What Is Going on in the World?

I couldn't grasp anything actionable from this, aside from believing the author should take a step back from the last 12 month's circumstances.

Some points appear to be the start of a line of thoughts that could expand to be useful, but the majority of the snippets are stating not so useful stuff like "nothing we do matters". Yeah, we know, and then?

Article reads like a bunch of random comments on HN. It needs to focus on concrete problems, not abstract things like:

> Nothing we do matters for any of several reasons (moral non-realism, infinite ethics, living in a simulation, being a Boltzmann brain, ..?)

This piece would be better if it didn't mix concepts from science fiction and philosophical thought experiments with more real problems like societal changes and the overall lack of meaning that people experience.

This weirdly omits the entire world other than the US and “Western civilization”, besides being internally contradictory. Harnessing any significant resources from space would require huge new infrastructure on Earth, which the author says is impossible and anyway they say everyone is going to die. So who’s going to build it?

There’s also essentially no attempt to frame any of this in a historic context. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a huge confluence of massively destabilizing political and economic events in the past 120 years, or the second, or the third...

Add in evidence-free assertions about AI and the best philosophy of personal behavior and the difficulty of good government, but no mention of the toxic influence that a huge class of transnational extra-governmental billionaires with an exponentially growing portion of global wealth has over global politics... and I think the author lost the thread over “what is going on in the world” a little too quickly.

The first two bulletpoints are spot on. After bulletpoint 2 everything started getting dumber and dumber.

We are basically back to the early 20th century but without the propensity to kill each other (yet). People are showing a complete lack of rationality even when facing the most basic problems. They are willing to believe anything as long as it plays into their biases and doesn't hurt them in the short term.

The solutions don't require any meaningful sacrifices. The sacrifices are insignificant compared to the benefits.

I feel like the Pandemic has screwed up optimism from the world. This post would be less depressing if it was written a year ago.

I feel optimistic - once travel and economic machine starts booting up, protests/riots will become less frequent. Countries will open up and things will get better.

This post IMO is a knee-jerk reaction on the scale of year.

This appears to be an existential crisis played out in bullet points against the backdrop of current events. And rightfully so, one should be experiencing this. The author’s thoughts are a result of a worldview that many of you are responsible for nurturing and amplifying.

>> AI agents will control the future, and which ones we create is the only thing about our time that will matter in the long run.

Every time there's a big story in the news about a new thing achieved by an AI system, someone will lose their shit and go on social media to say how it's a sign of the end times where Terminators will roam the Earth and humans will hide in caves. At least the article has the common indicency of placing this inevitable eventuality "in the future", with all the precision typical of palm readers and popular entertainers.

For perspective, here's an article I found by following the wikipedia links on Gary Kasparov's 1997 defeat by Deep Blue in chess:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/be-afraid...

The article is titled "Be Afraid" (!) and it includes passages like the following:

  In Game Two, Deep Blue passed the Turing test. Yes, of course, it was for
  chess only, a very big caveat. But, first, no one was ever quite sure that a
  machine ever would pass even this limited test.

  And second, if a computer has passed the Turing test for chess, closed logical
  system though it may be, that opens the possibility that computers might in
  time pass the Turing test in other areas.

Besides the typical abuse of the Turing test to mean anything anyone wants it to mean, as long as it means something as vague and fuzzy as it is irrelevant, I remind the esteemed reader that the year is 1997 and people are raising the alarm about AI going superintelligent and taking over the world a long time before Eliezer Yudkowski or Elon Musk and OpenAI. And if you look further back, you'll find similar predictions of AI being "just around the corner" since 1957. Maybe we need to build guns that can shoot behind corners, to protect ourselves from evil superintelligences, eh?

So hold your horses and don't lose your mind. AI today is just as limited as it was in 1997 and in 1957. We have more data and bigger computers but we still don't understand intelligence and our best bet to reproduce it on a digital computer remains the hope that it will somehow arise, magickally, unexpectedly, on its own, fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus, if only we throw more big data and more big computers at narrow tasks in irrelevant domains- like chess, Atari, Dota 2... or, indeed, protein structure prediction (not quite a hallmark of intelligence that).

The article says "It’s a draft" at the bottom. I don't think this article was meant to be widely shared.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

--Socrates