346 karma · joined February 23, 2024
The desperation of AI denialists/skeptics/doomers on HN generally (and in this thread specifically) have reached toxic levels of delusion.
They are still stuck in the denial/anger/bargaining stages of the acceptance process.
People are clearly terrified and not ready for what is coming.
It’s important to question our basic assumptions in the face of entirely new circumstances and new areas of exploration, such as the potential for emergent artificial consciousness.
You might have been called unhinged for caring about animal rights during the era of Descartes when public displays of animal vivisections were considered perfectly fine because animals have no “soul”, but today we would find such displays brutal and horrifying.
We don’t know what we don’t know, so it is important that someone is asking the hard or uncomfortable questions at the edge of our understanding to grope past our own biases even if it seems to be pointless to you right now.
We might just discover something wonderful, that our assumptions were wrong, paving the way to greater enlightenment.
How do we align humans?
This paper makes a distinction between direct operational strain and harm created by governments' responses (like adding fees, procedural barriers, and other types of friction in the system). The second part is where my concern is, when bureaucracy is meant to suppress questionable claims it can also delay or deter legitimate benefits.
The paper says it doesn't/can't make definitive claims about AI's impact, but says the strain is moderate. The conclusion does not seem to suggest any severe operational risk to these agencies/systems. Only 9 of 84 potential cases involved benefits or social protection, and it says most cases are good-faith users.
So, I do question what in the paper would show that the burden is large enough to jeopardize benefits? The main finding seems to be that friction in the system may itself effectively deny legitimate access.
Response to your edit: the $186 billion is GAO's government-wide estimate across 64 different programs and not a fraud figure or addressing individual benefits. It contains administrative and document errors, indeterminate payments, and underpayments. And expecting integrity in a system doesn't prevent criticism in the form of asking whether added enforcement bureaucracies cause more harm to legitimate beneficiaries than it prevents in that system.
So I dug a little deeper: roughly 94% of Medicare/Medicaid dollars and 89% of SNAP dollars passed audit reviews in 2025, but I can't find any national percentages for beneficiary fraud rates overall (which is sort of what we are talking about).
Provider fraud does appear to be the main driver of healthcare losses if we look at the enforcement evidence, but that does not mean every improper payment is abuse. It does seem the programs are audited quite extensively (unlike what some other comments in this thread are claiming).
Don’t audits usually find that vast majority of benefits are valid and correctly applied?
We stay the same? We accept some amount of harm, disease, and want as necessary to the human condition?
Respectfully, in my opinion, you have not explained anything. You've just made a series of statements without qualifiers, which is not convincing. Are you a pure utilitarian or do you believe in principles that go beyond that? Do you believe governments have restraints on their powers towards persons under their care regardless of citizenship status?
The point of government is universally debatable and changes based on new knowledge or new principles/needs; governments are continually evolving and there are many different types of governments. If a government has jurisdiction over persons and those persons misbehave, that government is still responsible for those persons and does not get to discard them without violating human rights as they are understood today (and most constitutions and courts subscribe to the position I am describing).
You keep iterating your belief in how governments should work but you have not defended that belief in a convincing way (with either historical examples or justifying the seeming abuses other than saying "they can do this"). I believe governments should and/or do support universal human rights and defend human rights (as enlightenment thinkers believed).
What you're describing, if I understand correctly, is in violation of those universal principles of human dignity (some persons are lesser than others under the law, which is not true no matter how you try to justify it).
The whole reason we have international courts is countries can violate the rights of persons under their jurisdiction. Your claim that governments can do whatever they want to non-citizens, flies in the face of that idea. Are you against international courts that try to protect persons from the governments that have jurisdiction over them against abuses?
Just because there are differences in public attitudes between groups or nations does not mean you can look at one applicant and assume they personally believe whatever the average person in that culture believes.
Most immigrants are not a random sample of the country they come from, they may be educated, secular, religious minorities, political dissidents, LGBT themselves, liberal, etc.
If you're worried about a particular belief or ideology then make that the standard for the applying individual and do background checks, interviews, security screening, civic knowledge, etc, rather than a blanket country of origin ban.
It is inherently discriminatory to take group-level generalizations and turn them into blanket exclusions of individuals.
As for the "destination country becomes like the origin country", that is far too simplistic and reductive of a take. Selection effects, institutions, education, intermarriage, generational change, laws/culture of the host country, all matter in shaping behaviors of immigrants in society. Immigrants affect a society but the society also affects immigrants.
What I'm saying is that persons legally present in a country should not be penalized as a group based on nationality, religion or any other broad cultural polling/averages rather than individual conduct and due process of the law.
Citizenship can allow for some distinctions but it does not make non-citizens mere guests whose rights can be revoked at will. A state can regulate immigration but it still has the moral/ethical and legal duties to avoid arbitrary and discriminatory treatment of all persons under its jurisdiction, especially toward people it has already admitted lawfully.
There should never be 'second class' persons under the law and rights should not be "subject to changing political winds" as you seem to be suggesting, because that would mean there are no such thing as universal human rights which would put all persons (citizen or otherwise) in danger of losing their rights at the whims of the state or the majority.