”Because if humanity has shown anything, it's that a lot of people are, euphemistically, bad individuals”

In reality most individuals are good people.

Individually, people prefer be kind and compassionate, prefer to help when they find another in trouble.

Our view of the world has become distorted by the relentless focus of social- and mass-media on violence and rage inducing clickbait. Including on the few people in power who are in fact sociopaths (a tiny minority, but they’ll get more focus than reasonable, well-behaved CEOs voicing nuanced opinions).

If you look around yourself you’ll see much more good than bad; if the looking is at your screen it’s easy to become depressed and lose faith.

I do agree with the above mentioned view that corporations can show ‘sociopathic’ behavior. Their incentives are monetary gains, shareholder value; inherently driving them away from social well being.

Here too, companies with a positive, emphatic corporate culture exist, but that takes strong leadership who can see beyond the monotonic view of monetary gains. And again, the media will throw examples of misbehaving companies in our face all day long before paying attention to things that went well on the backside of page 16.

▲

Fordec 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All the good in the world can be 99.9% of the population even, it still doesn't stop the minority enacting a bioweapon mass casualty event. It's the reason we have jails. Jails don't house 50% of the population, not even close, but the grief the minority population enact gets its whole branch of criminal justice and multiple federal departments to counteract for good reason. And now this technology will accelerate what lone wolves can do, which cannot be undone, before they are stopped by the good majority.

▲

catoc 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, AI may suck - time will tell.

But focusing on bioweapons and mass destruction, on the grief other people (‘jailed minorities’) cause, disregards the progress we have made. Over centuries human welfare has massively increased. On average things have never been better for humanity.

I’m not saying there’s no danger of bad things happening - I’m saying our view is distorted, which is a not a good basis for decision making

▲

Fordec 7 hours ago | parent [-]

And I'm no bear on the tech either. I'm not even in the boat of that the tech should be slowed down yet. But in a world where anyone can produce the effort of 300 people trivially, this eventually takes us places. Electricity and industrialization introduced huge benefits upfront, it introduced new problems that needed addressing at the long tail. Lets not pretend there won't be new problems to tackle here or just "hope" it works out.

AI isn't going to create in of itself "new" problems, it's just going to expose what we already know can cause harm, but was just stopped from being bigger problems because scaling issues was a natural barrier and we took the lazy way out until now.

	▲	catoc 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes AI may cause job loss, more inequality in the short term. But if there is anything humanity has shown is that we can deal with disruptive progress. We may need to resettle but over the longer term every disruptive innovation so far has lead to an increase in wellbeing for the whole of humanity. (That does not resolve the danger of AI itself ‘going rogue’ or a single lunatic developing a bioweapon, but those things are much less likely to occur than the level of media attention would suggest.)

▲

graemep 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It also empowers the people trying to stop them.

▲

strangegecko 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Individually, people prefer be kind and compassionate, prefer to help when they find another in trouble.

What are you basing that claim on?

How do you know it's an actual preference and not mainly caused by external factors (e.g. not wanting to be seen doing unkind things, wanting to be seen as upstanding)?

	▲	dminik 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't want to do the "check his hard drives" thing, but is that you? Do you only not do things because you don't want to be seen doing "unkind things"?

▲

331c8c71 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> In reality most individuals are good people.

I'd agree if we are talking about personal interactions. Few hundreds people that we personally know and interact with is the scale we are wired for by evolution, isn't it?

What civilization enabled and continuously rely on, however, is the type of deindividualization of actions and bucketing of people, which, in turn, enables pretty horrible things at scale (from the weapons of mass destruction to objectively psychopathic profit-maximizing corporations). One can even say that not facing the consequences of one's actions is a feature and not a bug of the system.

▲

catoc 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Interesting that saying a positive thing about humanity results in getting downvotes