One easy-ish solution is to realize that the pseudo-anonymous mass of people doing things on the internet really doesn't matter, and crucially, spend less time on the internet. Already taking 2 days/week away from the net makes my life much better.
I'd rather just have a world where people move a little slower, care less about efficiency, appreciate the smaller things in life, and stop forcing endless upgrades of every kind on everyone with new phones, new apps, soulless art, and new ways of doing things. But that's just me.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day. The reasons behind this are communication and training overheads. If AI leads to a world where people don't really have to know anything to do their jobs - just provide high-level judgements that LLMs seem farther away from than they are from accuracy, or if they could somehow keep the human beings out of meetings, the forces keeping labor concentrated could abate.
On the other hand, if AI accuracy limitations drive the labor demand even further towards expertise, and if making tasks higher-level raises the communication requirements rather than somehow reducing them, the preference for having a few people work 80-hour weeks while twice as many people remain unemployed will become even stronger.
I'm surprised that someone has pointed this out because it is 100% on point.
The moment your economy is productive enough that it is not necessary to hire every single person, employers start firing people rather than cut the working hours evenly across the population, because each employee represents a fixed cost. Hence you either work full time or you don't work at all.
This is peak utilization of efficiency in the USA. This is what corporations think is acceptable optimization/efficacy looks like if we give them the choice. And then the non-wage slave caste people will complain that this single mother didn't raise her children well enough and call her lazy/a bad parent:
> Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the gains all go to the people at the top.
Taking that at face value, what happened before 40 years ago? There was unimaginable growth in per-person GDP, so people could have plausibly kicked back and relaxed rather than toiling in factories.
If you're asking "what caused the change?" the answer is "Ronald Reagan".
If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible".
Just to expand on that a bit, in case it isn't fully clear:
There is a level of productivity per worker required to support everyone in the society. This level fluctuates some with the overall standard of living, but does not vary with total productivity, population, or GDP. Let's call this level P, for Parity. (And let's assume it's not "just barely enough to support everyone", but "enough to support them comfortably and reliably, with a decent buffer".)
Once the level of productivity per worker passes certain thresholds—multiples of P—the total amount of work required to maintain the society at the same level drops. More work produces surplus. That surplus can be then used in a variety of ways. One of those ways is by reducing the amount of work being done. So, for instance, if the productivity level reaches 2P, then every worker can work half the amount of time they were working before, and still be producing enough to fully provide for everyone. If it reaches 3P, then every worker can work 1/3 the amount of time, and so on.
If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows.
I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. I'd say that at this point, just as a rough estimate, we're probably somewhere between 1.5P and 2P, but that's not really my field of expertise. But because the wealthy have captured approximately all productivity gains above the level we were at in 1980, they have seen their wealth massively increase, while the rest of us have just been scraping by.
>If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible".
>[...] I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. [...]
GDP per capita has been growing exponentially for centuries[1]. Is there some arbitrary GDP per capita level where people should be expected to kick back and relax? Why makes your arbitrary line more or less correct than someone else's arbitrary line? Moreover people's revealed preferences show that for most people, that line hasn't been reached yet. Why should people's revealed preferences be overridden by whatever number you came up with?
>If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows.
Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured. Even if you're some sort of marxist that thinks labor's share of GDP should be 100%, at the very most this means the point at which everyone can kick back and relax is delayed by 40%.
This isn't about GDP in a currency sense. It's about Creating Enough Stuff that people can thrive.
Like I said: there is a threshold of Stuff Created Per Person above which providing a comfortable life for every person is purely a distribution problem. For most of human history, we have not been above that threshold.
"Subsistence farming", for instance, is effectively defined by only being able to meet the much lower threshold of "enough that people can survive".
A post-scarcity society is, broadly speaking, defined by being able to produce enough for everyone to thrive with minimal work from anyone.
