Silicon Valley is turning into its own worst fear (2017)
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
Adapted into the movie Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve:
You cannot equate paper clip maximizer with SV companies. Because fitness functions are different.
Not saying that diamonds industry didn’t make world worse off but still somehow it didn’t take over the world to make people eat diamonds for breakfast. So the same there will be no entity that can make all people everywhere eat strawberries for breakfast all year long.
Scary part is finance industry that basically already is self conscious with all the rules baked in and no single person being able to grasp it.
Finance with AGI could already become paper clip optimizer - but it actually needs energy only. It doesn’t need humans anymore. So it would most likely fill in whole world with power plants and erase all other life just to have the electricity.
Excellent quote. We say we're in a rational world where we make rational decisions in our societal game we've all been told we have to play - capitalism where money is the determinant of success vs failure for corporations, families, individuals.
But step back and when looking at the question of whether it's rational to us as humans be playing this game and it is not rational at all. Why are we not deciding that food and places to live for everyone is the determinant of success of a country, society? Or happiness?
60 Minutes has a segment about Bhutan from a couple weeks ago [0] about this. They lived by something they named "Gross National Happiness". Which feels weird to type but again stepping back, it's because our whole lives we're told that "Gross Domestic Product", overall money, is the determinant of "best" and that's so engrained for us.
On a different note, Ted Chaing's short story books [1][2] are incredibly, incredibly good. I'm reading them again and read "Story of Your Life" earlier today. Being able to write fiction like that makes it much more trusting to listen to what someone has to say on other topics. And saying that seems like another topic - how we're told to downplay fiction compared to non-fiction, when our brains evolved for stories. But that's for another comment.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g_t1lzn-1A
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Other...
I think a lot of countries do, just not the USA. Money is truly king in the USA. But in Europe, developed parts of Asia, people are definitely not as rich, but decent quality basics are much much more accessible and considered a basic right.
I think in America food and it's price are the priority personally. Every meal that I actually enjoy and isn't fast food is painfully expensive. The only exception is Mexican food IMO.
What is screwing Americans - healthcare and urge to buy things people don't need.
I have read about people in the USA forgoing basic procedures like endoscopes because they cannot afford it. Can you believe that?
I was recently in Spain, what's different is "good" food is cheaper and it's part of the culture, crap food is less acceptable. I had one of the best sandwiches and coffees of my life and at airport, an airport...at 6am. It was also cheaper than what I'd get at most US airports.
Your sandwich was cheaper in absolute terms but more pricey in relative terms, if you count it as a fraction of your daily rate.
That is what people do decide. That is why everyone slowly converged on capitalist economies with some level of social safety net - it is the system that best resists mass starvation and provides material comfort for as many people as possible. There is no alternative that is better at feeding (or housing, for that matter) people; otherwise that'd be the economic system of choice.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bhutan-emigration-crisis-60-min...
I grew up in the US and literally never heard this. It’s a way to measure economic behavior but nobody actually cares about that number. For the people who are money focused, they look at things like PPI and individual incomes. I’m not making a value judgement on how much focus should be put on that, but the point is that GDP is irrelevant to citizens.
For a concrete example, Biden/Harris got backlash about the economy sucking despite GDP being great because of the massive erosion in purchasing power during 2022/2023. Them pointing to GDP to show how strong the economy was even made it worse.
Go ahead !
He clearly practices extreme craftsmanship and is a very deep thinker.
I wonder if he's seen the latest videos of staged demos where humanoid robots can fold clothes
edit: didn't say 2017 when I commented.
It's much easier than it should be to fool people with demos.
It's one thing for a little robot vacuum to do. Whole other when it's a very large, very heavy humanoid robot.
https://yoshinopower.com/collections/portable-power-stations
https://mobile-aloha.github.io/
(note: in some videos the robot is teleoperated)
Or more precisely, it is that we allow a group of people, under the control of a single person or very small number of people, amass incredible power, and do so in an amoral framework in blind service to a goal of stock price growth.
The problem is a scale problem in my mind. If you limit the scale then all the other problems become manageable.
We wouldn’t need antitrust laws anymore if our tax laws made it unprofitable to own shares in a company with, for example, 50% of search market share or online retailing share.
I can't agree with this, even though I think the corporate form has done more harm than good. While the idea of limited liability in exchange for a public good has some possible merit - building transport infrastructure was one of the original reasons they were created - giving away limited liability for nothing was a mistake. The shareholder value myth and corporate personhood have done even more damage. Nonetheless, not all capitalist ills are corporate ones. Many of the companies with the most capital doing the most damage are "shadow banks" - hedge funds, PE firms, etc. - which are run as partnerships, not corporations. They don't even issue stock, let alone care about its price. Also, nobody qualified to be opining about this could be unaware of the damage hyper-rich individuals are doing and will continue to do regardless of whether corporations are involved. Infinite accumulation of capital (and political power to go with it) is a problem, the corporate form is a problem, there's some overlap and they're both anti-free-market, but neither should be dismissed to focus on the other.
But, I think, it's the act of trying to optimize on a metric itself that is the source of the destruction. Unmeasurable human values can't survive an optimization process focused on measurable ones.
It's the whole 'we increased shareholder value by 1% even if we won't exist next year' scheme. The notion of any sort of sustainability or long term planning has long vanished.
Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Not specific to capitalism. The same thing occurs with any government/economic structure that is optimizing for a metric. Think of a communist government using “happiness” to drive decisions that just silently kills or drugs everyone who isn’t happy.
Prepare, nerds, to be put through the same process as seamstresses, weavers, blacksmiths, lumberjacks, etc.
So much of what people identify as post-modern or late-stage or whatever is just the continuation of the same intrinsic process that has been happening since the end of the 18th century.
All that is solid melts into air.
And here I was going to suggest that billionaires, unbridled mega-corporations were the fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.
> Musk gave an example of an artificial intelligence that’s given the task of picking strawberries.
Also odd since it's more likely that a corporation, in the name of maximizing profits, would make decisions that threaten humanity. We can start with Bhopal, India. If you find fault with that example I am sure there are plenty of others, some probably a good deal more subtle, that others can suggest.
Me, not worried at all about AI.
> Me, not worried at all about AI.
Now imagine AI in the hands of a corporation building murderbots and propaganda bots.
Depending on the measure [0], it's possible that the richest billionaires and least-bridled corporations are both well in the past. Human civilization survived, and will continue to survive.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_richest_Americans_in_h...
Humans with morals are still very much in the decision chain and there is obviously a lot of debate about their morals, but them being there makes such a vast difference that the comparison to the strawberry AI is completely invalid. The strawberry AI isn’t even considering humans.
The article then builds on that false comparison for the rest of the article so there isn’t much to gain from the rest of it.
You can make the same lazy comparison to a completely socialist, centralized decision making by a government optimizing for a single metric (voter approvals, poverty levels, whatever). It has nothing to do with capitalism or the economic system.
TLDR; article says mega corps are the same as dangerous AI because they make optimizations in favor of profit that some people disagree with.