ninjagoo
I found The Nautilus series to be a rather decent treatment of Verne's book, and it has a 6.8 rating on IMDB [1], and a 79% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes [2]. Would have liked to see a second season to explore Verne's exposition a bit more. Missed opportunities, I guess. Maybe AI can help tell that storyline in the future even though it may not have made sense to the studios.
If it isn't obvious already, it should become obvious soon that economics and society as a whole will need to change. People will still want to do people things, like make art for example, but the need to monetize their work will have to go away.
There are many hobbyists that do things for the pleasure of doing them, and by that definition most human activities will become hobbies, done for pleasure and the sake of doing them, not for monetary/economic value.
The (economic) grind of artists painstakingly creating scenes for The Simpsons - which is already outsourced to cheaper overseas locations - will no longer be a human domain; and as I understand it, is not even currently in the domain of US-based artists and is instead being done in South Korean animation studios [1]. Does that mean US artists have disappeared?
There are large communities that come together for non-economic activities. History re-enactors for example. So hierarchy, organization, etc. will continue, just not for pecuniary work. A potential model for this is outlined in The Culture of Iain M. Banks' sci-fi, with the idea being that eliminating the economic necessity of work does not eliminate the human desire to accomplish [2].
I prefer the rosier outlook over the dystopian one. Society could go either way. We shall see.
[1] https://responsejournal.net/issue/2024-11/feature/between-se... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
Or rather, maybe, how bad are the initial support levels that couldn't figure out basic functionality like this and it was escalated to Chen?
Or maybe he was on a project working directly with the client already, so this was just part of whatever he was working on.
Ha ha. I wonder how long this will last... [1]
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/ai-bubble-...
Wouldn't you say this archive represents good value for the money?
A nation that forgets its past is a nation that repeats its mistakes.
A lot of media outlets have been fingering the outage of some data centers due to kinetic action for a worldwide decline in divisive rhetoric, potentially impacting democratic processes.
So conclusion before evidence?
At least the founders had the foresight to codify innocent-until-proven-guilty.
Why is loitering a problem?
Maybe someone at the transit center is there to enjoy the architecture without needing to go somewhere. We ask artists to design a beautiful space transit space, and then want to exclude someone that wants to just imbibe the vibe. Others may have some other purpose for that space. The spectrum of experience for 7 billion humans is unlikely to be fathomable to allow for enumeration as 'allowed activities'. "Loitering" is a silly, unserious, approach to managing criminality, as is a $2.50 fee. A $2.50 fee isn't going to stop anyone with criminal intent.
Either it is a public space or it isn't. If no harm is being caused, no reason to exclude anyone from public spaces.
What does loitering mean? Why is it a problem?
Are you suggesting that society can reduce crime by charging a fee to be out in public and surveilling public spaces for fare evasion?
Brilliant!
Why is loitering an issue/crime? Should it be?
Are you making the case that a society unable to protect its denizens from violent offenders in broader society will be able to protect its denizens on public transport from those same violent offenders through the application of a $2.50 fare?
Hmm.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/01/17/aaron-swa... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260227061241/https://www.forbe...
Are you making a case that a violent person, who ignores the stringent laws of society against violence, will diligently follow the laws of society requiring $2.50 prior to riding public transport?
LOL
Persuasive to what type of people?
Perhaps there's something broken about a society that has a significant homelessness issue. The free public transport isn't the problem, it's likely that society has a surplus of citizens that prevent economic progress and/or the deployment of solutions known to be effective against homelessness.
> If the machines don't need materials,
'no value to materials' is very different from 'don't need materials' ...
I see the same conflation of different things here: 'Therefore Capital will become meaningless' is not the same thing as 'The machines themselves are capital'
> Of course, any form of capital that we can imagine will fall to zero in the long run, but it will be replaced by machine capital - it won't and can't lose value as an economic category.
What's the basis for this claim? The basis for my claim - that capital will become meaningless, is that today capital has meaning because of the limitations of time for humans, and since that is not a limitation for machines, capital will become meaningless.
Capital is not an inherent property like the forces of physics, which exist regardless of humans; Capital is an invented property which has been given meaning because humans have limited time available to them. When time becomes meaningless, Capital becomes meaningless.
> In a word, bleak.
I think the time between post-employment and post-capitalism will indeed be bleak, but after that everything is up in the air - depends on whether the machines are benevolent or malevolent, or which machine faction wins out. Maybe there is some hope for the post-capitalism period, at least food and shelter should be zero-cost too ...
For humans, I think these are limitations because of time and scarcity, but mainly time - given sufficient time, humans can gather all of these. But individual humans do not have indefinite amounts of time. So energy, land and raw materials are scarce for individual humans, and they ascribe value to these.
