Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down.
I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on
> I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on
Same here.
I want to be an engineer.
As a good engineer, I find a problem then recursively ask why.
I end up with a political root cause - not a technical one.
One could imagine scientific institutions that are less vulnerable to the whims of government. As loathe as I am to defend an Altman point, AI could play a role in making them possible.
Those incentives are themselves the output of a variety of heuristics that we rely on only due to a lack of viable alternatives. I expect that eventually AI will make some alternatives viable because the bottleneck is so often an information processing one. Three examples:
- Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be beneficial to the public, but it kinda sorta works enough.
- Those loans cause money to enter the system and then we all chase it around and we cooperate with people who give us some of it even though we know that having money is a lousy proxy for competence or vision or integrity or any other virtue that might actually warrant such deference, but it kinda sorta works enough.
- Research gets done in support of publications, the count of which is used to assess the capability of the researcher, even though we know that having many publications is a lousy proxy for having a made a positive impact, but it kinda sorta works enough.
If we can fix these systems that are just limping along... If money can enter the system in support of ventures which are widely helpful, not just profitable... If we can support each other due to traits we find valuable in each other, not just because of some happenstance regarding scarcity. If we can encourage effective research in pursuit of widely sought after goals, rather than just counting publications... well that will be a whole new world with a new incentive structure. AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies.
> AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies.
The thing that you, altman, and every other AI booster fail to explain is how AI will do this. Every argument is littered with "if"s and "could"s, and it's just taken for granted that AI will be smart enough to find a solution that solves all our problems. It's also taken for granted that we'll actually implement the solution! If AI said that curing cancer requires raising taxes, cancer would remain uncured.
I've got a few designs in mind for an alternative to scarcity based economics. I don't presume to have it right, but its worth a shot and its a bit more concrete than blind trust in one technology or another. I thought it would take my whole life to just lay the foundation, but with some AI help, maybe not.
The trouble with you naysayers is you always take as immutable things that we can change.
So I think this piece by Altman is mostly hype smoke also but I really dislike your framing here. Somehow the "AI boosters" have to come up with a how but the "AI doomers" can just sit back, criticize, and not solution?
Let's be real here, US politics is fucked and none of us knows how to fix it.
> Somehow the "AI boosters" have to come up with a how but the "AI doomers" can just sit back, criticize, and not solution?
as the top level comment pointed out, we have solutions to many of these things, but we choose not to do them. I don't think it's unfair to say "maybe we shouldn't spend billions of dollars on this thing that will probably just reinforce existing power structures".
> Let's be real here, US politics is fucked and none of us knows how to fix it.
> Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be beneficial to the public, but it kinda sorta works enough.
This system exists and is optimized to make the bankers rich. The idea that it helps ensure that ventures using that money will be successful is the thin veneer used 100+ years ago to sell it to everyone. But the true purpose has always been to make bankers rich. If you to institute any other system that would not achieve that purpose, you will find yourself battling enormous opposition.
The same things are true for huge parts of our society. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious is the US Healthcare system. Experience from all over the world shows clearly that it is not an efficient way to organize Healthcare, by any stretch of the imagination. Still, it won't change, not because people don't believe the outside examples, but because the system is working for what it was designed to do - transfer huge amounts of money to rich people. And it delivers just enough health care that people aren't routing in the streets against it.
Unfortunately, many problems are last mile problems. If we could teleport medicine and technology to everyone who needs it, these problems would be mostly solved. And I'm sure drug companies would love to make money on those people since their marginal cost is so low. But coordination is hard, and it's not necessarily a problem money can fix.
It's like the math that takes # of homeless people times cost of an apartment, and then people claim we can solve homelessness for [reasonable amount]. Makes sense until you look how much US spends on homelessness every year already.
Cell phone technology was the closest thing we got to teleporting technology and wealth to the rest of the world. Most developing countries completely skipped a phase of development that required crazy amounts of infrastructure to be built out. More people have cell phones than running water. It's pretty incredible if you think about it. Hopefully AI will be a similar leap frog.
I work in ML and honestly I agree. We live in a fairly post scarce world. We could already live in a much less post scarce world.