We are somewhere between the two, but we are reaching the point where we're closer to the latter than the former. Technological advancements have, for some time, ensured that we have enough food for everyone on earth (again, there's still a distribution problem; that part is nearly 100% about politics, not about scarcity). If the very wealthy had not captured all the productivity increases since 1980, I don't know what else we could have achieved, but it wouldn't have been small.
> Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured.
Look at any graph of income growth by quintile that goes back to the middle of the 20th century or earlier, and you'll see it starts with some roughly parallel lines, and then one line that keeps going up at about the same slope, while the rest stay nearly flat.
The 4 day work week movement continues to move forward, and becomes more likely to succeed as workers gain more power as the prime working age population continues to shrink over decades due to structural demographics (total fertility rates below replacement in most of the world).
Well for one, no computers collating every persons value to the economy to buy and sell as and manipulate through targeted effort
Credit system didn’t exist, which conveniently grandfathered in all the Bloomberg, Trump, and other old money …obviously inheritance made them geniuses who deserved it
Basically Boomers came of age 40 years ago and needed something to do. So the 80-90 year olds of the day handed them all the power.
I mean come on. Do we really need to circumlocute the cause? Why the old rich people writing the rules and always winning is suspicious af still?
All of that might be true, but it doesn't address my core question: why didn't people kick back and relax 50 or even 100 years ago? If people 50, 100, or 200 years ago made the choice to keep working hours constant rather than convert productivity gains into leisure, why is the choice to keep working hours constant today suddenly caused by malign influence of the powers that be?
>The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades.
If you're claiming that people worked fewer hours during the industrial revolution than today, I'll need a citation for that. If you're referencing the claims made by "Original affluent society", that has problems around how working hours are counted.
The criticisms have the same lack of information problems.
So modern anecdotes make the most sense. I grew up in 80s dairyland. None of the farmers worked a 9-5 but they rarely worked 40+ too.
We worked much much less in rural-landia before the last few decades gave rise to "service and knowledge" work with no concrete goal but "make line go up".
Knowledge work comes along with zero concrete termination points. Programmers grinding code 80+ hours are not stopping to see if it's useful or just repetition.
Sure from a physics perspective they're doing "work". From a lived experience, to real needs of biology, economy perspective they're just sitting at a computer juicing their hormones, while exploiting farmers labor, who now works more hours as more knowledge workers contribute less real outputs essential to biology. Same with why carpentry and other trades services are so expensive; supply and demand. Millennials wanted 24/7 office jobs.
While I grew up in farmland I later went into EE, and have a good sense for who is moving the ball. It isn't software people. Their biology is addicted to a stupid loop of zero real productivity. Playing abstract snake games in one's head, to count initialized memory registers and recording their data is some basic bitch work marketed to the point of fostering delusion it's cutting in 2010-2020 to use 1960s style syntaxes to manage machines.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the capacity for the economy to create "bullshit work" (e.g. work which is engaged in zero sum "wealth defense") is unbounded.
For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even let the bottom 50% retire early, society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital. This would probably only happen with violence.
This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market while the efficiency gains which could be realized at the bottom of the pyramid get "burned off" via inflation targeting of 2%. A quirky side effect of this is that the vast efficiency improvements we have seen have not even been allowed to prevent a pensions crisis.
The Economist, serving in its capacity as a dutiful servant to neoliberal capital, frets equally about AI inevitably causing us to "run out of jobs" as it does a demographic crisis inevitably causing us to "run out of workers" (https://archive.ph/6hgYq).
>This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market
That's a seductive narrative, but not backed up by data. The share of GDP that goes to labor is has held relatively stable in the past few decades. It has admittedly fallen, but it's on the order of a few percentage points, whereas the GDP per capita more than tripled.
How do you square these “growing wages” against the zeitgeist which says more and more people are living hand-to-mouth? At what point do these statistics get tossed out because they have little to no bearing on the lived experience of the great mass of people? At what point does one acknowledge that these statistics seem like they’re compiled simply to muddy the waters to make reality seem different than it is?
Famously, one can spin statistics any way they wish. Prove to us this isn’t the case here.
