And from the lunatic, eccentric, enigmatic, passionate, romantic, homicidal end:
"We danced the Mamushka while Nero fiddled, we danced the Mamushka at Waterloo. We danced the Mamushka for Jack the Ripper, and now, Fester Addams, this Mamushka is for you."
-- Gomez Addams
"Fan out. Pugsley, head for the dung heap. Mama and Morticia, the shallow graves. I'll take the abyss. Lurch, check out the bottomless pit. Fester?"
-- Gomez Addams
Enterprises don't consider anything, enterprises cannot think. Only people do. Enterprise is made of people. Should people consider other values than profit?
Yes. AI generates sameness on a good day, and comical gibberish on a bad day, that will never change because, AI isn't human.
Sameness will drive customers to look for human made stuff, gibberish will drive them away.
It seems to be a lot of zealotry, buttery and violence. Learning to be good with all that free time will take work.
Of course, we often pay each other for these frivolities. So people don't treat them as free time.
Do we measure software engineers in terms of their lines of code per day? I feel that this is basically what you and others are doing when you compare writing or illustration to digging holes. You're seriously misunderstanding the economy of these fields. Productivity has almost nothing to do with the market for art or writing. What matters is the quality of a work (very hard to measure and deeply ingrained in our psyche) and the attention a work receives (Software engineers should be more familiar with this. It is the "algorithm" people love to disparage). We had more than enough productivity already in these spaces. Does giving people a content firehose actually do anything to these markets? Have you read any books written using AI? Do you know and follow any AI artists? Is anyone besides Nvidia and OpenAI making money here?
I understand the appeal of the models, and as a software engineer I've gotten at least some use out of them. But even in that space I have to wonder if producing more code is a net positive. There's a lot of drawbacks to producing more code. There's more chances to write bugs, more you have to document and maintain, and you're potentially overlooking simpler and more elegant solutions.
I guess all I'm trying to say is when you say this is just a hole digger, you're glossing over a lot of nuance.
Depends very highly on what kind of art we're talking about.
There's the "I get my stuff into galleries" artist. This IMO has an extremely high social component. It's in good part about who you know, how well you can spin your work, how much some rich guy has paid for it in the past, etc.
There's the "I sell commissions on Deviant Art" artist. That's to me a kind of hole digging position already. Certainly you need to produce good work, but what seems to make a good artist in that scope is good work, reliably, fast.
There's the "I illustrate stuff" artist. A more properly commercial version of the above. From my limited experience there's demand to pump out work quickly and as cheaply as possible. Eg, a book may need a cover or a few illustrations, or an ad might need something drawn on it. In many cases the client is basically looking for a hole to fill. The cases where somebody wants to have something truly beautiful that lots of effort went into seem vanishingly rare. There's a reason why corporate styles like "Alegria" exist and are annoyingly common.
There's the "I draw comics" artist. Those need extreme consistency because they're on a tight deadline.
> Do you know and follow any AI artists?
Honestly, I'm beginning to. AI is just a tool like any other. Some people use it to faff about and make random stuff, but I'm starting to notice people using it to produce things that have a coherent plot or tell a story, or at least keep a consistent setting. It's still janky at this point because it's hard to maintain consistency.
Really, there's nothing weird about that. Think about supremely lazy things like Garfield or Ctrl+Alt+Del. They still had a following even when graphically they were supremely lazy. If you can copy/paste body parts to assemble a comic and still get some people interested, no reason why you couldn't do it with AI. Heck, it'd come out looking better at this point.
Even better, agricultural machinery. At one time > 90% of humans were unfree agricultural laborers ("unfree" = slaves, serfs, or something similar). The remaining 10% were mostly soldiers, with a thin veneer of lords and priests at the very top.
unless the AI models surpass a certain critical point, with which new and original works could be generated without using original human derived works.
aka, an AGI.
We as society aren't the beneficiaries of automation, those profits go to private owners. Given that price points exist, the benefits of lowering costs of production are captured by increasing profit margins.
After those profits are captured, we as society have to shoulder the burden of caring for potentially thousands, or more, people who are put out of work, and their families.
Historically, that hasn't held true for long: competition catches up.
Or increased diversity, customisation, higher quality, more availability, and because of competition - where it exists, cheaper products and services.
Increased capability leads to demand scaling. Making a road wider will increase traffic to match.
Should an AI created to make paper clips consider other values than making paper clips?
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-formerly-pa...
Diving all the way down ad absurdum: What's the point of maximizing profit if there are no humans to utilize those profits?
"Dude, you broke the future": https://youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4
It’s better to have a machine that makes 100 cakes for 100 people with only 2 people working than to employ all 100 people without the machine to make 4 cakes.
The people who make the profits have the power to influence legislation to benefit themselves and keep from sharing in their profit. This is one of the fears that actually gave rise to the Luddite movement, and so far history has only proven that there is merit to this fear.
When workers brought up these concerns, the factory owners brushed them aside which forced the Luddites to use more extreme measures to be heard like breaking factory machinery. Eventually the wealthy owner class pushed parliament to pass a law that made machine-breaking subject to the death penalty.
“In an attempt to halt or at least make the transition smoother, the Luddites initially sought to renegotiate terms of working conditions based on the changing circumstances in the workplace. Some of the ideas and requests included the introduction of a minimum wage, the adherence of companies to abide by minimum labour standards, and taxes which would enable funds to be created for workers’ pensions. Whilst these terms do not seem unreasonable in the modern day workplace, for the wealthy factory owners, these attempts at bargaining proved futile.
The Luddite movement therefore emerged when attempts at negotiation failed and their valid concerns were not listened to, let alone addressed. “
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-L...
What are you talking about? Taxation has been around for a very very long time.
False dichotomy + poorly statistically worded.
The proper question is always "Would society be better off at the margin with more automation". The answer someday may well be "No, because many people are already unemployed, and this will exacerbate that even further", but there's no reason to add that clause to the question.
Enterprise is created to provide a beneficial service to the society/humanity/world. Profit is a means to sustain the people, who are working in the enterprise, and subsequently the enterprise. The problem starts when some smartass in power becomes greedy and turns an enterprise for service to people into an enterprise ONLY for profit. If you only want to make money, work in a govt mint.
I see many problems with this statement:
- Is a new robot-only company fairer than firing humans at an old company?
- Should we as a society forego the benefits of automation, because it makes some people unemployed?
- Should there be a robot tax? What is a robot? Is my calculator a robot that keeps an arithmeticist out of a job?
- Should an enterprise created for profit consider other values than profit?
In my view, we should automate as much as we can, because we spend less valuable human time on what is achievable by machine. However, as more and more people fall behind as technology progresses, it might pose a problem, so I think we should institute basic income.
I wouldn't bother with regulating the minutia, just tax Laffer-optimally and give out benefits so as not to create perverse incentives.
But I am keen to know someone's thoughts to the contrary.