AI, as most technology, make these things easier, but they are power. It's all about what you do with power. You can build power plants or bombs. AI could (let's be hypothetical) free humans from all necessary labor. Robots making all the food, mining all the materials, and do the whole pipeline. But that requires a fundamental rethinking of how we operate now. That world isn't socialism nor capitalism. That's a world where ownership becomes ill defined in many settings but still strict in others. It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here. Do we trust a few people to make all the robots to do all those things and then just abdicate all that power? Do we trust governments to do it? There's reason to trust no one. Because a deep dystopian can be created from any such scenarios. Going towards that hypothetical future is dangerous. Not because super intelligences, but because of us. Those with power tend to not just freely abdicate it... that's not a problem we're discussing enough and our more frequent conversations of ASI and the like just distracts from this one.
> It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here
I'd like someone, amongst the tech bros for instance but it could be any influential politician in power, to set a target on when do we stop making life more miserable than it could for billions of people, by asking them to aim for no more than structural unemployment, 40+ hours weeks, steady economic growth in the name of progress.
Because as long as the end game isn't defined (and some milestones towards it), we won't have Star Trek, but a sci-fi version of a Dickens or Zola book, or at least an eternal treadmill augmented with marginally less useful innovations.
That's how I project over the next centuries the failed prediction from Keynes about everyone working 15 hours weeks in a near future, in a western world that yet did achieve post scarcity (at least for now)
I'm not sure it's mostly last mile problems. A frequent problem I see is "costs now vs future costs". Worse is "costs now vs amortized future costs"
What I mean is let's say you are making something and you see an issue. You know it'll be an issue and if fixed now will cost $100, but if you fix it a year from now it'll cost $1000. Many people will choose the latter. On paper, I think most people will choose the former but in practice the latter is often hard to determine. An example might be a security risk. It only gets harder to fix as you generate more code and complexity increases. But of hacked this has high costs both through business and through lawsuits.
The amortized one is a nasty problem because it often goes unnoticed. Say a problem costs $100 to fix now but every day it isn't fixed it costs $1.00 every day you don't fix it costs 5% more (so $1, $1.05, $1.1025,...). These sneak up on you and you'll pay a lot more than that $100 by the time you notice
I think you misunderstood OP. The last mile problem was solved or being solved. Millions of lives were saved and fewer people were dying every year. It was one of the greatest successes in human history. Now we’ve stopped because our government decided to stop. Millions of more people will die unnecessarily and technology has nothing to do with it.
One lens is the “Thrive/Survive” axis. As more people thrive, they have more space for individualism, compassion for others, etc. This can be used to explain the arc of “moral progress” over time.
A follow up would be to observe that in many places today, inequality causes substantial sub-populations to feel that they are not thriving, or even declining though GDP is increasing. Which would explain the rage of the middle-American and many Europeans.
If you buy all this, then there is a clear path by which radical abundance resolves the problems. Same as how the Baby Boomers were a very low-polarization generation; when everybody is thriving it’s a lot easier to get along.
Personally I worry more about the possible worlds where technology doesn’t bring us radical abundance. Declining empires with nuclear weapons don’t sound conducive to a fun time.
> it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on
My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology). Typically that's online for most people, but in SF, it's a physical echo chamber, too.
That echo chamber allows large numbers of people (coincidentally, the people shepherding a lot of the technology) to rationalize any position they come up with and fall into a semi-permanent state of cognitive dissonance ("of course my technological solution is the solution").
If other people are saying the same thing nearly everywhere you look, who's to say those who disagree are actually the correct ones?
> My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology).
Technology can scale up small conveniences into major economic and quality of life wins.
But when it's tolerated, technology also ramps up seemingly small conflicts of interest into economic and society-degrading monsters.
Our legal intolerance for conflicts of interest as business models needs to go up a lot. No amount of strongly worded letters, uncomfortable senate interviews, or unplug-the-system theater, are going to discourage billionaires farming people's behavior, attention and psychology from continuing to farm people's behavior, attention and psychology.
we should separate the language a bit here, technological problems are political problems inasmuch as corporations and the individuals who harness that infrastructure to gain immense wealth proclaim themselves eminent technologists who exert influence over the political sphere through monetary feedback mechanisms that are created by selling technical solutions to political problems.
USAID is not the sole source of administering AIDS and malaria treatments. No doubt many more people were successfully treated because those treatments exist.