> How do you square these “growing wages” against the zeitgeist which says more and more people are living hand-to-mouth?
Both can be true if the distribution has changed, which seems to be the case:
"Over the last four decades, the income gap between more- and less-educated workers has grown significantly; the study finds that automation accounts for more than half of that increase."
Additionally, necessities like food and fuel seem to have jumped in price, outpacing wage growth over the past few years, while other important goods and services (housing, health care, higher education) have outpaced inflation for decades.
If they weighted nondiscretionary housing, education and healthcare in the inflation basket properly and de-emphasized discretionary electronics and clothes I doubt it would even be flat.
> For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even more wealth (for the bottom 50%), society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital.
And even then, even a small percentage of bad actors who are selfish would likely restructure it back due to technology enabling them to do so! The fact is, the elite at the top is a steady state that is hard to leave if you worship efficiency. Only the Amish and some native tribes have realized that the only way out is not to play.
This seems circular… capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy, and will likely betray any trust or faith placed in them if put under enough pressure.
So society has to depend on something fully independent of any specific person or group and that cannot be changed without leaving behind a long papertrail.
In other words nobody dreams of becoming a banker/accountant/auditor/etc. at 5 year old. Probably even double entry bookkeeping would be superfluous if everyone were virtuous paragons.
> This seems circular… capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy, and will likely betray any trust or faith placed in them if put under enough pressure.
True, but it's also mainly because we have a society that is based on technological innovation with rapid transportation/communication. I was only responding to the other reply that seemed to imply that there was an alternative restructuring that puts less capital at the top.
>capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy
Not really. It became that way because wealth begets power.
The narrative it tells us is that we should be terrified to change this because nobody else except the owners of capital can be trusted as stewards of our economy and political system (particularly not "government").
What's really ironic, based on my understanding, is that the world that you have expressed a desire for, is much likelier in a world where economic growth accelerates based on AI. Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
I sincerely doubt it, because that technology also invades life. It invades the world with more information, not less. More business...when has technology ever slowed things down? AI just seems to make certain tasks more efficient, but I haven't seen anything slow down.
Before technology, even if things were slow, people didn’t have time to do anything with the slowness anyway. I think you’re thinking of some past utopia that never existed. Or maybe you’re thinking of the 90s, idk.
> Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
Which is the scary part of the AI revolution. Devaluing labor always leads to increased inequality in the short-to-mid term until a new equilibrium is met. But what if we have machines that can do most jobs for 10-20k a year? Suddenly we have a hard ceiling for everyone below a certain "skill level", where skill includes things like owning capital, going to the right college, and having the right parents.
In the past, when inequality became too extreme, (the threat of) violent uprisings usually led to reform, but with autonomous weapon systems, drones and droids, manpower becomes less of a concern. The result might be a permanent underclass.
Really? The AI revolution is happening in the West, and mostly in the US. Just imagine it happened in a muslim country, or Russia, or China, or even India. Half of them would immediately use it to start a war. If you think labor is devalued here, it can be SO much worse.
Also I don't understand the entire argument. The thread is about stopping economic growth. You say you don't receive enough of the current economic growth ... so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it? At 0 growth the only way to give you anything would be to take it away from someone else. In other words: you want an extra meal at 0% growth? That can only happen if someone else doesn't get one ...
> so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it?
Personally, I don't want growth to reduce, exactly. I'd prefer it if there were tighter restrictions on the direction of growth, and we spent more time finding creative ways to return to smaller communities where the efforts are spent less on pure money and more on people helping each other. And more time restoring nature. So growth, but not purely in an economic sense.
It only seems like a degrowth thing when you look at from a purely fiscal angle.
There is nothing stopping you from moving to a smaller community, and in the west there's tons of them around. And if you're willing to take the (very low) wages that go with that, you can live there for the rest of your life easily.
Hell, I know people who've done this. Several actually. Well, only one that's still alive (they retired there, wanted to grow old and die there ... and did), but still.
But ... why bother anyone about it? You want others to do this but would never accept doing so yourself?
