Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

Game theory definitely does not require rational agents. Game theory says there are agents with certain specified strategies. Whether a strategy is rational from the underlying theory of value the agent adopts is completely separate matter. For example, its very common to study agents who always do one action no matter what others do or what the reward function is. Hard to call such actors rational, but that does not stop as from studying them.

It eventually becomes so big and inefficient that it gets overtaken by new competitors.

Open source vs. Microsoft is a great example.

The amount of political control individuals have in a democracy is much less than people think. I get to vote every few years for a small preselected handful of representatives, none of whom represent me or my views, and that vote is usually meaningless anyways. In my political life none of the parties I have voted for have won an election. So tell me how much control of the government do I have? How much do any of us have? Especially when the government itself often goes against the wishes of their voters anyways. The reason democracy is preferable to a dictatorship is because it prevents the government from doing things which are widely unpopular, like committing acts of genocide and political violence. But that's it really.

Remember, governments have a monopoly in areas of life that impact everybody constantly. Private monopolies do not, in every case you can simply ignore them and not purchase their products, and by doing so you exert more control over them than you do casting a meaningless vote every few years.

The idea of democracy being will of the people is pure fantasy. It's useful to prevent governments from doing really bad things, that's it. It doesn't even matter who you vote for, broadly speaking. Just that you are able to exert that pressure.

Society is better if we sacrifice one horse and buggy driver job for two engineering jobs. The drivers suffer from that, but the net win for society is so plainly obvious that it's a better investment to retrain the driver or just pay the off rather than support a job that dying anyways.

I don't think the point is that the transition isn't difficult. It is that there is an overall benefit that outweighs the challenges of the transition.

The sad part is that industrializing societies have not been very good at reconciling the benefits with the costs. The benefits first go to a select few and have seeped out to the masses slowly. Railroads in the US are a good example. The wealth accumulated by the Vanderbilts, Hills and Harrimans, did not get redistributed in any kind of equitable manner. However, everyday people did eventually gain a lot of benefit form of those railroads through economic expansion. (None of which address the loss of the native Americans, whose losses should also be part of the equation.)

You're missing my point. Job losses are a fact of life, just like death. Why should people get upset about the fact that someone might lose their job, or die? It's not amoral. These things happen constantly to millions of people, we'd we worn out. We happily send young healthy people to their death fighting in wars so we don't have to. I don't see people weeping because the armed forces exist.

Or is this just some sort of PC bullshit, that we can't talk about this sort of progress without carefully lamenting job losses? If you're not useful doing a job, why should you be employed in it? That's the bottom line.

Even with support infrastructure/money it didn’t work.

You aren’t going to transition into the same level of experience in a new industry.

If it’s jumping into tech/code, for example; even with the best resources, it’s a slog to get back to similar levels of renumeration.

Add in the fact that you have obligations, bills and dependents?

Theres never going to be enough money to keep people afloat while they change domains mid-life.

Check out the programs to retrain miners. Aside from fraud, there were also unrealistic promises.

However, leaving aside leakages - there weren’t that many entry level jobs for code in those regions in the first place.

The cultural differences (trades, physical labour vs code, abstract problems, sedentary work) were sizable barriers to success.

Let me be more nuanced. What’s the difference between AI and a computer program? In the context above

This also assumes that universal education is a sensible aim. I think that's doubtful and that it contributes to these sorts of burdens and waters down the quality of education in the process.

As a concrete example, for a few decades now, we're been pushing primary school students toward university education quite aggressively and broadly. It was quite common to scare students toward university by claiming that without a university degree, they would be flipping burgers at McDonalds. This, of course, is completely false and it is disgraceful that such dishonest and manipulative tactics were used. Today, because of rising university costs and the dubious value of most university education, we're seeing this idea challenged at the level of the university. Gen Z's interest in trades has increased by something like 1500%. I don't see this as a negative. In Germany, for instance, there is a more balanced distribution across trades and university.

Now, I admit that the situation is a bit different in the case of primary education, but here, too, I think we do well to think in terms of reform rather than technology and patching up a pedagogically and administratively broken system. The American education system spends an inordinate amount of money on each student with little to show for it. If, for instance, those funds were allocated wisely, then a number of problems would likely go away or become smaller issues.

Of course, what does "allocate wisely" mean? Education systems require a principled grasp of what education is for. If you don't have a sound anthropological grasp of what it means to be human and how education is supposed to enable one's humanity and serve human persons, then you are in no position to run an education system or decide school curricula. I cannot stress this enough. Our education system today is very "pragmatist"; we're constantly told we're being prepared for a career and a job market. That's not education: it's job training. Of course, schools are quite mediocre as training facilities, because they're sort of a halfway house between training and whatever residue of classical education still lingers. So that's one distinction: training vs. education. Now, if we simply accept this distinction, we should ask: how should one organize training on the one hand and education on the other to enable each to be successful within its own circumscribed domain? And what if we keep things as local and decentralized as possible? I guarantee you would not see the inept system we have today.

So, with this...

> There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education

...I agree, but again, my view is that at best we are buying time with these sorts of technological gimmicks. We're also social animals. We cannot keep isolating ourselves behind technology under the pretext of "practicality".

> I'd say most people most of the time outsourced actual thinking to someone else.

Someone else being human, until now. That may change. That's the whole point!

But I concur with your general point on the upstream production of thinking and knowledge. Indeed, such elite thinkers are those in economic history referred to as the "upper-tail human capital". Terence Tao being one of them giving license to the kind of thinking that accepts AI as a simple tool that is not fundamentally breaking our relationship with technology is what exactly I am protesting.

> But it's equally true that those people who weren't doing much thinking due to access or language barriers can actually start doing some thinking now with the help of AI.

If only we keep thinking that thinking is a comparative advantage of our species, I suppose!

>> 1. Let's be clear: what you're describing is faith.

> And what I am countering is not? You can easily argue technology generally improves lives. Is it optimal? Beyond abuse? No. Does it have unintended consequences? Yes. Are we better of without it? No.

The faith part is assuming it will always turn out as well as it has in the past. But every technology is different, and the patterns of the last 100-200 years are not some fixed law.

Look at each technology and its characteristics with fresh eyes, and think of the consequences without that assumption. That's not faith.

> But, for example, nukes have given us the longest period of relative peace in history.

I think celebrating nuclear weapons is a bit premature. A non-zero chance of obliteration over a long enough period of time becomes a near-certainty.