> Violence is not a panacea, but often, the outlet.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
History demonstrates categorically that violence is the last and most reliable form of recourse available to the disempowered, once society has trended too far towards either an excess of freedom or an excess of equality. And, in fact, our position in that balance between freedom and equality is perpetually oscillating, tending to finally reverse direction only in response to violent revolt.
This cycle has repeated over and over, essentially since the dawn of civilization. This was among the most important insights of 'The Lessons of History' by Will and Ariel Durant. And it's baked on two very simple insights about human nature: (1) those in power rarely give it up willingly (they often do the opposite) and (2) fear, on average, is and always will be a far stronger motivator than appeals to a person's conscience.
(1) We already automated the critical path of a great deal of processes, where that made economic sense. The long tail exists, but it's not replete with as much juicy low-hanging fruit that makes for splashy use cases. Rather, AI will likely produce a tremendous number of marginal improvements over time, which are likely to aggregate and eventually show up in improved top line performance. This could certainly accelerate if agentic AI becomes a true 1:1 replacement for certain types of labor.
(2) Outside of automation, AI is faster search. The information was there and now we can find it more quickly. This helps a great deal, but it's not fundamentally transforming access to information, which was already free and effectively limitless. But there's still value here. I think one key advantage of AI on the search side (for now, prior to meaningful degradations that might ensue) is that it can help push back against exploitative information asymmetry in insurance, consumer goods, health, etc.
> So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
I think there's a chance this is itself a type of selection bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous. And fame has consequences.
Many music artists end up trapped by their own fame (and attendant expectations) and fail to update themselves over time, thus falling out of the limelight. But there are plenty who defy this trend. Tiesto, David Guetta, Kaskade, and Armin van Buuren in EDM, for example. Coldplay is another great example. Love them or hate them, they're still putting out chart toppers.
Something similar is true for scientists in my opinion. I think Richard Hamming had the most incisive analysis of this in 'You and Your Research' [1], which is worth reading in its entirety.
> But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.
> When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
My view is that fatalistically assuming that age is an obstacle to creative output obscures the hidden variables that are genuinely determinative.
I think there's a chance this is itself a type of selection bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous
Not in this case, no, at least as far as the music goes.
My user-name here is taken from a Northern Soul record as its the music that means the most to me. The genre is obscure almost by definition.
I would guesstimate the proportion of the hundreds (thousands?) of records so classified and celebrated made by people under 30 to be over 95% and that correlates with my (admittedly subjective) experience of the best music of other pop genres.
I'm a lifelong US citizen and burst out laughing at this. What values? What coherence?
Do you mean the NSA man-in-the-middleing all that traffic and leaving a backdoor for Mossad? Imagine the most despicable possible invasion of privacy and the most reprehensible shadow oppression and manipulation of an uneducated populace you can conjure up.
Now imagine something way worse than that. This is America.
Note that in 36 odd states in the USA companies and their officers (i.e real people) cannot boycott Israel (or even say nasty things) and then do business with the state.
But if you say the American government is occupied by zionists loyal to a foreign government, that's "hate speech" and would land you in prison if not for the enduring strength of the first ammendment (which several Europeans ITT think is bad, because they think "hate speech" is bad and they lack the mental fortitude to admit that sometimes right wing meanies might actually have a valid point.)
Yet another illusion. A lot of Americans are very good at finding ways to persecute people for having an opinion, often using economic consequences as a cudgel to enforce groupthink. And, at this very moment, the government is compiling lists of people it regards as enemies, purely on the basis of their "free" speech.
No need to wait: they've already fried themselves out of the evolution game with STDs. Any child they have will likely be retarded or diseased in some way.
Don't forget to include alcohol as a drug - "fetal alcohol spectrum disorders", FASDs, are a real thing.
The likely outcome is that 99.99% of humanity lives a basic subsistence lifestyle ("UBI") and the elite and privileged few metaphorically (and somewhat literally) ascend to the heavens. Around half the planet already lives on <= $7/day. Prepare to join them.
I don't understand. In this hypothesis, in the elite's view, what is the purpose of the rest of society? If everyone has little to no productive output, why would they support us with a UBI? They could just hire whatever human skeleton crew they'd need to sustain their activities (if needed). The rest of humanity could be either mercifully left alone with absolutely nothing, or annihilated.
Humans are here to create the Training data to bootstrap the system
Luckily we’re already most of the way there!
Over half of the population has been instrumented already to collect all their behavior data worldwide
That’s been the goal: persistent collection of training data should come out of your day-to-day life in order to bootstrap the action systems that are machine based
The challenge now is that most of that data is based on actions we don’t want machines to do
I'm definitely making certain assumptions, such as: (1) democratic rule endures, (2) even absent true democratic rule, the populace can still resort to violent rebellion as a failsafe, (3) psychopathic tendencies amongst said elite are constrained enough such that mass genocide remains sufficiently psychologically unpalatable, (4) economic calamity substantially precedes the deployment of fully autonomous policing, etc.
How this all unfolds is absolutely path dependent.
I agree. Although, looking at these assumptions, subjectively I think that all four of them are in question, and as time passes, their eventual long-term failure seems increasingly likely. Even if one of these four pillars persists, I would expect an overall worsening by default. If democratic rule persists in places, the most powerful would occupy places where it does not exist, or create fully private states, still wielding enormous power over democratic states through wealth and military might. If violent rebellion is technically possible, a middle ground will be carefully calculated where the lower classes are kept on life support with the minimum amount of resources required to dissuade unrest. If the trillionaires of tomorrow suddenly start caring about other people, they could employ second-order measures to effectively reduce the population, thereby safeguarding themselves - massively constraining or removing the supply of food, water, medicine, any vital technology that would be only available to them. I don't see how an economic crisis would prevent automated enforcement, it may only delay it a bit.
Hope is kind of in short supply nowadays. Even if your hypothesis of absolute-automation doesn't happen within our lifetimes, things seem to be guaranteed to get worse for people like us. If it does happen... we'll likely never reap any real rewards from it, barring a complete restructuring of our whole society to an extent that has never happened and likely would never be allowed to happen.
The cynical pessimist in me agrees with you that the odds are somewhat bleak. The slightly irrational optimist in me says "rage against the dying of the light".
Also, there has never been a better time to learn about philosophies that get at the essence of being human and that elucidate precisely how and why our baser characteristics (acquisitiveness, status-seeking, ego, etc) hold us back from being happy. The world we're heading towards will convert desire into suffering more readily than ever before, even as our basic needs are easily met. Philosophy is the cure. And I strongly believe happiness will remain accessible to those who embrace it.
Agreed. The quality of life bar will be higher for sure. But it will still technically be a "subsistence" lifestyle, with no prospect of improvement. Perhaps that will suffice for most people? We're going to find out.
Her criticism is purely about the man, not Feynman as a physicist, a thinker, or a teacher. Feynman was probably on the spectrum and he had a lot of problematic behaviors. That doesn't meaningfully alter the core of his legacy.
It's also not terribly insightful to point out that a great figure from history was deeply flawed. If anything, that's so common as to be nearly guaranteed.
I don't think you actually watched the video? Nearly all of the criticism is about the myth creation around him with a short bit at the end mostly praising him as a person
It's almost like a lot of our technologies were pretty mature already and an AI trained on 'what has been' has little to offer with respect to 'what could be'.