> But ... why bother anyone about it? You want others to do this but would never accept doing so yourself?
Well, first I already have, so I don't know where you got "never accept doing so yourself", which is something you made up. Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature, which in my opinion is on the same level as actively targeting people. So I do want that to stop.
If nature was not being destroyed and it was just people messing up their own little world, then that would be different.
> Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature
Is it? If you put it this dramatically, it's bullshit. Nature will survive us, rather than the other way around, guaranteed. MAYBE we can kill large animals if we tried, but probably not even that (they'd just shrink and then grow large again, wouldn't be the first, or second, or even the tenth time that happened).
Life on earth is being sustained by the sun and by nuclear reactions inside the earth. Nothing we do makes the tiniest of difference in the long run.
Increased temperature and increased CO2 and climate change essentially make more chemical and solar energy available in the environment. Life is chemical in nature and is limited by available energy. That means there would be more life, more green, if more energy was available. Life would have to be pretty damn badly designed if this damaged it, rather than what we actually see happening: life is spreading to much more of the planet than even 100 years ago.
So, first, you can rest assured: it is just people messing up their own little world.
Second: it would be seriously unnatural if we stopped. After all competing and using up all available resources is literally the sole goal of all life on earth. And if you compare humans to an average ocean-bound bacterial species, we're not even particularly good at it.
Okay, so we are not destroying all of nature, only enough nature that it will get seriously uncomfortable for us. Great! Your second argument is even stranger. It would be unnatural to stop polluting the environment? Where are you going with this?
Well, I had a high-paying job, six figures. But that six-figures came with less freedom, higher-paced work, life bureacracy, and I wasn't happy. I had no time or mental space to just sit and think. Probably the least happy I was in my entire life. So I quit. Now, I do live a slower-paced life, and earn very little. But I'm the happiest I've ever been.
Out of interest, how much capital did you accrue during that time? Mortgage free and a good pension seems to be the bar for voluntarily adopting a slower pace of life.
Not a lot, lol. I don't even own property, and my pension will be a very small pittance. The goal is to hopefully make enough through independent projects to make it work. And if North American becomes too expensive, then Plan B is to move to a cheaper part of the world, much cheaper. Less infrastructure there, but what're ya going to do? Can't have everything in life, and you've only got one :)
there are many many 6 figure jobs that don’t require working more than > 40 hours a week. Bureaucracy is hard to avoid though, unless you’re at a startup, but then you’re working all the time lol.
For me personally, lack of money early in my career caused me _far_ greater daily stress than bureaucracy at work. Not needing to budget daily purchases? now that’s low stress.
Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
This also leads to higher medical costs, lower productivity, and less satisfaction in life.
So maybe efficiency should be a priority. What do you think?
>Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
>We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
Throwing away food can be efficient. In fact, absent evidence to the contrary, we should expect that throwing away food (or buying/producing more) is the more efficient option out there, given that people aren't putting effort into conserving food. Remember, conservation isn't free. For instance it might be possible to reduce the amount of fruits that are bruised and thrown away, but that requires more packaging and more careful handling, which isn't free. At the household level, proper meal planning and inventory management can probably eliminate all food waste, but nobody wants to spend the mental effort into managing an ERP for their kitchen.
>We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
You got cause and effect mixed up. People live in suburbs and drive around everywhere because they like the suburban lifestyle (eg. cheaper/bigger houses, "safer" and "quieter" neighborhoods), not because they're not too fat to live in 15 minute cities. Remember, suburbanization happened well before the obesity epidemic.
> We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy in terms of carrying that weight.
But it's efficient in terms of working as a slave for the technological system, though. It means less time spent on life, more time spent on thinking about technology.
> We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
In other advanced societies (say New York City), people catch public transport to go to work. Catching public transport usually involves a certain amount on walking, since the bus/metro stop is not usually outside your front door.
Yes I think people become unfit from growing up in a car culture and then become dependent on cars for transportation because they can't conceive of a world where they don't require one for transportation because they're so unfit.
