walleeee
The distinction you are collapsing here is really a crucial one. My thermostat's goal-oriented behavior does not make me a slaveowner unless rocks are conscious, to riff on your comment below. Our lack of consensus on the definition of these concepts is no reason to conflate them.
The distinction is crucial because while these machines clearly do exhibit intelligence under certain definitions, there is no evidence of consciousness, and we have very little reason to give them the benefit of the doubt, unlike biologically related beings, a great many of whom, human or otherwise, are presently in something like slavery
It is perfectly rational to choose lower income occupations for your own reasons. Income maximization at all costs is how you become a pawn in someone else's game even (especially?) if it makes you rich.
this of course affecting not only the Western regimes but technocratic rule everywhere
I'm saying the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means. It is not unique in this. This is not the only reason the US is rich or the only reason any other is not.
I'm also saying that this is a really bad strategy if the goal is humankind flourishing on this planet. People already enrich one another in many ways. We have to stop warring on one another and nature, thoughtlessly dumping entropy where we can't see it, etc.
To some degree this is true, in the sense that human flourishing implies some degree of suffering for e.g. the ants we accidentally step on, animals we eat, bacteria in our guts, etc. But Jains do their best not to step on the ants, many people refuse to eat flesh, and so on. Plants and bacteria will have to fend for themselves for now. We can certainly do better with each other.
I am proposing no version of fatalism, besides the fact that, at least in our living substrate, organisms have not all learned to do each other no harm, if this is even possible, and even if it isn't, fatalistic hedonism is not the inevitable response to this fact.
Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.
But what we're beginning to understand we're also destroying far more rapidly even as we devote more and more effort to digital facsimiles of our faculties
My dry pessimism was a comment on this foolish inversion of priorities. Alien visitors, if the forest is truly dark, may conclude we're well on the way to self-annihilation in pursuit of false idols, while we fail to recognize the miraculous nature of existing biology.
Language models are a novel/alien form of algorithmic intelligence with scant relation to biological life, except in their use of language.
Surprise, it's harder for people to self-govern when they are surrounded by mechanisms designed deliberately to subvert their capacity to self-govern.
Correct, many of which are directly, a skeptic might even argue deliberately, exacerbated by companies like OpenAI.
And yet your proposal is
> a company to tackle this at scale.
What gives you the confidence that any such company will focus consistently, if at all,
> on help, not profits
Given it exists in the same incentive matrix as any other startup? A matrix which is far less likely to throw one fistfuls of cash for a nice-sounding idea now than it was in recent times. This company will need to resist its investors' pressure to find returns. How exactly will it do this? Do you choose to believe someone else has thought this through, or will do so? At what point does your belief become convenient for people who don't share your admirably prosocial convictions?
Perhaps more generally phrased as governance
Yes, the answer is not some business plan by which some can dodge disaster in an untrustworthy market, the answer is to recognize that this planet is a spaceship i.e. materially closed, and we are massively soiling the nest, microplastic is in steak because it's literally everywhere on the surface of the earth, etc.
Therefore, good ecological governance is a requirement, as is the analysis, as a public service, of the resources and ecosystems, and the services they provide human beings and our dependents, i.e. a democratic and just policy, not a lucrative plan to privatize yet more of public health
If one is convinced the best vehicle for the above in the near term is a business, then it had better have a different approach than is typical of personal health tech startups
Empowering individuals isn't worthless by any means but pitting one against another with asymmetric information is worse than worthless
Both, surely
What makes you so confident they truly believe these things, rather than find it convenient to let everyone think so
You don't, that's the idea.
innovating creative interpretations of innovation, perhaps
Reviewing well executed changesets by skilled developers on complicated and deliberate projects is not comparable to "fleet of agents" vibe engineering. One of these tasks will sharpen you regardless how lazily you approach it. The other requires extreme discipline to avoid atrophy.
Maybe it has something to do with the purveyors of these products
- claiming they will take the jobs
- designing them to be habit-forming
- advertising them as digital mentats
- failing to advertise risks of using them