Not quite 1000 on Codex as of last day or two!

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune

> We have, as a civilization, two paths before us

You forgot C: Butlerian Jihad. mass outlaw AI research, AI usage, AI building, AI infrastructure, on penalty of death

It may not be a good option but it's there

When the value of human labour reaches zero the economy will collapse so that will be interesting.

AI is different. It promises to be able to do everything humans can, but better and more cheaply. When AIs can do every human job cheaper than the subsistence cost of employing a human, humans will be economically obsolete and worthless.

Then there's the minor issue of AI deciding to just wipe us out because we're in the way.

Taking everything together, AI more powerful than that which currently exists must not be created. This needs to be enforced with an international treaty, nuking data centers in non-compliant states if need be.

The agricultural and industrial revolutions "weren't labor displacement", they were technological and social changes that happened unevenly and gradually in time and space and which resulted in labor displacement, but they were not the only cause, and they didn't happen BECAUSE of labor displacement. I would argue the subsequent labor displacement caused a minor part of the social gains to be later distributed and realized through class struggle, but that's beside the point. Most wars cause mass labor displacement and military technological advancements that later translate into society as a whole. Are you prepared to argue for wars? If you are American, you are experiencing firsthand the effects of what once was a major part of your industrial labor being absorbed by China. It has led to massive inequality and erosion of standards of living in the US. Not so much for the Chinese working class, which has increasingly improved their standards of living. Are you going to argue for it? I think if we only look at things from a limited perspective, and in this instance a technocratic and teleologic view of history, as in history has a designed finality and this finality will be achieved through unrestrained development of production forces, you are bound to quietly take part in the destruction of society and nature, now viewed as externalities, and accept the worst of atrocities in the name of "advancement", while most of any gains are captured in the short term by a minority.

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> The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist.

Think of the alternative, though: If we planned for a soft landing and implemented safety nets and started transitioning ourselves to a society where people didn't have to work to survive, then a few trillion dollar companies would make slightly less profit every year. We simply cannot allow that. Won't someone think of those trillion dollar companies for a minute?

^^^^

That's a truism. But it ignores The Iron Law of Oligarchy, Pareto Principle, and dozens more that remind us that power tends towards centralization. It's currently fashionable to call out the billionaires, but if you removed them, they'd just be replaced by corrupt government officials, or something else.

That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.

There will always be a shortage of money for medical care. The dirty secret of social medicine is that a small percentage of the population are essentially unhappy utility monsters [1] who gain little or no benefit no matter how many resources are poured into treating them.

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

The opportunity cost to society of performative model training is stunning - 400M for a grok training run to dominate the charts for 2 weeks

> It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care...

It has nothing to do with society; there is infinite demand for medical care. The upper limit is whatever it takes to live until the universe's heat death in good health. That takes a lot of resources.

However much society spends on medical care, there is always more that could be spent. The modern era has the best, most affordable medical care in history and people are showing no signs of being satisfied at all.

While war spending generally just causes pain for no gain it doesn't change the fact that there will never be enough available to satisfy people's demand for medical care. Every single time people get what they want they just come up with a new aspirational minimum standard.

There isn’t really a shortage of money for those things, just rampant levels of fraud, corruption, and incompetence in the government to make those things artificially expensive. California spends so much money on high speed rail and gets 0 feet of track because they’re not paying for track; the whole thing is a scam where the politicians give taxpayer money to their political supporters in exchange for political support. Defense isn’t immune to this either; Boeing, which builds a shitty heavy lift rocket out of Space Shuttle spare parts and delivers it late and over budget, pulls the exact same bullshit with their defense contracts, and there’s always some shitty Senator siding with them against the American people whenever anyone gets upset.

The current British government should be a shining beacon for you! Its welfare bill actually outstrips national income by far. Britain's pathetic defense capabilities cannot even see off Russian warships that intimidate by deliberately hanging around British waters assessing our vital undersea cabling. The UK government has now asked France if it can help deter these ships. Tangentially - I should add that even with their massive expenditure on the National Health System (NHS) it's not enough and too many people feel that they have to go abroad to get life-saving operations and procedures. If they can afford it of course. But sure, that is another matter. As far as I can tell, there seems to be pretty much an apolitical consensus on both areas.

War accelerated evolution, it’s why it exists.