That's not how capitalism measures efficiency. It all comes down to profits. Everything else is bureaucracy and marketing. There just aren't any incentives to drive these macroecononic efficiency goals you mention.
Not exactly. Capitalism is just the optimal solution for technology when the primary driver of growth is people. But AI is likely to change that and then capitalism will be modified and done away with but the destruction will remain.
Not exactly easy, because first you have to make enough money to do so. And to do that, you'll likely be stuck in a grind of competing to be the most efficient. Adn even if you can do that in a short period of time, a sufficient number of people doing that will just fuel the system as usual.
Well you can’t drive money, fly money, surgery money, publish money, build a house out of money that doesn’t melt in the rain…
If you want to put it that way.
But given we agree it is absolutely useless, you should probably periodically trade some of it for food. Etc.
That works out really well, since money doesn’t mold as quickly as food, and doesn’t require refrigeration. So accumulate money, let it work for you in the form of productive capital, but skim it for food purchases.
only if you have a real (sane, sustainable, efficient) economy to give the money some value. without a real economy money is a number in a computer/a piece of paper, and growing is constrained by the finite resources of the world
It is wasteful. But it only is wasteful if you look at it from the valuation of human utility. For technological advancement, the system is quite efficient. It's just that we're not the priority.
Go out and observe and enjoy nature, enjoy good food, the company of lots of friends, etc. I wouldn't mind a world where people had more time to do that, if it meant I had to carry around a Walkman or go to live concerts...
Of course, not all innovation is bad. Banning smoking in restaurants does not require technology to restrict it...
Tons of people do not have anything on that list thanks to the social implants and if we are honest cant have it ever again in a world with 8 billion. So why not stop pretending that the idealizations of the past is a viable alternative. Its empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.
> ts empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.
Alright then, if that's really the foregone conclusion, then what's the point of existence? Should we not try and make things better by any means necessary?
> > ts empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.
> Alright then, if that's really the foregone conclusion, then what's the point of existence? Should we not try and make things better by any means necessary?
That's the pertinent question, and I don't have an answer that can adjudicate the dispute, but I can humbly help you formulate the choice as one between Leviathan or oblivion:
> In his contribution, "Leviathan or Oblivion?", Ophuls wrote on the political and economical implications of environmental problems. His main argument was that "because of the tragedy of the commons, environmental problems cannot be solved through cooperation...and the rationale for government with major coercive powers is overwhelming." According to Ophuls "reforming a corrupt people is a Herculean task," which only leaves us with the choice of becoming a leviathan or oblivion.
> Eckersley (1992) argued that, "...although Ophuls has since moderated his position by placing a greater emphasis on the need for self restraint than on the need for external coercion, he continues to maintain that the latter must be resorted to if calls for the former are unsuccessful."
The sobering realization that others smarter and earlier than I am have seen this change coming over the horizon and have warned us heedlessly leads me to believe that we must be the change we wish to see, and that change must happen socially, culturally, and politically.
Ours must be a human revolution toward society, not withdrawing from it. We must encourage and embrace the humanity in ourselves and in each other, and seek to lift others up more than we seek to tear others down. Hate can't drive out hate; only love can do that. We must love each other more than we hate each other. Love will guide us to our salvation.
Even efficiency improvements only help up to a point. Just because making things more efficient increased propserity at one point, doesn't mean they will continue to do so. In fact, the very crossing of that point of diminishing returns is what fuels the late-stage capitalism you refer to.
Honestly, I would say that the causality is the reverse.
Late-stage capitalism is enabled by the 4+ decades of the very wealthy taking all the gains from increased efficiency, which gives them the power to turn it into a feedback loop.
Our current situation is not an inevitable and natural outgrowth of the improved productivity of the late 20th century: it is specifically caused by policy changes (starting) under Reagan that allowed for more consolidation, less care for the common good, and more focus on personal self-aggrandizement.
Well, you definitely have a point there. The causality is less clear than I implied for sure with regard to the connection between late-stage capitalism and efficiency.
