Yep, some WH member trading 400k$ an hour before an attack sure did wonders for "the good of society". So does media showing rates on gambling websites as if they were an oracle and not something that can be gamed for cheaper than a TV ad.
> I think the simplified version of that reason is: no one really believes in anything anymore, except in the value that acquiring money by any means necessary is a good thing.
Hit the nail on the head and these are my thoughts exactly. I don't really want to be the guy that thinks his time is extra-ordinary (cue fake quote of Socrates saying "kids these days have no manners"), but... maybe it is?
For me it's like people don't even feel the need to pretend anymore. Selfish geopolitical calculations and greed have dictated all actors' actions in the 20th, that isn't new, but at least then there was a need to appear to abide by laws or to uphold human rights, even to strive for the eradication of war (and often it wasn't a disguise; people actually cared about those things).
States used to care or at least appear to care about progress, betterment, social improvement, moral improvement. Today? All any government speaks of is raw GDP growth %. And so gambling is pushed on TVs, streets, subways, kids' entertainment... The idea that a government of a nation would strive for the moral well-being of its citizens (by heavily curtailing gambling for example) seems positively quaint in 2026.
My favourite station is Rokin, because it includes an amazing display of these artifacts (from Roman dishes to Nokia 3310s) in between the escalators that take you to the platform. It's incredible.
I'm reading the Diamond article you liked and I cannot understand for the lift of me what you wanted? The Brittanica article seems substantially poorer. Note also that a key feature of Wikipedia is the hyperlinks! If you don't know what a "crystalline structure" is, or you want to know more about "hardness", you're welcome to click the links and dive further!
The wikipedia is more information dense, but that's not always what I want in a general purpose reference. Also hyperlinks are good if you want to read the article. But I don't want to have to click through hyperlinks, and thereby lose focus. Sometimes I just want to know just enough to complete the context in which some thing was mentioned. In the opening sentence there's a whole phrase "solid form of the element carbon" hyperlinked - to what is not immediately clear - but curiosity peaks the mind and I see that it's to an article on carbon allotropes. Later on it says it's "metastable" so I need to know what that means, but it just links to an article that's equally obstruse and so I have to go on an endless rabbit hole of hyperlinks. Britannica usually explains briefly in parentheses what some piece of jargon means.
Let me point out, that for me personally, for many years, hyperlinks in Wikipedia were the worst feature. I hated that! Anytime I started looking for something, I would start following links ad infinitum. Was extremely distracting. Instead of a little inline definition, for everything is a link. There is a good balance between linking to the definition of each word, and just inlining the definition.
Anyway, at some I disciplined myself to not follow the links. But sometimes the definition really needs following them.
They took our jerbs is a perfectly valid argument for people which face ruin without a jerb.
Capitalism is not prepared nor willing to retrain people, drastically lower the workweek, or bring about a UBI sourced from the value of the commons. So indeed, if the promises of AI hold true, a catastrophe is incoming. Fortunately for us, the promises of AI CEOs are unlikely to be true.
This is the bit I get frustrated by - the need for jerbs at all.
If we manage to replace all the workers with AI - that's awesome! We will obviously have to work out a system for everyone to get shelter, and food, and so on. But that post-scarcity utopia of everyone being able to do whatever they want with their time and not have to work, that's the goal, right? That's where we want to be.
Jerbs are an interim nightmare that we have had to do to get from subsistence agriculture to post-scarcity abundance, they're not some intrinsic part of human existence.
That's the optimistic take. The pessimistic one is that we, people who need to work jobs to survive, are not an intrinsic part of human existence and will be obsolete and/or left to die once we no longer have an economic purpose.
I can't see that being a realistic outcome. We're a long, long way from that, if it is possible. Billionaires are only billionaires because people buy their company shares. If no-one has any money and we're consigned to scrape in the dust for food, what will billionaires do? Who will buy their products, their shares?
Somehow there is always this huge leap between "Strong AI" -> stuff happens -> "about 10k people live in cloud cities and everyone else lives in the dirt".
Money is a tool that has no value by itself. Billionaires are billionaires because they get a much bigger part of the work their group is producing (the group can be one company, a region, a country or the whole world depending on how you see things). If AI does the work instead of people, it will change nothing for them.
You can be optimistic (it will self regulate and everyone will benefit from AI) or pessimistic (only the billionaire class will benefit from AI). But in any case, there will be no need to sell products or share if there is a class of artificial slaves that can replace workers
But right now, there is no way in hell we're going to get any kind of support for people who lost their jobs to AI. Not in the US, at least.
Look at the current administration. Do you think they would even consider providing anything like UBI?
They actively want to take us down the cyberpunk dystopia route (or even the Christofascist regressive dystopia route...). They want us to become serfs to technofeudal overlords. Or just die, and decrease the surplus population.
I think you (and many others) are overestimating the degree to which everyone does, in fact, know that (everyone should, but not everyone does...), while simultaneously underestimating the degree to which the people in charge right now think they're the absolute most specialest people. Or, in some cases, literally God's chosen.
Furthermore, they really, really want to be absolute rulers being treated like (the popular conception of) medieval lords by all of us, the peasants. They deeply believe that we are beneath them; that we do not deserve to have the means to thrive or even survive if they do not explicitly grant it to us; that our natural state is that of supplication, and theirs is that of power and control.
UBI would give that up. It would give us the unconditional means to live, regardless of their approval. And that they cannot abide.
I don't know any billionaires personally to be able to verify your statement, but I get the feeling this is a media caricature rather than their actual opinions. I've met a few tech millionaires and their opinions vary pretty wildly on this stuff.
Well...millionaires and billionaires aren't exactly the same group, are they?
An ordinary person, working diligently at a decent-paying job, can save up a million dollars if they're not unlucky.
Even a million-dollar-a-year salary is only 10x a fairly modest tech salary of 100k.
But a billion dollars a year is 1000 times that.
So...no, I don't know any billionaires personally either. I'm extrapolating from the things they say and do. But frankly, with the way the media is today, do you really think that more than a tiny fraction of it is trying to portray billionaires as worse than they are? Given how much of it is actually controlled by them, and bears the clear marks of their editorial hand?
> The voices that are silent are the ones that are shouting from the rooftops when Israel does this to Palestinians.
As the comment you just replied to says, Iran is already sanctioned and bombed, while Israel gets billions in military (and other) aid from US and the rest of the West. It's abundantly clear that there's a difference.
And furthermore, so you have to have a decibel meter perfectly calibrated for every tragedy that happens on planet earth, or your arguments are nullified? Preposterous.
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