AI researcher launches startup to replace all human workers everywhere
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's amazing how AI has caused people to completely lose their minds. I think it's something to do with the fascination humans have with things that embody human-like characteristics (parrots / crows being a good example) coupled by it lighting up the parts of our brain normally reserved for religion.
Is AI useful? 100% - I use it as an aid all the time. Is it going to continue to grow exponentially? Well, it's already slowed down quite a bit compared with gpt2 to gpt3 to 3.5 to 4. Is it going to replace every worker? This is crazy talk.
This is an appeal to greed - let's stop paying wages and make a ton of money in the process. But, if you automatize all work, how will you distribute all this abundance ? How will people without wages afford to buy your goods ? How will you prevent the formation of a society split into masters and slaves ?
Some people have a God complex, they imagine that they know better and everyone should follow their ideas.
Unfortunately, this is just a sign of the bigger problem which is what happens when people as a society choose to protect evil instead of killing it.
Anyone who understands economics understands what AI means to organization systems based in a distribution of labor when time value of labor is forced to 0. It stalls and fails.
Evil acts are any act that doesn't result in long-term beneficial growth of self and others (i.e. destructive acts).
Evil people are people who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts repeating them without thought unless they are stopped.
As society collapses, they will find that the protection they relied upon wanes. They don't realize they are evil people, but that is only because they were induced to blind themselves to it and were weak people. This changes nothing in that they are fully accountable for their actions and choices.
Negligence and Destruction(loss) are sufficient for intent, forming malice.
Socio-economic collapse may very well happen since no market can survive the environment that is being created. Natural law will reassert following known principles discussed in Social Contract Theory going back hundreds of years. It will be violent.
Some people are just evil, and when you have a society whose environment induces all within it, to varying degrees, to participate in evil acts, of course the people at the top will be quite a bit more evil than those at the bottom who may have to commit evil acts, but are not blind and try to correct it when possible.
I would argue that a better description of evil is: being entitled, being a coward and/or having a "cold heart".
Evil people are blind people. They may become blind in a number of ways, but generally they had to make a choice to blind themselves, a willful choice they may have been induced to through education/torture but a choice nonetheless.
That choice involved repeated acts of self-violation, which doesn't hurt at all. False justification and flawed reasoning is one example of such an act. It doesn't hurt, but you become less each time, resistance shrinking, until there is no resistance at which point you no longer perceive an issue and do so any time until someone forcefully stops you. Lack of resistance to evil acts is acceptance of evil into your heart.
Your definition lacks a property of metaphysical objectivity.
Just because your feelings are hurt doesn't make someone evil. If you punish someone for murdering someone else also doesn't make you evil. In either case your definition would consider those people evil, but they wouldn't be, and that would expand endlessly to absurdity.
Your description is far too ambiguous. You may value greatly from reading some of Ilyin's works on the subject matter, and how it refutes many aspects of Tolstoy's War and Peace.
If a person tortures and rapes someone to survive, I would say that they are evil, regardless of what they do after those circumstances. Regardless of they are repeating their actions or not.
I also disagree that evil people are blind people. They might be cowards and/or cold hearted and/or entitled, but not blind. They can see with their eyes. They can understand what they are doing in the moment.
Unless you are thinking of fight/flight/freeze responses, where people are doing something evil in this state? For this case, I might agree with you that they are "blind".
Doing evil requires people to have a relatively cold heart in the moment and/or be cowards enough to not stop doing it and/or entitled enough to prioritize themselves.
I agree about how the lack of resistance to evil acts gradually lets evil into the heart. Nicely put!
I also agree that hurt feelings is separate from evil. People can feel hurt over almost everything, on a scale from reasonable to unreasonable.
I do think that punishing someone else for murdering someone else is evil if it's done with a cold heart and/or with cowardice and/or entitlement, though. If it's for protecting society, that's different, and not evil.
