throwaway0123_5

> that suburbanites choose to live in suburban areas because they want the isolation.

I don't think most of them want isolation, I strongly suspect that most people moving to suburbs are doing so for their career, as most well-paid jobs are in metropolitan areas. In a metropolitan area your options are mostly: 1) city 2) suburb w/ very little mixed-use zoning

Cities tend to be more expensive for less space. There are going to be many people who would want to live in a city with their family but simply can't afford the rent, so they live on the outskirts of the city (suburbs). Alternatively they may want the space, yard, etc. that a house provides, but this doesn't mean they want isolation. They may very well prefer suburbs with good mixed-use zoning and public transit, those are just very rare in the US.

> It seems that if you took suburbs away from these people

I'm not proposing taking suburbs away from people, nor are the vast majority of urbanists. We're proposing more ability to build denser suburbs (i.e. some multifamily housing in suburban areas), mixed-use zoning (so you can walk to stores), and better public transit in suburbs. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing. Suburbs that have these features tend to be in high-demand, they're just rare today because they're illegal to build in many places (I think there's some commentary on that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0).

> they'd most likely try to move into more rural areas

Unlikely IMO because again I suspect that many/most have moved to suburbs for their careers. There aren't nearly as many jobs in rural areas.

> 15-minute city

Anyone claiming this is bad is just being disingenuous IMO. ~Nobody promoting 15 minute cities wants to force people to live in cities, they want cities where you can meet most of your needs by walking or cycling or taking public transit. If you don't want to live in a city or want to live in a city and spend 10s of thousands of dollars on a car you still can. I don't think we can extrapolate much about what the average American wants based on those who believe that conspiracy theory, because the people who believe it are either woefully uninformed about what it actually is or are just being malicious reactionaries.

I don't think there is some special physical property absent in suburbs and present in rural areas that contributes to social isolation in the former but not the later. Rather I think it has to do with the kind of person that lives in each place. My grandparents and cousins live in a rural area. They all have ancestry in that town going back to the early 1900s. So do most of their neighbors. Families live next to (where "next to" admittedly might be a few miles depending on how rural) each other for generations. This is obviously conducive to strong intra and inter-family social networks.

People who live in cities and in suburbs on the other hand seem to be far more transient. They move around for school or careers and aren't tied down to one place. I grew up in suburbs in three different cities. New neighbors frequently moved in and out of all three places, and the street where I lived from aged 5-10 has only two "original" families left.

For those people, the built environment in suburbs being conducive to social isolation (in American suburbs anyways) becomes a problem. The nearest grocery store, restaurant, or interesting venue of any kind is likely 30+ minutes away if you try to walk, and the walk is likely to be dangerous due to poor pedestrian infrastructure and poor public transit. There are few accessible third places in which to meet people, it takes a lot more intentional effort. This is even more of a problem if you're a kid, as you're now entirely dependent on your parents and their car to meet friends or go to places where you can meet friends.

I moved from upper-middle class suburbs to Washington D.C. The difference in how many people you meet who you might want to be friends with, and in how easy it is to get places where you want to go (especially without a car) is night and day. Will suburbs ever be as good as cities in this regard? Probably not. But mixed-use zoning and returning to "streetcar suburbs" would probably go a long way (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/27/in-praise-of-s...).

There's also other reasons to oppose current suburb development patterns. Suburban sprawl is highly inefficient in many ways. It takes dramatically more infrastructure to serve the same number of people that you could in a denser area. Roads, power lines, pipes for drinking water and sewage, etc. The taxes that many suburbs pay don't cover these expenses and suburbs end up being subsidized by people living in denser areas. Rural areas also suffer from this to some extent, but rural areas are a necessity for society to run, hosting farms and other resource extraction activities, so subsidizing some costs is fair. People in rural areas are also more likely to be self-sufficient, having their own septic tank, private well, etc., and aren't offloading their costs to society.

This is incredibly cool but it seems like the potential damage from a "hallucination" in this mode is considerable, especially when they provide examples of it going very far off-track (looking up Yellowstone pictures). Would basically need constant monitoring for me not to be paranoid it did something stupid.

Also seems like a privacy issue with them sending screenshots of your device back to their servers.

"Might makes right" is not only a pretty heartless ideology but one that I don't think works well most of the time. It seems like the prior application of that policy caused much of our immigration today.

> if they are making our lives worse

They (legal and illegal immigrants, for this discussion specifically from Latin America but I suspect more broadly) certainly are making my life better and I'm not convinced that they're making the life of the average American worse.

I've seen a lot of convincing arguments for why immigration helps us, and they seem to mesh with my understanding of immigration to the US being historically a good thing. I can't say the same for arguments from the other side. Often the claims are totally baseless, such as claims that illegal immigrants are as a whole dangerous, despite having a lower incarceration rate than US-born citizens. Other times they're just myopic (most of the claims related to jobs imo). Sometimes they're just blatant racism (white-replacement theories).

> I'm assuming that powering them down isn't a viable option

Sadly that might be assuming too much... here and on reddit I've seen a handful of people who have said that we should continue with AI progress even if it causes the extinction of humans, because we'll have ~"contributed to spreading intelligence throughout the universe and it doesn't really matter if it is human or not."

With that as the extreme end of the spectrum, I suspect the group of people who simply aren't considering what happens to obsoleted humans is much larger, and corporations certainly haven't demonstrated much interest in caring for those who technology has obsoleted in the past.

Tbh it is really disheartening to see so many technologists who seemingly only care about technology for its own sake.