I'm in favour of countries regulating US exports, social media, tobacco, weapons, AI, and porn included.
I'm sure those living in the US won't agree with me and will be against such regulations, since they don't benefit their companies and that's fine, everyone has to protect their own interests.
I was echoing the words of EU regulators, who've already imposed heavy regulations on US weapons manufacturers, pharma companies, social media, AI and now porn.
By the way, these goods and services don't represent freedom to the rest of the world. In fact, the US is seen as a protectionist country that promotes neoliberalism while imposing tight regulations to foreign companies.
That world has never existed. People have always been hustling. If you are thinking of some agrarian ideal then you are looking at a world of incredible wealth and power inequality. Given the choice between moving faster and making a better life for you children and living a quiet life under the thumb of a dictator people have always chosen the former.
I used to use Yahoo, which was fairly portal-like with its categories and manually submitted websites. And I got to say, it was far higher quality than 99% of Google search results that are SEO spam.
I still credit dmoz (one of the main data sources back in the days of pre-google portals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ) for giving me good habits for data classification
And come to think of it, it also influenced the way I use social media because I mostly only follow people who curate/recommend interesting links, like back in the day of human curators having ownership of their own categories
Size of the web does not matter, it is more about not obsessing about cataloging the entire web and focusing on the content offered through the portal. I think the biggest issue to overcome with doing such a thing in 2025 is the death of links pages and webrings, they allowed the portal to give you access to web beyond the sites listed on the portal. But the blog killed the homepage and with it went their links page and the webrings they were members of.
The portals offered a very naturally curated web, the portal curated the sites it listed and each site offered a curated web as well through those links pages and webrings.
Yahoo? Is that a joke? Google won because Yahoo and the others were inferior. Not everyone here is a kid who didn’t know better about Ask Jeeves or Alta Vista, or AOL.
I don't agree with that. I think Python is a better first language. The better students will get through the program just fine, especially if they really want to learn computer science in depth. And the average ones will at least learn something useful.
> RC is a place for rigor. You should strive to be more rigorous, not less, when using AI-powered tools to learn, though exactly what you need to be rigorous about is likely different when using them.
This brings about an important point for a LOT of tools, which many people don't talk about: namely, with a tool as powerful as AI, there will always be minority of people with healthy and thoughtful attitude towards its use, but a majority who use it improperly because its power is too seductive and human beings on average are lazy.
Therefore, even if you "strive to be more rigorous", you WILL be a minority helping to drive a technology that is just too powerful to make any positive impact on the majority. The majority will suffer because they need to have an environment where they are forced not to cheat in order to learn and have basic competence, which I'd argue is far more crucial to a society that the top few having a lot of competence.
The individualistic will say that this is an inevitable price for freedom, but in practice, I think it's misguided. Universities, for example, NEED to monitor the exam room, because otherwise cheating would be rampant, even if there is a decent minority of students who would NOT cheat, simply because they want to maximize their learning.
With such powerful tools as AI, we need to think beyond our individualistic tendencies. The disciplined will often tout their balanced philosophy as justification for that tool use, such as this Recurse post is doing here, but what they are forgetting is that by promoting such a philosophy, it brings more legitimacy into the use of AI, for which the general world is not capable of handling.
In a fragile world, we must take responsibility beyond ourselves, and not promote dangerous tools even if a minority can use them properly.
Wait, you're literally advocating for handicapping everyone because some people can't handle the tools as well as others.
"The disciplined minority can use AI well, but the lazy majority can't, so nobody gets to use it" I feel like I read this somewhere. Maybe a short story?
Should we ban calculators because some students become dependent on them? Ban the internet because people use it to watch cat videos instead of learning?
You've dressed up "hold everyone back to protect the incompetent" as social responsibility.
I never actually thought I would find someone who read Harrison Bergeron and said "you know what? let's do that!"
But the Internet truly is a vast and terrifying place.
A rather shallow reply, because I never implied that there should be enforced equality. For some reason, I get these sorts of "false dichotomy" replies constantly here, where the dichotomy is very strong exaggerated. Maybe it's due to the computer scientist's constant use of binary, who knows.