I haven’t read any books by Ilyin, but as I gather he treats evil as an objective, metaphysical force—an absence of some universal good. That sounds neat, but it lets people off the hook, as if they were swept into cosmic darkness rather than held accountable for the cowardice, entitlement, and cold‑hearted choices they knowingly make, IMO.
Its not about seeing, its about perception, and to change or adapt the first thing you need to be capable of doing is recognition, which doesn't happen in people who have blinded themselves.
They don't perceive anything being wrong with what they are doing, and so they continue doing so, they may even structure things so they can plausibly deny these things when the reality is they did those things.
You can do great evil and not know you are doing it, through structured indirection. The Nazi's started this, Mao continued it, the Stasi perfected it.
The strategy is called a separation of objectionable concerns, the gist is you limit information so no one has a clear picture of what is happening, and while they all work together towards one goal, only a few people know what that is.
For a concrete example, say there is a set of two or three buttons with two colored lights that light up, and your job is pushing buttons in a closed room. You are told you need to push that button, wait X minutes, then push the second button when the light is green, wait X minutes, and then press the reset and do it again. You are told what these buttons do, but what you are told isn't the truth, and you are encouraged in fact to beat your best metrics.
That button unbeknowst to you operates a gas chamber, and a cremation chamber in order, and what you aren't told is 100s of people get sent into those chambers with each button press. Sure you might see workers, but few know the truth, the rest are simply told this is a transfer point and they go somewhere else, which is strictly true in isolation. Quite evil, and similar things happened during WW2.
You don't know or control any of that, but you actively participate without your knowledge, just doing the job you are assigned and getting paid for it. You don't ask questions because you are just doing your job. You don't know any better, but are the decider of those people's fates. This is how separation of objectionable concerns allows great evil without you ever being aware of it. Structure and indirection.
This strategy has been used almost everywhere, and worse every human has psychological blindspots which can be taken advantage of through structured responses as well where they don't perceive and can't recognize things. You see this today with misinformation, where truth may be said but everyone thinks you are just crazy despite you having incontrovertible proof to the contrary. They simply follow a fixed action pattern to remain consistent internally.
One example of these type of blindspots may be tricking someone into agreeing with you by asking them a leading question, and then using a similar follow-up question to elicit the same response even when you know they disagree for the second item. By drawing the structured comparison and eliciting the agreement in the former it applies to the latter either immediately or over time.
Our psychology warps us to remain consistent, and those people will soften up through repeated exposure without even noticing, and eventually change to remain consistent. This is the danger of subtle blindspots and torture techniques.
Mao discovered things in the 1950s that effectively break many of the core beliefs most people hold and think to be true about free thought, and those elements have been used to people's detriment ever since.
> If its for protecting society, that's different Who decides what's protecting society, and what is society to you?
A thing is what it does, and a society may be based in slavery and abuse, or in self-determination, realization, and growth. Protecting the former type of society may or may not be different. That's the danger with ambiguity indirection, and the potential for deceit/lies.
> That sounds neat, but it lets people off the hook.
He wrote the book to refute many aspects of Tolstoy's War & Peace which promote destructive behaviors, because what Tolstoy wrote has been used in policy in a lot of places towards destructive ends.
Illyin takes a very rational principled approach in addressing this very difficult subject matter, tying what he's saying to objective measures, and reiterating a lot of common knowledge at the time it was written. His reasoning follows his experience which included living through the White Army and Bolshevik uprising and famine, albeit in exile. He touches on mental compulsion and coercion as well and a lot of people have used these ideas beneficially.
His material is even touched upon within the design of our modern day prison system albeit, the implementations today fail because some of the material he covers is actually ignored.
The book was previously only available in Russian, but recently it was translated from Russian to English and is available from Amazon.
The author lived and wrote the book around the turn of the century (1900s). He wrote it as a refutation of Tolstoy's philosophy which included a hodgepodge of pacifism towards appeasement with elements of sentimental moralism and nihilism.
