jnicholasp

It's a millennia old question, and still the best answer for how to produce collective agreements, on questions we do not collectively unanimously agree on, is simply to count the votes and do what most people want to do.

Yes, the majority has often wanted to do things we now think were reprehensible, and this is certainly an ongoing situation. But Churchill is still right: democracy is a terrible form of government, it's just that it's not quite as terrible as every other form we've tried.

And you haven't answered my question - what should we replace democracy with, and precisely how would that process work - and without answering that question it's tedious to make pronouncements about how much better some undefined alternative would be. G.K. Chesterton: "Revolutionaries are always right about what is wrong, and they are usually wrong about what is right." It's easy to see the flaws in something that exists in front of us. It's very hard to design something that would in actual fact be better.

> > Basic, more modern human principles shouldn't be left to democratic vote

What process should be used to decide which are these modern human principles that are too important to be left to majority rule, and who gets to participate in that process?

You're implying that Musk's "follow through" is a result of his money and connections, when the reverse is true.

Yes, of course, now that he has money, connections, and a powerful reputation, that makes it easier for him to do things. But he created the money, connections, and power by being able to do things even when he had none of them.

> You have to take OP's word on that.

Is there a good reason not to?

My first argument was that, in a hypothetical future world which had solved aging, it would be likely they would have also solved cancer, dementia, etc.

My second argument was that our current moment in time is not likely to be near the end of the possible tech tree, that large advances in technical knowledge and ability are very likely still in front of us, and that therefore it doesn't make sense to argue that if by now we haven't already solved [x,y] then we probably never will.

Your argument seems to be that we don't fully understand the unintended consequences of our inventions, and that there's a distinct possibility that some of those unintended consequences may cause us to go extinct before we get smart enough to stop making those kinds of errors.

I agree with that argument. I don't see any conflict between your point and my point - just between your point and some claim I didn't make about techno-utopia being just around the corner.

Some kind of "techno-utopia" does seem like a possible future, but not necessarily a probable one. I don't know if we'll make it there. We're not reasonable enough, maybe. And one of the ways in which we're unreasonable is that we tend to read into our opponents' arguments things they didn't say and impute to them beliefs we don't have evidence that they hold. That isn't helpful, and on the large scale it's distinctly harmful - it's a major part of the political polarization and divisiveness that is dragging down our collective ability to cooperate and come to reasonable compromises.

False dichotomy. Either/Or does not exhaust the set of plausible options.

> it's 2017, and despite all our impressive progress, we still [haven't solved x]

People tend to think that [current year] is super late and advanced in the history of the world, and seem to infer from that impression that things that haven't been solved yet are unlikely to be solved. The germ theory of disease is about 150 years old; practical uses for electricity are just over 100; powered flight is just over 100; not using horses as primary transportation is the same; etc. Now is early in the possible history of discovery. There remain hundreds of thousands of important things we don't understand, or even know about, yet.

Besides which, we are talking about a hypothetical future in which we have solved aging; to suppose that future would exist without comparably revolutionary advances in intimately connected biological problems like cancer and dementia is odd.

Because a state of medical science which has solved aging will certainly not have solved cancer, Alzheimers, or heart disease.

Excellent, thanks so much.

Do you still have any of your curriculum or class notes? My nephews are in elementary school, and I'm looking for programs that their school/after school organizations could easily adopt.

Do you mind sharing what college this was at? My email is on my profile if you prefer.

My nephews are in elementary school, and we're right next to the local university. I'd love to see if we could get a program like that going here.

> More likely, instead of 10 janitors, you'll have one janitor and a dozen robot cleaning machines.

For how long, though? Is there any reason to think that will be anything besides a transitional stage before the robots entirely phase out the human?

I suppose it depends on what you think of as "near future", but I - and I have no special insight, for the record, just speaking as an outside observer - would put around 75% probability of a robot that can wholly replace a janitor existing in 15 years, and 95% in 20.

In terms of time needed to politically and socially prepare for that situation, 20 years feels really near term to me. I don't really expect our existing political structures and processes are capable of dealing with the challenge adequately in time. It's one of my top three fears for the <30 year future. And unfortunately the other two (global displacements from climate change, and bio-/nuclear-terrorism by desperate or angry people/groups) are synergistic with it. If it weren't for my normalcy bias, I'd be kind of terrified.

> Or they'll do better jobs. [...] The 69% didn't become an unemployed underclass.

No, they moved into factory, mining, retail, and other jobs that were commensurate with their abilities. The automation shift is not the same, because it will take over all the unskilled/low-skilled jobs, and there will be nowhere in the economy for the displaced people to move into.

It is not really conceivable that all these people are capable of taking on jobs which require complex thinking, judgment, creativity, or other higher skills. IQ is a real thing, and although it does not reflect on someone's human value, it does very definitely place limits on what functions a significant portion of the population can perform. And in the long run, we will all be in that displaced portion. Best that we find ways to create human security and meaning, now, for a coming world in which we have no necessary economic role to play.

Because the Pacific coast of Russia is thousands of land miles, and even more thousands of sea miles, from the places Russia wants to be able to influence. Having naval bases there doesn't really help them project naval force in Europe and the Middle East.