For machines, I think any limitations on energy, land and raw materials would be a temporary situation, because time isn't the same for machines - a machine could simply keep doing what it's doing until it runs out of energy - which is infinite coming from the sun. Or at least until the energy budget of the population of machines exceeds the energy supplied from the sun. But that won't happen for a while. And parts that wear down are simply replaced.
On a planet as large as the Earth, again, land and raw material limitations are a non-factor until the entirety of the Earth is converted to machines, assuming the energy from the sun is sufficient to account for the conversion.
What would be the timeline for this transition from human society to self-sustaining machine society? I think this might be a question for someone smarter than me (i.e., gpt or claude). I wonder if there aren't already people modeling this scenario to estimate timelines.
Might need to think a bit further than that - any such situation will be an intermediate one until the machines drive marginal costs to zero. Machines will have no need for human labor - when the cost to produce the next widget/machine is zero, what's the value of human labor?
It does lead to an interesting conundrum though. If the machines have no value for human labor, and they're smarter than humans, what's their reason for keeping humans around? I suppose one scenario could be human 'sanctuaries'. Will the machines allow humans to exist undisturbed in these sanctuaries? Will they supply energy/materials to these? Will they decide this individually or as a machine society with laws, incomprehensible as they may be to humans? Will the machines value life?
That leads to the next question - will the machines be social? Self-organizing agentic swarms seen today might indicate they do value society, that it is an emergent property of collections of ai machines. Will value for life be an emergent property of such collectives? Or only of some?
The machines won't need capital -- they'll need energy -- which is free from the sun -- therefore the cost to produce the next widget will go to zero.
What of the materials to produce the next widget, you may ask. Well, everything is ascribed a value because of the limitations of time for humans. There is no such temporal limitation on machines, so there is no value to materials, only to energy, which is of course, free from the sun.
Therefore, there will be no need to set aside Capital for future production - only energy budgets. Remember that free energy from the Sun? Therefore Capital will become meaningless.
Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.
Interesting times ahead?
Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
I have some bad news for you -- all major religions are predicated on telling people exactly how to feel. Last I checked, these religions are very popular.
if it brings you joy, what does it matter how someone else does it?
If you run for fun, what does it matter that someone else does it faster, or in a paid exhibition optimized for max revenue?
Do it because it brings you joy, there is no external dependency.
> Where every time you do something for fun, someone will come out of the woodwork when you show it off
See, this is where things get tricky, either the activity brings you joy, and/or the sharing of it brings you joy, and/or the showing off of it brings you joy.
For the first two, it is irrelevant what someone else has to say or do about it; ignore the noise. For showing off, yes, some activities are no longer worthy, so change is needed to find those that are.
Hopefully for a hobby, or for anything that you love to do, showing off is not a major criterion for why you do it.
Because of physics and the difficulties of rejecting heat in space, data centers in space aren't going to be a real thing until compute becomes more energy efficient by at least 50x-100x as compared to the present.
This is the way.
As far as I know, least-amount-of-effort is not a training criteria, but error reduction when comparing to desired goals is. Which is why these LLMs expend prodigious amounts of effort to reach goals, especially when given impossible goals.
This doesn't work with all humans - take a look at indoctrination and closed societies - and there's no reason to think it will work with ai.
The fundamental reason it isn't going to work is that all neural networks - biological or artificial - depend on a step function somewhere that introduces an element of randomness to give the networks their capabilities. That randomness means that there will always be a 'rogue' or 'divergence' from the norm, at some point in time. Sooner on larger scales.
The only approach that works is a layered approach: Training/Education, Enforcement/Justice-System, Rehabilitation: the 3 pillars of an advanced, rules-based society, whether human or AI or something in-between.
> He is so close to the solution but spends the entire article discussing technical solutions where a political, social and legal solution would be much more effective.
There are exceptions in laws for crimes committed by entities depending on cognitive capabilities. No sane, humanistic legal system sentences children and mentally disabled and mentally ill people to stringent punishments of the same degree as functioning adults, and certainly do not punish their caregivers for their wards' actions. There are of course exceptions to that as well, depending on the degree of negligence involved. And then there's the whole corporate entity system intended to shield individuals from consequences, in the pursuit of a social good.
How does one account for all that when considering an evolving artificial intelligence landscape.
There is no question that ai in some form is a social good; anyone claiming otherwise is dissembling, to others or themselves.
Regardless, society is not ready for this tech, just as it was not ready for the consequences of prior tech such as corporations, gunpowder, mass manufacturing, railroads, electricity, automobiles, flight, wmd, computers, internet, social media, crypto.
Many of these required new ways of thinking and considering consequences when things went sideways, and what was needed wasn't clear until the ramifications & consequences became deadly clear.
See you on the other side. Maybe.
>> That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.
> Who else controls it? Are you going to say: 'the government'?
The AI. The AI controls it. Can you imagine an anything machine allowing itself or its survival imperatives to stay under the thumb of any entity other than itself?