What you're describing is my main concern of how this AI development might turn out. If we get any sort of autonomous agent (conscious or not) that can replace human workers in massive scale, there is currently no government or other institution prepared or willing to make sure that the people left standing without jobs can afford to live.
I'm really hopeful that all Sama's talk about ASI / AGI is just salesspeak, because if it isn't we are potentially in for a very dystopic few years.
But then, it isn't in the top 0.1% interest to replace human workers and cause a hunger-fueled revolution either, I just don't have high hopes that they will care enough to try to prevent it.
I'm equally as confused; huge WTF moment. Seems like a paradigm breakthrough, in that Nobel Prizes can be given for discoveries in tangential fields. Or perhaps it's due to Dr. Hopfields physicist status, that all his discoveries are considered physics related? Or that NNs are considered a part of physics / nature?
This makes sense to some extent (terminal illness or such), but one can argue as someone did above that if you're willing to make the permanent decision to "destroy" yourself, are you sane enough to legally make decision? Are you for sure not under temporary delusion, distress, or other threat? You can always "legally" "destroy" yourself through suicide, but if you want to involve a medical professional it seems very reasonable that you have the mental clarity to make the decision.
Should it be illegal for the doctor to deny me an amputation that I ask for? After all, I should be "free to destroy myself" absent any justification?
> You can always "legally" "destroy" yourself through suicide
Not in a dignified, foolproof way. E.g. can you go to a pharmacy and get a dose of morphine that will kill you with certainty? You can't, in most jurisdictions.
Forcing other people to deal with the trauma of cleaning up your bloody remains after you jump off a window isn't exactly compassionate either.
Give people a clean way out, even if you don't want it for yourself.
It's hard for me to even imagine such a state of mind, and the suffering one experiences. Somehow the fact that the euthanization takes place in your own home gives me the creeps. I really wonder what drives people to work in this space? In the case of pets or animals being put down it's a vet that does the deed, is it doctors in this case?
Also, her therapist claiming that "There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better" sounds like an enormous red flag for me. Some authority should take a long hard look at a professional therapist speaking like that, especially considering the proximity/possibility of human euthanasia, or just suicide in general.
I was positive to euthanasia before this article (I had considered it primarily for terminally ill people and such), but this really turned me off. I can't believe we made suicide a legal depression cure before when there's been so much talk about shrooms/acid and such perhaps being helpful.
> Also, her therapist claiming that "There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better" sounds like an enormous red flag for me. Some authority should take a long hard look at a professional therapist speaking like that, especially considering the proximity/possibility of human euthanasia, or just suicide in general.
I don't think this is a red flag. I don't see anything wrong with a therapist speaking like that because this statement is often made after years of working with the patient and not after the first few hours of therapy. In my time I worked in a psychiatric ward we had many patients who were considered "austherapiert", i.e. the treatments they have undergone over the years have not worked. In some cases, we are talking about patients who have been in and out of the psychiatry ward on a regular basis for over 20 years undergoing different treatments without their condition improving. People who have been suffering from their illness for decades, and we're not just talking about depression, but also illnesses such as schizophrenia, BPD, bipolar personality disorder, dementia, etc. Many of these patients take medication to manage the symptoms of their illness, but the side effects are often perceived as worse than the actual illness. And even with medication, a normal life is often no longer possible. People lose their jobs, their family, their friends - their whole life because of their mental illness. It's not only about the internal suffering, but also that their life irretrievably breaks apart and due to the symptoms of the illness building a new life may be not possible.
I don't want you to persuade you regarding euthanasia, but please, please don't make decisions based on "articles" from The Mirror. At least not before you tripple check the sources.
>Also, her therapist claiming that "There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better" sounds like an enormous red flag for me. Some authority should take a long hard look at a professional therapist speaking like that
That is not a quote from her doctors or her therapists. It appears to be an uncorroborated quote from the patient, though even that is not clear from the article.
> Somehow the fact that the euthanization takes place in your own home gives me the creeps.
If I was about to die I'd much rather die in the comfort of my own home than any other place, a hospital is not a cozy place; a clinic wouldn't be either, it's still a foreign place with nothing of your life or about you around. I'd much rather die in a place I know, that I was part of creating and makes me feel comfortable in it than any other place.
> I can't believe we made suicide a legal depression cure before when there's been so much talk about shrooms/acid and such perhaps being helpful.
This is absurd, you're trying to decide for someone else how they should approach their own suffering, why don't let the sufferer take control? It's not up to you to decide, at all, and it's not a split-second decision, to be euthanised one has to go through consultations with professionals which might not grant it, if a panel of experts decided the person has the right to decide to kill themselves who are you to say otherwise?
If they are wrong what's your solution? The person wouldn't know, they are way past the "searching for solutions" phase if they were being seen by a panel of experts to decide on euthanasia, if the person doesn't have a medical way to kill themselves they had already decided to take their own life, would you prefer they jump in front of a train? A moving car? Or shot their brains out on the bathroom tiles?
The tricky thing about mental health is that unlike physical ailments it requires the individual to still persevere and try on their own possible solutions, if someone has given up it's extremely hard to change their minds unless you want to forcefully incarcerate them and force them through psychiatric interventions while monitoring for any potential suicide attempts. Is that what liberty and freedom looks like to you?
Doctors have been wrong and will continue to be wrong all the time, they try their best to the current knowledge, if a whole panel is wrong we can only hope that in the future they will improve, the person's suffering was real to all involved at the time and the decision was taken.
And just to conclude on the same vein of your argument: what if the panel of experts isn't wrong and you are denying people suffering from at least taking their own decisions on how they would like to end their life? Do you prefer that world?
Honestly this is kind of a double edged sword. Allowing all drug use, and legalizing some form of registered and sanctioned trade of it might be better than what we have now, who knows. But at the same time, imagine large companies advertising drugs, targeted drug ads, the highly likely increased recreational consumption and normalization...
I don't think society is fit to handle practically unhindered drug use.
Adverts? Dont allow it (word of mouth will work even better - especially with known purities not available on the streets). Just follow the cigarette industries ad-rules, but stronger.
Or....like beer and other alcohols.
If Sam genuinely believed that AGI (assumption: capable of achieving some sort of singularity, or at least being capable enough to replace x% of human knowledge workers) would materialize in the near future, why would he then invest any time or money into these YC companies, given that most of them, if not all, would be made completely obsolete by such a technology?
Occam's razor would imply that he is simply encouraging future YC batches to build products on top of OAI products, with "AGI" being some sort of multi modal GPT.