Regardless, I only advocate for restricting technologies that are too dangerous, much in the same way as atomic weapons are highly restricted by people can still own knives and even use guns in some circumstances.
I have nothing against the most intelligent using their intelligence wisely and doing more than the less intelligent, if only wise use is even possible. In the case of AI, I submit that it is not.
Why are you putting down a well reasoned reply as being shallow? Isn't that... shallow? Is it because you don't want people to disagree with you or point out flaws in your arguments? Because you seem to take an absolutist black/white approach and disregard any sense of nuanced approach.
I don't have a dog in this fight but I think the counter argument was a terrible straw man. Op said it's too dangerous to put in general hands. Treating that like "protect the incompetent from themselves and punish everyone in the process" is badly twisting the point. A closer oversimplification is "protect the public from the incompetents".
In my mind a direct, good faith rebuttal would address the actual points - either disagree that the worst usage would lead to harm of the public or make a point (like the op tees up) that risking the public is one of worthy tradeoffs of freedom.
The rebuttal is very simple. I'll try and make it a bit less emotionally charged and clear even if your original opinion did not appear to me to go through the same process:
"While some may use the tool irresponsibly, others will not, and therefore there's no need to restrict the tool. Society shouldn't handicap the majority to accommodate the minority."
You can choose to not engage with this critique but calling it a "false dichotomy" is in poor form. If anything, it makes me feel like you're not willing to entertain disagreement. You state that you want to start a discussion by expressing your opinion but I don't see a discussion here. I observe you expressing your opinion and dismissing criticism of that opinion as false.
Some students treat AI like those things. Others are effectively a meat proxy for AI. Both ends of the spectrum would call themselves "AI fluent."
I don't think the existence of the latter should mean we restrict access to AI for everyone, but I also don't think it's helpful to pretend AI is just this generation's TI-83.
Why is "AI" (current LLM based systems) a danger on the level comparable to nukes?
Not saying that it is not, just would like to understand your reasoning.
Who decides what technologies are too dangerous? You, apparently.
AI isn't nukes - anyone can train a model at home. There's no centralized thing to restrict. So what's your actual ask? That nobody ever trains a model? That we collectively pretend transformers don't exist?
You're dressing up bog-standard tech panic as social responsibility. Same reaction to every new technology: "This tool might be misused so nobody should have it."
If you can't see the connection between that and Harrison Bergeron's "some people excel so we must handicap everyone," then you've missed Vonnegut's entire point. You're not protecting the weak - you're enforcing mediocrity and calling it virtue.
> Who decides what technologies are too dangerous? You, apparently.
I see takes like this from time to time about everything.
They didn't say that.
As with all similar cases, they're allowed to advocate for whatever being dangerous, and you're allowed to say it isn't, the people who decide is all of us collectively and when we're at our best we do so on the basis of the actual arguments.
> AI isn't nukes - anyone can train a model at home.
(1) They were using an extreme to illustrate the point.
(2) Anyone can make a lot of things at home. I know two distinct ways to make a chemical weapon using only things I can find in a normal kitchen. That people can do a thing at home doesn't make the thing "not prohibited".
> Who decides what technologies are too dangerous? You, apparently.
Again, a rather knee-jerk reply. I am opening up the discussion, and putting out my opinion. I never said I should be God and arbiter, but I do think people in general should have a discussion about it, and general discussion starts with opinion.
> AI isn't nukes - anyone can train a model at home. There's no centralized thing to restrict. So what's your actual ask? That nobody ever trains a model? That we collectively pretend transformers don't exist?
It should be something to consider. We could stop it by spreading a social taboo about it, denigrate the use of it, etc. It's possible. Many non techies already hate AI, and mob force is not out of the question.
> You're dressing up bog-standard tech panic as social responsibility. Same reaction to every new technology: "This tool might be misused so nobody should have it."
I don't have that reaction to every new technology personally. But I think we should ask the question of every new technology, and especially onces that are already disrupting the labor market.
