Just a single anecdote, but one death made the papers here last year because it was an e-bike that hit and elderly gentleman. The e-bike had been modded and the media was suggesting the cyclist faced jail time as a result. (if I remember correctly)
There are two ways to write an email. One is to keep it short and to the point that so there are obviously no errors, the other is to waffle on and obfuscate the message with an LLM so that the reader's eyes glaze over...or something like that.
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time."
i can ramble without an LLM, and i suppose you can ask an LLM to keep it short. but both are results of not taking the time to craft an appropriate message.
I think its important to remember that humans are not that far removed from the native animals that we share the earth with. Civilization is just a thin layer of rules we use to try and keep the peace between us.
Just being born doesn't entitle somebody to food and shelter, you have to go out and find it. You have to work.
A magpie is not provided food and shelter, it has to hunt, fight for territory, and build its nest.
Humans don't have some inalienable "worth". But if you can work, you might choose to trade it for some food and shelter.
AI is not going change that. We might think the AI owners have a moral obligation to feed people who can't find work, but there is no guarantee this will happen.
Also, for the short term at least, we need to stop talking about AI like its a thing, and talk about the companies that build and own the AI. Why would Google build an AI that can do everyone's job, then turn around and start building farms to feed us for free?
Do we perhaps imagine our Governments are going to start building super automated farms to feed us. How are they going to pay Google for the AI with no tax income?
>A magpie is not provided food and shelter, it has to hunt, fight for territory, and build its nest.
>Humans don't have some inalienable "worth". But if you can work, you might choose to trade it for some food and shelter.
A magpie is a slave to its environment (high entropy). Humans are capable of building systems that alter the environment (low entropy).
If we are apathetical to AI, we choose to ignore the benefits and improvements from technology. And ever since the plow, bows and arrows and sharpened rocks, we have always depended on technology to improve our condition. Which is why naturalists find it amazing when we find other species of life on this planet use tools to give them advantages that nature and evolution didn't supplement them with through genetics.
There is a difference between "survival" and "purpose". We have developed our ape-selves to become more than meat in the circle of life. With purpose, we can be more than the magpie.
AI is not an environment - it's a technology as much as the hammer or plow. If it is built to concentrate wealth or kill more people, that's an architectural choice and not a law of physics.
Human labor is more than product outputs. If we cannot change the social contract that defines worth to shift towards human participation and stewardship, then it's a death sentence for the majority of the world's human population.
While companies are not charities, they do depend on consumers. If you take away the income of consumers, do you have a market? If anything, AI should be treated like the telephone or electricity - a public utility - where it can be used to re-engineer how systems, like agriculture, can be done.
At some point we will reach a point of post-scarcity. Where energy is effectively little cost if not free and is able to create all our needs. What happens when things are no longer scarce?
We (humans) need to work on ourselves to overcome our base natures like greed.
After reading this piece I was wondering if there were any examples of a fascist state that were deposed by peace, or whether armed conflict is now inevitable.
There are few, Spain's King Juan Carlos I being crowned king after Francisco Franco's death, and Chile's Pinochet leaving power after the 1988 referendum for example.
I'm a professional artist. I don't use AI as it's just not there yet.
But I don't consider using AI all that different to using a camera. A photographer still has plenty of work to do with composition and framing, the lighting, the subject mater, even timing. I still consider a photographer an artist.
I think an AI artist will have a lot to consider as well. To distinguish themselves from other AI artists.
Update: When I say the AI tools are not there yet, its precisely because I can't seem to get the AI to take feedback or instructions. I can't adjust the lighting to create the mood I want, I can't tweak the framing.
We have a home pod, we use it a lot for simple things like timers when cooking or playing a particular kind of music. They are simple and dumb, but they have become part of our lives. It's just a hands free way to doing simple things we might do on the phone.
We are looking forward to being able to ask Siri to pipe some speech through to an AI
You're going to need some exceptions. What happens when someone dies and leaves their house to their kids? What if someone's home is temporarily unlivable (say due to a fire or flood which requires extensive renovation) -- do they have to live on the streets?
And that's not even addressing the obvious question of what happens to tenants if there are no landlords.
I think my suggestion would unlock a lot of supply, without expanding our cities or adding to urban sprawl.
Keep in mind, about half of all adults are married, so each couple can own two properties. One to live in, one to rent.
I imagine we could figure out some way to handle inheritance, perhaps we could give somebody 12 months to decide which house the want to keep, and which to sell.
Rental single-family homes should largely be illegal. Short-term housing should be largely limited to apartment buildings and more space-economic structures. Littering the landscape with empty houses only helps bank accounts.
Still, I'm more than cognizant that there must be huge exceptions carved out for any of these ideas.
the owner could rent out their own house and rent someone elses.
it does make sense if you want to save a nice retirement home for yourself or a place where you want to raise your children while you work and live somewhere else.
right, i was just trying to point out that it would not make renting single family homes illegal.
it doesn't have to be a closed loop though. owners could be (and in my example most likely would be) renting an apartment/flat in the city which is not privately owned)
I think the idea is that nobody would prefer to rent if given a choice, and that everybody could afford to own if not for the presence of landlords in the market.
Possibly but that is not the main argument. The main argument is about the lesser of two evils. Do we want to prioritize the open market of SFH ownership, or do we want to prioritize (maximize) the number of people who can own a SFH. Banning multiple SFH ownership would target the latter, with the tradeoff of a restrictive ownership path for wealthy individuals.
Actually, I'd go one step further and say they are harmful to everybody else.
It might just be my circles, but I've seen Carl Sagans quote everywhere in the last couple of months.
"“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”"
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