1,711 karma · joined October 2, 2018
Also what if it’s not 2 vs 98, but something more like 10 vs 90, or 30 vs 70? Or 50 vs 50? And this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over a generation, or at least a few decades.
Anyway, the point isn’t this will happen, the point is that really bad outcomes that are almost impossible to walk back from are completely within the realm of possibility. And we have no real way to predict where we’re headed. So people are rightly very afraid.
Your strongest point is “will people stand for a world with no jobs, where only a percentage of the population owns most things?” And the answer is who knows, people stand for a massive amount of inequality right now, and technology for suppressing the masses is getting much better every year. It’s a big unknown imo, and probably contingent on too many things to predict at all.
There are many millions of people in the USA who don’t work but own things. Some don’t work and own a lot of things
The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai.
Idk, this conversation is endlessly frustrating, because people seem to have so much certainty one way or another about the future. Fear comes from not knowing more than anything.
What a load of bullshit victim blaming.
I say this as someone who agrees, cameras don’t work much. But my point is that people had better support some alternative then, instead of blocking every other attempt to improve the situation.
My wife is at the point where she would probably like a flock camera on our street. I’m at the point where I wouldn’t mind a patrol car circling the area, like a damn police state. What else would you suggest people support when they are harassed by crime this much?
(Edit to expand): instead of just complaining I’ll meta-point. People will vote for things like flock cameras when society is unsafe, or they feel unsafe. Right now, in the USA, lots of places are visibly unsafe and people deal with actual threats from bad actors much more often than they deal with police overreach. If you want people to vote against mass surveillance then you need to support policy that makes mass surveillance unnecessary, and you need to do it now instead of “in a future communist utopia there will be no crime” kind of policy (I use this because it’s what I see a lot of in Seattle). Weak on crime is anti-urban, weak on crime is pro police state.
Any tips for how you planned your landscape to work this way? I’m slowly trying to convert mine but have already gotten burned by not matching plants to the right soil or sun exposure level and it’s taking longer to get right than I expected.
I asked Claude to do the math, and it claimed reducing alfalfa use (not all use, just alfalfa) by the Colorado river by 1% per 1 million people who move from a place not already supplied by it.
I think when it comes to water a really important mental model everyone needs to have is that a human without a lawn or pool uses really tiny amounts of water at scale directly.
How are you going to pay for the models or the electricity or the hardware? How are you going to compete against a swarm of ai agents that were spun up 6 months before you with 100x the capital whatever small amount of capital you scraped together doing one of the last few human jobs? Not with your human intelligence, which is now useless compared to machine intelligence. Maybe with luck, but at that point we’re all just at the casino.
The wife of another friend of mine confided in me that AI replacing his work in such a short time has made him depressed to the point she's getting scared he'll hurt himself.
I think we need a support group or something. But I'm too busy burning the candle at both ends trying to "catch the lifeboat" before its too late. So are most other engineers I know.
I'm sorry you're going through this but know not only are you not alone, but you're in the majority of software developers at this point (I think, anecdotally).
People get confused by some of the research because it often publishes emissions by who owns the asset emitting and not who consumes it (eg Starr et al paper breaks down both, and consumption vs ownership is wildly different, and you can tell what bent people have by which number they pick to report on…)
Another way I’d put it: if you’re not ready for gas to be $40/gallon and beef to be $100/lb ground, then you’re not really ready to fight climate change. And no one is, so it’s not going to happen unless we get a technology miracle.
Lots of things are wealth gap problems. Climate change is not, it’s an everyone problem.
The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.
At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.
“Pulling punches now will only ensure that it comes back 10x worse later” and using punches will what, subdue? This is half the political power of America you’re talking about punching. Republicans will what, roll over? You think democrats win handily enough to end it?
It escalates the blood feud. The way out of a blood feud is de-escalation, amnesty, forgiveness, working together. Not demanding more blood, even if you think it is perfectly justified.
So I’m hoping the justice department either doesn’t have enough of a case to convict, or has enough of a case that the whole country falls in line. The in between, it’s time to get out. Because shit will go downhill very fast.
Unless Trump does something egregious enough in the coming years that the case against him is rock solid, black and white, and heavy, any move to jail him and those around him is impossible to distinguish from political targeting. I have not seen evidence of something out of line enough, no matter what Reddit hive mind thinks.
So with the knowledge I have, I’d say any serious push to jail him and his team would be terrifying. If we get crystal evidence of bribery that holds up in court and is clear enough to sway a large swath of Republicans, then that’s great. Still a worse outcome than there not being something black and white to nail him with, but I think that case democracy survives. But not “trumped up” charges.
If Trump goes to prison, that’s when I leave, because that will be the moment historians point to as “no going back”.
This same work that ai agents already do better. Now only the top juniors are really still worth it, the ones with more nebulous ownership, communication, synthesis, drive skills. And even these I think are on their way to being consumed by ai, unless the curve flattens (totally possible too). I think my only point is that the world is moving so fast that so many “optimistic about the field” posts I see basically assume we’ve reached the end of ai agent and system capabilities. If we have then great. But I find it a really unlikely bet.
There is still room for juniors… in fall of 2026. Will there be in fall of 2030? If your thesis rests on LLMs and AI systems not dramatically improving over where they are today, is it worth anything?
Ethical stance is not something you can teach in one course. If you don't have this disposition by the time you're in college, I think you're likely not learning it.
When the hospital charges you $37 for an aspirin, that singular pill might have a crazy profit margin in isolation. But your entire treatment could very well be losing the hospital money.
In my own anecdotal experience, the one hospital I know enough details about to comment on specifically, had something like 85% of patients costing the hospital more money than the hospital made. It was entirely funded by the relatively small number of people who had the “right” insurance and had the “right” procedures done.
Eg Kaufman: https://www.vizient.com/insights/reports/national-hospital-f...
There is absolutely no reason, whatsoever, to think we are nearing the end of genuinely useful growth. We still die early of cancer, spend too much time working, live in too small domiciles, don't enjoy enough hobbies, eat worse food than we'd like, etc. We are nearing catastrophe because of our carbon-producing energy sources, but that's not "growth" generally, that's a specific problem.
I have to remind myself that more likely, people have just no idea what "economic growth" means and develop some strawman definition based on basically no background understanding.