How far we’ve come. Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!
All you need to look at is the carbon footprint of people who clamor and demonstrate for green policies. Including idiots gluing themselves to roadways —all the idle traffic they create and the manpower necessary to remove them and repair the damage. It’s a sucker’s game.
ESG is a huge thing. Some of it is greenwashing, some is outright scam, some is legitimate pressure to make better environmental decisions.
But insisting that ESG proponents can’t make suboptimal individual choices is silly.
Sure, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Branson, Albert Gore, Barrack Obama and high schoolers are impressed, but not the mom and dad working jobs that are teetering, driving beaters and facing pressure from cheap labor. They see these people jet-setting being hyper-overconsumers and think, what the hell? They see these people increasing their wealth promoting change, but they don't change. Why should I change, they're not changing, they're adding more!
Or just hope. AGI is a capitalist's wet dream: it would completely undercut labor's power or allow it to be replaced completely, and it could also allow the developer to muscle out a large fraction of other capitalists from the economy.
Even though AGI would be terrible for the rest of us, it's got so much upside for VC types they can't help themselves.
AGI in an internet connected world is capitalism end-game. Once you have AGI, labour (both physical and intellectual) becomes redundant, humans have a "value to the system" approaching zero.
Our economic system is built on a series of assumptions that fundamentally cannot survive AGI, and nobody is really even trying to grapple with that fact.
What do you do when "demand" for human labour drops to zero and "supply" stays at >8 billion.
No account of tinkering at the edges is going to fix that. We're in a much deeper fundamental problem than you might seem to think we are.
I literally explained it. I straightforwardly applied the technology to our existing social/economic structure.
And changing the social/economic structure is probably harder than developing the technology and requires precisely the kind of power that a successful AGI technology would remove (e.g. workers can't strike to keep their jobs when the boss is planning to lay them all off).
> It's not a fact, pseudo scifi action movies don't count as facts.
Honestly, the "AGI will be so great/everything will be fine" assumption relies less on facts and more on sci-fi fantasy than anything I said.
Yes, both sides of the debate use scifi as facts, I agree. I don't think the other side does it more than you do, though.
If you think that, the problem's on your end of the connection. The most charitable read of your comment is you're expecting a level of exposition that is not actually required, especially given the common context of what exists now.
Personally, I think you're actually doing more of what you're accusing me, for instance your sibling comment of:
> The economic system is not set in stone. If everyone is irrelevant to it, the economic system becomes irrelevant to everyone, and a parallel system gradually replaces it.
You're basically hand-waving a future and saying "everything will be fine." And you're also misunderstanding some significant things in a kind of black and white way. E.g. I never said "everyone [would be] irrelevant [to the economic system]," I said labor would be. That's a lot of people, but not everyone.