> If you can't see the connection between that and Harrison Bergeron's "some people excel so we must handicap everyone," then you've missed Vonnegut's entire point. You're not protecting the weak - you're enforcing mediocrity and calling it virtue.
What people call excellent and mediocre these days is often just the capacity to be economically over-ruthless, rather than contribute any good to society. We already have a wealth of ways that people can excel, even if we eradicated AI. So there's definitely no limitation on intelligent individuals to be excellent, even if we destroyed AI. So your argument really doesn't hold.
Edit: my goal isn't to protect the weak. I'd rather have everyone protected, including the very intelligent who still want to have a place to use their intelligence on their own and not be forced to use AI to keep up.
> Wait, you're literally advocating for handicapping everyone because some people can't handle the tools as well as others.
No, they're arguing on the grounds that the tools are detrimental to the overwhelming majority in a way that also ends up being detrimental to the disciplined minority!
I'm not sure I agree, but either way you aren't properly engaging their actual argument.
Second reply to your expanded comment: I think in some cases, some technologies are just versions of the prisoner's dilemma where no one is really better off with the technology. And one must decide on a case by case basis, similar to how the Amish decide what is best for their society on a case by case basis.
Again, even your expanded reply shrieks with false dichotomy. I never said ban every possible technology, only ones that are sufficiently dangerous.
I agree with your reasoning. But the conclusion seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
The same line of thought can be used for any (new) tool, say a calculator, a computer or the internet. Shouldn't we try to find responsible ways of adopting LLMs, that empower the majority?
> The same line of thought can be used for any (new) tool, say a calculator, a computer or the internet.
Yes, the same line of thought can. But we must also take power into account. The severity of the negative effects of a technology is proportional to its power and a calculator is relatively week.
> Shouldn't we try to find responsible ways of adopting LLMs, that empower the majority?
Not if there is no responsible way to adopt them because they are fundamentally against a happy existence by their very nature. Not all technology empowers, even when used completely fairly. Some technology approaches a pure arms race scenario, especially when the proportion of its effect is mainly economic efficiency without true life improvement, at least for the majority.
Of course, one can point to some benefits of LLMs, but my thesis is that the benefit/cost quantity approaches zero and thus crosses the point of diminishing returns to give us only a net negative in all possible worlds where the basic assumptions of human nature hold.
I won't recommend anything. Every situation is different and you are arbitrarily transposing my argument rudely into another without much real thought, which is a shame. For instance, one thing you are ignoring is that we are evolutionary geared to handle situations of varying beauty.
I could point out many more differences between the two situations but I won't because your lack of any intellectual effort doesn't even deserve a reply.
I never bought this argument, because it seems the vast majority of people are fine with viewing tabs rendered as four spaces. And pretty much the default for spaces is four spaces. So I'm starting to think 99% of the world uses 4 spaces and it's the vocal minority that like 3 spaces or 5 spaces viewing for tabs. And in that case, the configurability is rather irrelevant.
Some of the very high-profile journals are run by non-profits, including: Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), PNAS, (National Academy of Sciences), eLife (HHMI/Max Planck/Wellcome Trust). A slew of more specialized journals are run by societies too.
In theory, they should be willing to lead the charge. In practice, I think they are largely dependent on income from the journals for a lot of their operations and so are reluctant to rock the boat.
Surely publishing a result is not in itself costly. But I guess the peer review is.
So journals could have a section (the grey pages?) for "unsellable results" that they didnt give a peer review. They would of course need to assess them in some other way, to ensure a reasonable level of quality.
Brazil is actually a pretty rich country. It's just that the wealth is exceptionally highly concentrated at the top. Brazil has enormous resources and potential, but all that potential gets sucked up by the big boys in their club. Although I know what you mean, it's important to distinguish Brazil from a genuinely poor-all-over country where there is not much wealth anywhere. Even in poor or average neighbourhoods in the big cities, you can see a person with nothing and then another person drive by in a BMW.
