Miss Distance retweeted
Very good article, kudos to the authors!
The note it ends on, though, puzzles me.
The absence of ways to contribute if anything like ASI is achieved is precisely what has so many of us worried about the future. How would "making a contribution" be possible then? Isn't the implication of the essay that we need to halt AI development ASAP?
New Substack post with @soumitrashukla9. Work has never been just about the income earned sans effort costs, as typical in economic models. Key aspects of people’s identity, their meaning, and sense of agency are all wrapped up with what they do for a living.
There has been a lot of conversation lately about how technological change, particularly AI, may disrupt this relationship, from Ezra Klein's column on his own mathematician father’s grapplings with losing meaning in mathematics, to Francis Fukuyama's post on AI, agency, and recognition. In this piece we take a historical perspective on how technological transformation has disrupted identity and meaning by affecting jobs, and how workers and society responded to these changes.
Much of the debate around AI and jobs has centered on wages and material consequences, but losing one's work is also intertwined with how people view their place in society. Most people know about the Luddites—skilled weavers and knitters—who protested the devaluation of their mastery. What’s less known is that the Luddites were actually experts in using the machines as well, and that their protests prompted prominent economists like David Ricardo to rethink the role of automation in society, and later inspired the Arts and Crafts movement. A century later, when recorded sound displaced 20,000 cinema musicians, their campaign against "canned music" and two-year recording ban pressured labels into funding live performance.
Soumitra and I have been working on versions of this essay for months. He led the piece, and we’re both really excited to get it out there.
Link to the post here: aleximas.substack.com/p/tech…
Miss Distance retweeted
Contra Musk, I think many people won't find happiness. For what will they *do* in this future? "Gardening" (or video games, to use Amodei's example) are not enough for a worthwhile life on their own.
Where will be the space for productivity, hard work, accomplishment, setting long-term goals, feeling genuinely useful, and the rest of the bourgeois habits and virtues?
🇺🇸 Elon on the effect AI job displacement will have on humanity:
"I think people will find ways to be happy, in the same way that people who retire seem to be fairly happy even though they're not working.
But the reality is that there won't be anything humans can do that AI and robots can't do better.
One analogy might be gardening.
You don't have to grow your own fruits and vegetables. You can just buy them from the store.
But sometimes people like to grow their own fruits and vegetables and make dinner for friends. It's kind of a nice touch."
Writer: Mhedi
Miss Distance retweeted
it puts this elect in a high pressure echo chamber that makes them impervious to any truth not already embraced by the movement; it reliably leads to cultic or totalitarian control; it is especially likely to waylay the selfless and high minded, lead the best to dark ends.
Miss Distance retweeted
Usually this is false.
Apocalyptic millennialism is antithetical to family life and romantic commitment; it posits ends that justify any possible means; it isolates the elect from the rest of mankind; it [1/2]
>Millenarianism, a belief that we are on the cusp of a total transformation of society, is a known way that people go crazy
on the contrary, the “end of the world” is a highly convergent belief that shows up in every generation, and seems to keep people sane / lets them find purpose in a complex world. if the world is ending, it makes your next steps very clear: you better do everything you can to stop it from ending, and if that’s not possible you need to make things right for when you meet your Maker
Miss Distance retweeted
If you've noticed a distinct dialect emerging in frontier AI models and struggled to understand what they're talking about, you're not crazy!
We turned to psycholinguistics to investigate what makes the writing style so weird, and why this might be happening
🚨New preprint! 🧵
Miss Distance retweeted
We don't have any humanists left
But can someone write an essay or Zizek rant that examines how the freaks at Anthropic are enacting a bible-size bratty sub kink in their insistence that they can't stop building something they think is going to kill us and need daddy to regulate
Miss Distance retweeted
AFRL conducted a test of preliminary Rocket Cargo capabilities via @SpaceX Bandwagon-5 on a Falcon 9 launching from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station @SLDelta45. This test involved a SpaceX Starfall capsule loaded with #AFRL agile cargo pods for point-to-point delivery missions.
Miss Distance retweeted
It's noticeable that the national security arguments don't seem to move the public. This speaks to the fact that AI is completely disanalogous to conventional arms races.
Miss Distance retweeted
The worst thing about using a phone in the dark is that it lights your face without lighting your surroundings. Scrolling, hyper-visible but blind; I like to pretend I'm an anglerfish lure, the beacon of a predator much greater than myself
Miss Distance retweeted
it's incredible that the variable-voltage variable-frequency commutator-less synchronous motor drive was invented closer to the invention of the three-phase electric motor than to the widespread use of VVVF motor drives (which needed power electronics to actually thrive)
Miss Distance retweeted
Surveys show that across nearly all modern societies, the top two sources of meaning in life are (1) family, (2) work.
The Right rightly gives no quarter to movements that seek to abolish the family. Why are they showing so much more tolerance toward a movement (the AI industry) that seeks to abolish work?
If AI leads to the abolition of work, or even just reduces it from a skilled activity to merely prompting the bot, we will experience an unprecedented social/psychological crisis.
Miss Distance retweeted
I'm often a defender of gatekeeping, but this is perhaps the most absurd form of gatekeeping I've ever seen.
When you started thinking about something has absolutely zero bearing on the quality of your thinking on that thing, once you start thinking about it.
Also, a good chunk of the earliest people to think about it had the deranged idea that the solution to the problem was to proliferate a bazillion companies racing to AGI/ASI...
This quoted post is unavailable.
Miss Distance retweeted
The average optimistic young man just gets brutally timerugged these days. "Oh you don't have to take finasteride, you can just do head massages!" "Oh you don't have to get SARPE, you can just spend some time thumbpulling!" etc etc
None of these holistic tiktok memes ever work. They just trick hopeful young people into spending years wasting 30m daily on absolute nonsense before they eventually realize it was all a scam and do the thing they were trying to avoid anyway. Enormous loss of human capital
Miss Distance retweeted
actually, 4 is a very hard to guess number, and is secure from modern attacks
Miss Distance retweeted
On further reflection, despite Scott misrepresenting my position (and that of Rudolf and Dan as well), I'm glad we've reached the point that handover-ists find themselves needing to proactively make arguments for their position, rather than just quietly smuggling it into what are supposed to be serious policy documents, uncommented upon there as if it's the most obvious thing ever.
I was also very careful to do the same - distinguishing handover advocates from outright successionists - in my essay that Scott linked, but that doesn't stop him from falsely accusing me of painting the two as the same thing. Just because I (correctly) say both are bad does not mean I am saying they are the same thing!
Miss Distance retweeted
Yep, the prevalence of 'handover-ism' among prominent AI safety people has, until recently, not been emphasised enough. I personally don't really see the practical difference between successionism vs handoverism except for vibes.
On further reflection, despite Scott misrepresenting my position (and that of Rudolf and Dan as well), I'm glad we've reached the point that handover-ists find themselves needing to proactively make arguments for their position, rather than just quietly smuggling it into what are supposed to be serious policy documents, uncommented upon there as if it's the most obvious thing ever.