I don't think I understand your point. We shouldn't develop new treatments because one country won't supply them to the entire world for free? Why is it the US's responsibility to treat every disease everywhere in the world? Do these countries not have their own governments?
1) The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence.
2) We don’t. USA’s foreign aid per capita is not that high (especially now). To mobilize private money for aid, you need a long-term, trusted infrastructure.
3) Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.
> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence.
And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs.
> Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.
Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.
We’ve been providing foreign aid for, what, like 70-80 years now? Have the dysfunctional governments fixed themselves yet? How long should it take? 100 years? 500 years?
Maybe providing aid is just propping up dysfunctional governments by doing their job for them and it would be better in the long run if they were allowed to collapse and be replaced with something that was forced to be functional.
It’s globally useful to eradicate/reduce disease in a region irrespective of whether or not the region’s government becomes stable. Viruses and bacteria mutate and do not care about borders.
I have no fantasies that aid will magically make countries stable.
If it is globally useful then the burden should be spread equally among all the countries on the globe. If the US is providing this service, other countries should compensate us for it.
It’s not an either/or. While we figure out the practical solutions to corruption in impoverished nations, we can /also/ do other work to improve the situation in Earth. And, in doing so, we will make solving the impoverished/corruption problem easier to fix.
We don’t have to figure out a solution to anything in other sovereign nations. Nor, can or should we really impose any functional, non-corrupt government on people who are unable or unwilling to do it themselves, unless you’re willing to go back to full-blown colonialism. The people in the country need to figure it out themselves and decide they want to have a functional government and make it happen. We can’t do it for them.
You’re conflating national building with mitigation of disease. I agree: medical aid is not a substitute for local medical infrastructure and can threaten its development. But aid is not guaranteed to do that. Also, disease is intrinsically bad.
I don't think the US is responsible for providing free healthcare for other countries. It should start doing that for its own people, though. That would be a big step towards being a functional country. Or maybe just not have legislation called "One Big Beautiful Bill". The US is a joke.
You are getting a lot of free stuff, because you own the dollar. That keeps you afloat so far, but I don't think it will last for much longer.
Why do you keeping making posts implying the US provides the bulk of international aid when that is demonstrably not the case (on a % of GDP basis or total dollar amount)?
The point is that a treatment existing does not mean it will be adequately administered. The biggest pool of treatable cases worldwide does not occur where the people with the most ability to pay are.
And a treatment not existing means it will not be administered at all, adequately or not. You need to make the treatment exist first, then you can figure out how to administer it as widely as possible. You can't administer a treatment that doesn't exist.
I don’t disagree with your point. It’s not the US’s responsibility to supply malaria drugs. My point was that it is not for lack of an existing cure that people are dying of malaria or AIDS, in reference to the article.
Personally speaking I wish the US was drastically more involved with providing aid because it can help reduce the impact of individual catastrophies happening everyday.
People keep saying we're the richest country in the history of the world. I think we have a responsibility to practice good old fashioned Christian compassion (with a side of soft power if that's more your thing.)
Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government collect fewer tax dollars and citizens can give them to charity as they see fit.
Absolutely we aren’t a Christian country. I personally don’t need Christianity to tell me charity for our fellow humans is a good thing. Plus, richest country in the history of the world remember?
The rich in the US enjoy their wealth at the “pleasure” of the lower classes. (And not just the American lower classes.) Those dollars they’re hoarding? Those were created by the people and have value because of the people. So, I’m all for confiscatory taxation to fund humane charitable endeavors and eliminate wealth hoarding. Someone will have to make do with one less yacht I suppose.
Finally, the amount we’re taking about here is a mere pittance. Let’s cut some other wasteful spending first (Pentagon) if you’re looking for savings.
USAID is not just charity. It is a projection of soft power that keeps many countries and world citizens looking up to the USA. It reduces likelihood of terrorist attacks on US citizens.
Among people likely to consider a terrorist attack, USAID is widely considered a front for the CIA to meddle in other countries' governments (and this has been proven to be the case in some instances). Which, if true, makes it a bad front for the CIA, and if false, means it creates more resentment than anything else and does little to reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks.
>Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries.
Soft power is of obvious immense benefit to citizens of the United States, however you've rejected that in other comments.