> i

> thæm

I suspect the so-called Allied powers are trying to instigate a war, but we will not be provoked.

> i read gp as using quizzical as a verb

That reading of gp's intent, while plausible, still involves an in-apt usage of the word. At best, you might say "This makes me quizzical", but that would still be an awkward way to express your doubts about the validity of the argument.

You may be partly right.

But self-driving cars will enable a sort of ad-hoc, on demand carpooling style 'mass' transit: something like ten-passenger vans that deliver commuters from similar downtown areas to similar home neighborhoods. If only ten percent of commuters switched to that method, taking ten cars off the road and replacing it with one van, the volume of traffic drops immediately to 91% of what it was. That alone, plus significantly smarter, denser, more efficient, networked AI driving, will hugely reduce gridlock.

And at some point as more jobs get automated, and the jobs that remain human-accessible become more knowledge-based and less presence- and specific time-based, we'll move away from the huge spikes in traffic at 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., spreading traffic volumes more evenly out across the day.

It might be that different approaches to reading are more useful at different points in your life. When you're young, inexperienced, ignorant, inevitably mentally provincial, you might well gain most by reading widely and quickly in order to acquire perspective and a passing familiarity with a lot of things. Once you've built a reasonably rounded, if shallow, model of the world, and started to learn which parts of it you are most passionate about, you'll probably gain most by going deeply into those.

Breadth first search, then depth on the best matches, in other words.

Thanks for linking that. I'd read it before, but it was useful to read it again ;-)

> This is quizzical

I think you might mean "This is questionable". Quizzical is an adjective applied to people's expressions or behavior, implying that they are puzzled, confused, or questioning. It is not an appropriate word for suggesting that an argument is dubious.

[Assume a standard grammar Nazi mea culpa here, if language corrections are annoying to you.]

There will be lots of positive uses for AI, both on Mars and on Earth, but Musk's main stated motivation for both Open AI and Neuralink is that he's deeply worried about AI being an existential risk to humanity, and he's trying to take steps to mitigate that risk.

By the time a significant tunnel boring project gets planned, approved and built, cars will be self driving and the Uber model of rides on demand will be extremely prevalent. Traffic will be massively reduced and existing roads will be much more efficiently used.

I agree with the theory that Musk is aiming these boring machines at Mars. That makes more sense than using them to attack the traffic problem when that problem is already being solved by one of his other companies.

Alongside the comments about Aboriginal legends, a copy of my comment from elsewhere in the thread:

The Klamath Native American tribe has legends of the eruption of Mt. Mazama that formed Oregon's Crater Lake - which happened in ~5677 BC [1]. If oral legends that reflect real events can last seven and a half thousand years, is there any reason to think they couldn't last 15ky, or 20ky? It seems to me all that's needed is a continuous cultural line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llao

The Klamath Native American tribe has legends of the eruption of Mt. Mazama that formed Oregon's Crater Lake - which happened in ~5677 BC [1]. If oral legends that reflect real events can last seven and a half thousand years, is there any reason to think they couldn't last 15ky, or 20ky? It seems to me all that's needed is a continuous cultural line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llao

I can't help you with the job situation problem, but on the subject of anxiety attacks, you might find this post by a psychiatrist helpful: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/05/the-case-of-the-suffoca...

Thank you, too.

I'm not convinced that propping up the price of labor directly follows from your point 1), which I do of course agree with. It seems better to me that the government do what it can to encourage the creation of jobs that are valuable enough to support living wages, rather than mandate that jobs which are not valuable enough to do so cannot legally exist. The former, I think, encourages creativity and the development of new possibilities, while the latter restricts freedom and limits the diversity of the economic ecology.

> those jobs can't support a family

Should they be able to? Absent some kind of deliberate regulatory or collective-bargaining action to prop up the price of labor in a given category, I assume the prevailing wages tend to reflect an implicit agreement between employers and potential employees on what that labor is worth. What is the argument for propping up the price of labor beyond what people are willing to do it for?

Or, put another way, what is the argument for why jobs should be seen as existing for the sake of giving workers enough money to live on, rather than as existing because some people want certain things done and are willing to pay a certain amount to have them done? In the second case, the value of having certain things done is not infinitely variable: some actions will create x value in the world, and can only be worth doing if they cost <x to do. Requiring that those actions be paid >=x will simply mean that those things will cease to exist. Is it a better world if we regulate out of existence those jobs whose performance is worth less than a family-supporting wage?

Why is it hard to unionize retail?

My (naive) guess would be that retail is a less-skilled job, so attempts by labor-groups to make themselves a controlled source of labor supply are easily circumvented by the readiness with which those jobs can be filled by nearly anyone. Whereas manufacturing jobs that involve some degree of skill are more able to corner the market on their own labor, and thus better able to negotiate from a position of power.

I'm not making an argument here, since I don't know the answer to my question, but is it possible that a higher proportion of coal and manufacturing jobs were traditionally living wage, support-a-family type jobs, as compared to retail jobs? And if so, wouldn't it be reasonable to focus attention on the losses in the two categories somewhat differently?

> segueway

Just so you know, "segue" is pronounced "seg-way" by itself. No need to throw an additional "way" on the end.