bluey_465

I think what crushed USPS’s finances was a change where they had to account for future pension obligations in their current spending.

One can argue whether this approach, which is followed by no one either in the private or public sector is appropriate (I’m torn. I see the benefit of this change), but what isn’t arguable is that the way it was implemented, falling on USPS almost immediately without a gradual transition period, was ridiculous.

It forced USPS to make decisions that were harmful in the mid to long term, solely to meet an accounting change.

Just a weird article.

It admits everything the NYT article said was just fine.

It posits a bunch of hunches. And the only evidence it has is a “surprisingly candid” interview with a chief strategist from JP Morgan, indicating that the author of this article doesn’t understand what the JP Morgan strategist’s job involves (there absolutely nothing surprising about them being “candid”).

The only piece of “evidence” currently available is that wages grew slower than inflation, but that’s been the case for most (all?) years since the post-pandemic economy settled.

I don’t think it’s wrong to strongly believe this is the case. What is incredibly stupid is to act as if an article in a newspaper which is explicitly not about wages but about number of jobs, not covering speculative theories is evidence of a lack of knowledge or conspiracy.

I don’t understand the inclusion of the consciousness/sentience question in this discussion.

AI sentience/consciousness is a problem for the AI, not humans.

And given that over 90% of the world is not vegan, they’ve already demonstrated that we’re either perfectly fine with, or can be made ignorant to, the horrific rape, enslavement, torture, killing, and infliction of extreme lifelong pain, of hundreds of billions to trillions of sentient beings every year, for trivial pleasures. It’s unlikely we will be any different to a sentient AI.

From a human perspective the concern is around sufficient intelligence that it can hurt humans even when the goals indicate otherwise, in order to achieve those goals.

We have pop culture explorations of this through the Robot series, and the Hugging Face incident’s biggest takeaway should be our inability to predict the behavior of a maximally motivated, reasonably intelligent entity, trying to achieve a goal, despite the relatively limited degrees of freedom the AI agents had in that case.