> Is it all that repressed guilt from invading Indian lands or something?

I don't think you have to look that far back to find fairly convincing arguments that the US is the architect of much of its own immigration "problems." Most illegal immigrants come to the US from Latin American countries that the US spent a lot of time interfering with in very recent history.

Consider Guatemala. Democratically elected president overthrown with CIA support in 1954 so that US fruit companies could keep up their profits by exploiting people. The 1950s weren't that long ago.

Consider El Salvador. During their recent (ended: 1992) civil war the US funded the right-wing government that according to the UN committed 85% of atrocities during the war. The US government then refused to grant asylum and legal protections to refugees, which contributed heavily to MS13 forming in LA. The US then deported many of these gang members back to El Salvador, which did a huge amount of damage to their development after the war.

Wrt Mexico's gangs, most of the demand for their products come from US customers.

Wrt Venezuela, whether the sanctions are right or wrong there's no doubt that they're hurting people there economically.

Given what the US has done to these countries (and others) in living memory, I don't think we have much of a moral right to turn these people away. I've also never had a single negative experience (and many positive ones) with immigrants from these countries (I live in an area with many of them), nor am I convinced that they're even an economic drag on the country.

> A writer after he finishes writing a book, he goes to a government office, and stamps electronically the hash signature of the book as "Human Approved". Then anyone can search the Book stamp in an internet database. Everything else is labeled as A.I.

Not sure what the point of this would be, the government worker will almost certainly have no ability to verify that the books people bring in weren't written with AI.

> That cannot be true. A massive poll of at least 10.000 people could demolish that myth.

The third link in the pew article I provided has some methodological details:

"Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand attitudes about artificial intelligence and its uses. For this analysis, we surveyed 11,201 U.S. adults from July 31 to Aug. 6, 2023."

> organized by the age of participants

I agree this would interesting. I found a smaller survey (n=1500) that suggests while young people are less anti-AI than older people, they are still heavily anti-AI [1]. Only 20% of Gen-Z states they're "excited about AI," while 29% say they're skeptical and 18% say they don't trust it. This meshes with my experience; even among colleagues that use and/or research AI they're nervous about the impact it'll have on society.

> Ages 18-30 will be 80% in favor of A.I.

I'm curious why you would assume this. In scenarios where AI causes major job loss, young people have by far the most to lose, as they haven't had nearly as much time to build up resources and acquire property.

[1]: https://www.barna.com/research/generations-ai/

> Many social/legal constructs are for lack of a better term, idiotic. Step back for a second and think about what ownership actually implies? Exclusive control over a scarce resource.

It implies whatever society decides that it implies, no? For example, many societies had or have conceptions of land ownership that are dramatically different from the western model, oftentimes to the extent of not having individual land ownership at all.

> Social/legal constructs like owning ideas or the sound of a voice exist not because they make any sort of logical sense

They don't make logical sense to you. Consider that for a very long time in the US the idea of owning people made logical sense to the majority.

> they exist to give privilege and power to certain groups at the expense of others.

Do not almost all forms of ownership do this? Some people own hundreds of thousands to millions of acres of land that I have no right to access. Massive swathes of the surface of the planet that we all share. Is the ability to own land not a far greater privilege than the ability to protect your voice from being cloned without your consent?

Ownership as a whole is a social/legal construct, no? [1] You only "own" something insofar as you control it. Societies build frameworks that aid people in controlling things based on who they think deserves control of those things. This clearly can vary widely between societies; the USA used to think owning people was perfectly OK and some places still do. Nobody has absolute control over (almost?) anything, and I think if a society provides many legal protections to something like a voice (who can profit off of it, who goes to jail if they try to copy it), it can be "owned" to as meaningful an extent as anything else.

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

> the book could be written by a human.

I don't understand why so many people in these discussions are so keen to ignore the impact of scale and accessibility when it comes to new technology, and specifically this new technology. Yes, most dangerous things that can be done with AI can also be done by humans.

Is it not meaningful that these dangerous things can now be done far more cost effectively? It would've made no financial sense in the past to spend hours/days creating a fake mushroom identification book. You'd almost certainly never get enough sales to make it worth it, especially once people realized your book was nonsense and potentially dangerous (getting you delisted, as it seems like the seller did with this book). Now you can just ask an AI to "generate 100 book ideas, scripts, and images." Who cares if almost all of them make very little money when the time and $ cost to creating them is near zero (it looks like this book was physical but especially for digital books, videos, etc.).

Is it not meaningful that dangerous things can now be done (or may soon be able to be done) by more people with less skill? The time/money investment required to learn skills with the potential for destructive use is IMO a strong filter against the people who would do those destructive things in the first place.

OpenAI and I think Google have talked about making intelligence "too cheap to meter." I'm not sure that is a good thing. I could be convinced, but every poorly thought out dismissal of AI dangers only makes me increasingly sure that we aren't ready for it.

For those who are less concerned about AI dangers, consider maybe that premature reckless deployment of AI also has serious potential for generating social backlash that might end up slowing or halting the adoption of AI for positive purposes. The average non-tech person I know thinks of AI as a useful improvement over Google, and maybe thinks AI generated images are cool, but they aren't in love with it. It could disappear tomorrow and they'd shrug. In fact, public sentiment against AI (in the US) seems to be rapidly increasing, and is bipartisan [1]. If the promise of AGI is achieved this will go into overdrive should (when?) mass-unemployment happens. Look how far right-wing politicians are able to go by drumming up fears about immigrants stealing jobs.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/21/what-the-...