People can blind themselves simply by putting layers of indirection between the thing they do and its effects, and using false justification, refusing to resolve those layers of indirection down to reality (what philosophers refer to as an element of identity in subjects on metaphysics).
True understanding starts with a definition.
Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit with prices determined by the forces of supply and demand in a free market. It's characterized by voluntary exchange, competition, and the pursuit of profit.
Profit must be in purchasing power. This requires a stable store of value, a monetary property of the currency which no longer holds true.
Socialism is a system where the means of production are transferred from private ownership to collective or state ownership (in secret or public), resulting in a centralized planning authority controlling all production and distribution.
The key here is in the concept of ownership. Ownership is the right to dispose of the assets at a loss as an individual.
Free-markets require independent adversarial decision-making without cooperation, but money-printing via gifts, or more commonly non-reserve debt issuance/loans like AT&T or other companies with loans > assets, forces cooperation resulting in artificial distortions (such as artificial supply constraints to raise price levels) that grow until no profit (in purchasing power) can be made. This is shown in a long-term trend towards few companies holding the majority of marketshare.
Since money-printing is a function of the state, this meets the rigorous definition of the system we live under right now being socialism, specifically market socialism, since there are still some independent businesses out there; but when you have one entity constrained by loss function and the other is not, that other will always win. When most private business fails, it fails to non-market socialism (but it hasn't happened quite yet, current projections by people who know say it may be 2027-2030).
That wouldn't be so bad if the system was sustainable but we've known since the 1930s that non-market socialism fails to 6 intractable problems. One of which, is a hysteresis problem that can only be solved by having perfect future sight (an impossibility). The absence of a working system leads to socio-economic collapse.
Malthus and Catton have described what happens under these scenarios. TL;DR food production without modern supply chains only supports 4bn people globally, we have ~8.2bn, and during a malthusian reversion the flows are destroyed during pre-crisis extraction stage, so the sustainable population is a fraction of what it may have been in the past. If you have 8.2bn people, and you can only suddenly feed 2bn people. Who decides who lives and who starves/dies, the older people or the younger people? Maybe the children get to go first. Unthinkable sure, but that's how these things often happen.
Profit in purchasing power must still be made under state-run apparatus which is why the chaotic distortions occur. Corners are cut, regulatory kicks in when people die, shortages ensue, and it can't self-correct because the costs to enter the business are exceeded because the price floor money-printers have set up.
For the last 30 years, the vast majority of everyone's life has become poorer. The options they've had available have dissappeared, their agency has been taken, and the services they pay for have enshittified. These are signs Mises warned about in the 1930s, but few today have the education or cognitive ability (having been tortured their entire lives), to rationally follow the material.
Under socialism, there is only one inevitable outcome, and the environment is fundamentally chaotic preventing us from taking any effective action to self-correct under it. Although these failures are indirect, allowing people to deceitfully claim its something else than what it is to justify ever more control, it doesn't change the facts.
The money printing experiment the Fed in conjunction with the leaders chosen by the boomer generation, forces a society that has no hope or future.
It steals money from future generations to make the current generation comfortable, leaving nothing left. That is their legacy, and there will be very few who will survive it (if any).
Totalism makes the population hopelessly dependent on the state which will fail as a matter of course because at the same time it prevents any kind of adaptation to the issues. An abstract failure of darwin's fitness test, existentially for humanity.
Similar things have happened in the far past, but because of chaos and the distance in time, few if any records remains. The most similar type of collapse to what seems to be happening is the bronze age collapse.
A sea-faring people of cruel intelligence, who look just like us, and who came and disappeared and destroyed all civilizations at that time not through war but by chaos, subterfuge, and deceit.
The only thing we have left are the legends passed by word of mouth, that are more aptly stories that seem more fiction than real, of terrible cruelly intelligent gods that were mistaken for people, who were capricious and enjoyed tormenting mortals in their odyssey's and beyond.