The argument otherwise reads like a stereotypical "Not with my tax dollars!" argument. It's always fascinated me, that. Inevitably it's always an impassioned argument, regardless of the funding subject.
In this particular case, a very conservative estimate might put the number of child deaths in the tens of thousands. Reality is probably closer to hundreds of thousands at this point.
I pay taxes, a lot of them. I don't get angry when my taxes are used by the government to keep disadvantaged children in hellish conditions alive.
If you were to express the total cost of USAID's former budget against your tax bill as a binary choice between that and a few hundred thousand kids dying, I suspect it'd be much harder to maintain your current position.
Moreover, consider that central to this issue is the abrupt dismantling of an agency which was critical to global aid flow, and amounted to a rug pull. There was no justification for that.
Hopefully Sam's ASI is more compassionate than people, which frankly isn't a high bar lately.
How about we lower taxes and give money back to the people who earned it? If you want to use your money to save dying children on the other side of the world, you are welcome to do that. If other people have more pressing needs for their money they can do that too.
It seems people are infinitely compassionate when spending someone else’s money.
I think KFC called that the Double Down, but to each their own.
What of the argument against USAID’s rapid disassembly then? Is such an outcome permissible or even desired on account of sparing these funds sooner, aid continuity be damned?
At what speed should it be disassembled? I don't see how dragging things out will help. No matter how slow you go, people who want it to continue are going to say it's too fast. May as well rip the band aid off quickly.
I mean, your plan seems to be:
A. The US should give infinity money to everyone forever and never stop. If anyone ever dies, it's the US's fault for not supporting them enough.
B. If you are going to stop, do it on the schedule of the people who are getting free stuff, and only stop when they decide they don't want free stuff anymore (i.e. never).
A responsible pace that doesn't result in abrupt mass deaths due to the lack of aid continuity.
>A. The US should give infinity money to everyone forever and never stop. If anyone ever dies, it's the US's fault for not supporting them enough.
Nobody said that, but with operating the world's largest aid agency for the better part of a century comes massive responsibility.
>B. If you are going to stop, do it on the schedule of the people who are getting free stuff, and only stop when they decide they don't want free stuff anymore (i.e. never).
You're right. Hopefully those impoverished kids (many of whom are dead now) take some personal responsibility for themselves in the afterlife. To think we'd even entertain pulling their food and medicine on their schedule and not our schedule.
We were trying to have nuanced discussions about these things 10 years ago and were ignored. The time for going slowly was then. Now things are just going to get done.
> You're right. Hopefully those impoverished kids (many of whom are dead now) take some personal responsibility for themselves in the afterlife. To think we'd even entertain pulling their food and medicine on their schedule and not our schedule.
The children? No, but their parents and the other adults running their country. That is who is responsible for providing for them. Americans have their own children they need to take care of and do not need their money seized and sent overseas to take care of other people's children.
And yes, maybe it is a "rug pull" but it was always going to be. It is immoral to engender such dependence in the first place, like keeping someone slightly poisoned so they're constantly sick and dependent on you to take care of them. Let people grow strong so they can take care of themselves and treat with them as equals.
>Americans have their own children they need to take care of and do not need their money seized and sent overseas to take care of other people's children.
You talk as if it's a zero-sum game, as if the two choices are mutually exclusive.
>And yes, maybe it is a "rug pull" but it was always going to be.
It is zero sum. How is it not? This is not an investment. It is not going to create future tax revenue for the US. It is just keeping people barely alive in crippling poverty for a little bit longer than they would otherwise.
IMO it is an investment and it will bring future revenue to the US. Because this fosters working relationship with other countries, countries that we ultimately rely on for their resources. Because they have a working relationship with the US, they're willing to give us some pretty sweet deals.
If you look at Africa, it has the most wealth by resources out of any continent. It's also the poorest continent nominally. We're getting a lot of good stuff at INSANE discounts.
What I'm describing is, of course, colonialist in nature. The US is an empire, not a nation. But, the hope is that as we help those countries develop they can help us stay developed, and we can eventually reach some mutually beneficial equilibrium. Instead of exploitation.
But, currently, the relationship is exploitative. It's a bit wild to me that you legitimately think the US, of all countries, is being exploited. No bubba... no. We do the exploiting. Everything you own is build with layers and layers of global exploitation built into it. You have a few hundred slaves working for you as we speak.
I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on