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Comment by drivingmenuts | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it should be. The system here in the US has produced some great innovations at the cost of great misery among the non-wealthy. At a time when technology promises an easier life, it only seems to benefit the wealthy, while trying to discard everyone else. The light at the end of the tunnel is a 1%-er about to laughingly crush you beneath their wheels.

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I don't think this is the strongest argument. Every technological revolution so far has initially benefited the wealthy and taken a generation or two for its effects to lift the masses out of previous levels of poverty, but ultimately each one has.

To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.

I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.

I don't know about for all perpetuity. If history has shown, anyone that reaches the pinnacle eventually becomes complacent, technology improves by becoming faster/cheaper/smaller. That just means it is prime to always be susceptible to a new something coming along that stands on the shoulders of what came before without having to pay for it. They start where the current leader fought to achieve.

The idea behind self improving AGI is that it will "get" every "new something coming along" before everyone else.

Self-improving AI is a rhetorical sleight of hand to make you think that.

Just because it can self improve doesn't mean it improves better than everything else or without substantial costs to develop improvement.

I personally believe magical unicorns are going to save us

We have had the capacity to have zero poverty for many decades, maybe over a century. China eliminated extreme poverty.

So has America. But the definition of poverty is not absolute positioned, to borrow a CSS analogy. Poverty gets defined relative to wealth. Overall, this is a good thing. But knowing that your poverty is rich compared to the poverty of two generations ago doesn't satisfy humans who gauge their relative social position and are unhappy with it.

I routinely see homeless people what are you going on about

Have you ever seen one who was starving? Do they lack access to clean drinking water? Are there malnourished children, without access to schools, begging in America?

Have you ever been to a country where there was extreme poverty?

When people talk about China eliminating extreme poverty, that has a specific international definition. From Wikipedia:

Extreme poverty is the most severe type of poverty, defined by the United Nations (UN) as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services". Historically, other definitions have been proposed within the United Nations.

Extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day in 2018 ($2.66 in 2024 dollars), set by the World Bank.[0]

The average homeless person in America spends several times that amount on drugs, and all of the above services are available to them. Homelessness in America is a societal failure, but it does not meet the definition of extreme poverty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

I don’t know about that. The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America. While American capitalism has many faults, oppressing the bottom quintile is not one of them. The US median income is consistently top ten globally.

This is completely wrong. Even “the poor” in most parts of the world has a pretty good life weight where they are.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w&pp=ygUMSGFucyByb3N...

>The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America

Immigration to the USA, both illegal and legal, has cratered.

Median income doesn't tell much if you don't factor in the cost of living. My salary sucks compared to what I would earn in America, but when I factor in things like free healthcare, daycare and higher level education, I'm better off here.

What countries offer free daycare? I know there are a few in Europe. It's not super common, so I'm curious to know where

I believe Sweden is one: https://www.sdg16.plus/policies/universal-childcare-model-sw...

That doesn't look free. Subsidized, yes. Lots of countries subsidize childcare. Including every US state

Sure, but extremely cheap collared with the us.

Here's a UNICEF report comparing childcare policy amongst rich countries: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/where-do-rich-count...

Sweden ranks third in the comparison metric (what good is free childcare if it is very bad or inaccessible?), and the us ranks 40th out of 41.

The US does a good job of selling the idea of living here and getting rich, though it does a better job of selling it to people who aren't already embedded in daily life in the US. While we have, perhaps, much lower numbers of extreme poverty compared to a lot of countries, as one of the richest countries, and growing richer by the day, we should have zero extreme poverty. The people with the will to fix our poverty lack the money and very few with money have no real desire to help the less fortunate.

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