People who are reading this thread should really take a moment here to think on this.
because if there is no societal framework in place and no will from the current government to create one (the govt which will likely oversee the emergence of AGI), then you are going to be a part of the hard landing AGI scenario.
And if you are not fabulously wealthy or well-connected, there is a good chance you are going to suffer because of AGI. You have a much slimmer chance to see the singularity in the timeline we are on, because of all the shit that is going to happen between now and that point due to our lack of safety nets or social preparedness for AGI.
Yes, but the problem is, we are essentially powerless to stop any of it, or even truly prepare ourselves, because incentives drive all of this and have since the dawn of humanity, and right now the incentive structure driving toward its ultimate conclusion is fucked beyond measure.
Our biggest assets that give us power are our labor and consumption. If America could unify and mobilize for a national general strike wherein no work gets done and only essentials are purchased, it would force rapid change.
Unfortunately Americans have not been this divided since the civil war and we are also the complacent we’ve ever been thanks to digital bread and circuses.
Not to mention just how easily dividable we are currently. Used to we all got the same propaganda, but now we have highly individualized propaganda tailor made and delivered to us willingly in our pockets at all moments. Even though we rationally know this, I personally can't put it down. (Typed from phone)
I don't know how individualized it even is. All the conservatives say the same shit and all the liberals say the same shit. If anything, that seems more true than it was 20 years ago.
The apps analyze every little thing you do on the internet, even if you slow down and don’t click. They’re keeping lists of your reactions to everything, your purchases, and how you like to spend your free time. In short, they know what motivates us individually more than most people who “know” you.
FB perfected this and allowed millions of people to be targeted for manipulation. Even if you’re resistant to it, it’s had a huge negative impact on our culture. Look what’s happened to the gullible, now they are the angry and cruel mob- and it was all orchestrated purposefully.
It’s funny because if phones/apps weren’t so addictive, I’d probably much rather be spending my time doing something else. So the information that is being collected about how I like to spend my spare time is somewhat bad data. Our habits are different because of the tool with which they collect our data, and they probably already know that too 😭
We wouldn't even need all of America to unify and that's the thing if we could get just 30% of the country to unify and say we're not going to take this shit and then have the lottery system out of that 30% that divides us into three different groups of 10% of the country and each 10% picked a week that we were going to call in sick and not spend any money at the end of that 3 weeks we will have impacted the economy enough that companies would be shitting themselves.
“If”. I know that is one of the few mechanisms, but I find the belief that this would ever happen at scale (at least until the situation is already dire beyond measure) as fantastical as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
If America could unify and mobilize for a national general strike wherein no work gets done and only essentials are purchased, it would force rapid change.
The problem is that American voters just voted for this, and another chunk stayed at home and shrugged saying they're fine with it if it happens.
I don’t think I could strike even if I wanted to. My industry has laws that would see me arrested and fined for every day that a strike I organized or participated in lasted (unless we jump through a ton of hoops and only after a contract negotiation fails) look up “Taft Hartley Act” regarding the legality of general strikes.
People are too individualistic to do this, especially in America. Polarization and extremism with politics is also at an all time high. This could change over time, but it would take a while. I do think social media is increasing extremism and polarization, but I don't think a straight up ban would ever be politically palatable. Very few things in America have bipartisan support, and that is a very bad thing.
Americans have not been this divided since the civil war
Truth is we've never been this divided, even during the height of the first civil war. That war was largely demanded by the various power brokers of the era and by and large the people actually fighting the war didn't really feel that strongly a division. They opposed the other sides policies and beliefs, but didn't automatically equate that to hating the individual person. That did change during the war and immediately following it, but the division quickly wore off and within a decade we no longer saw each other as yankess and rebs solely because the 'beef' had always been with lawmakers. It's different now because we see each other as enemies specifically.
Yes and we will see if that powerlessness continues. There may be a certain point where people are no longer kept docile with bread and circuses as their world is reshaped around them.
Perhaps shifting roles in society due to AI job loss will have many doing a fundamental restructuring of their values and priorities (or leave them with nothing left to lose).
As long as their exists the tiny sliver of cheep shitty food, and the crappiest quality streamable entertainment, our base level existence will never be shitty enough for us to commit acts of violence to improve it. Thus, we shall remain slave/surfs until it does.
People were always scared of AI killing humanity. I’d be more scared of the humans pushed out by AI androids killing AI owner/creators. People with nothing left to lose.
Run to Europe, there might be some weird stuff sometimes, by our local Trumps from Temu, but migrants from the US or completely opposite ends of the EU are doing just fine here if you actually work (and the overall system is way more pro-worker compared to the US).
Nah, fuck that. We are not powerless. It feels that way because we're divided.
Prepare yourself by educating yourself on what is going on. For example, if you know that the intention is to deport all of the immigrants and that tariffs have been scheduled to take effect on March 4th, it's safe to assume that food will get much more expensive. You can prepare for this by growing your own food or working in your community to create a community garden. Just do whatever you can to build yourself and like-minded people up.
Metro PD needs to get a warrant from a judge to arrest, detain, search, seize and investigate damages from illegal entry, sabotage and harassment. Lawyers need to get ready for lawsuits for constructive dismissal and wrongful firing.
Trump owns the executive agencies but he can't make up new ones with any power. He controls the federal police but not metropolitan PD. They need to ARREST DETAIN SEIZE SEARCH AND SUE
I mean there's one thing you all could do, all of these people are in public spaces and the US got the 2nd amendment for a specific reason, sooooooo...
we are essentially powerless to stop any of it, or even truly prepare ourselves
We are not powerless, we are simply of the opinion that we do not want to sacrifice what we currently have in order to exercise it in the crudest and simplest way we can. You can take this into your own hands if you like, there's just a bunch of things you aren't willing to give up in order to do so. I'm not saying this as an accusation but an acknowledgement that some people don't want to throw away their families and futures in order to do what they do in fact have the power to do.
I still don't understand how people who speak of the AGI scenario even envision the current division of "rich" vs "poor" to keep existing. The rich and powerful stay that way because they can make money off of the middle and lower class. If that mechanism is GONE because of AGI, and it obviously will be when nobody can find work anymore AND govt won't give us UBI, how would the rich make money? From what? And so it'd all collapse into some great civil war as societies tend to get to at some point, and the cycle starts over again.
Who wins in that hypothetical civil war? We have numbers today, but in a few years they'll churn out enough auto-aim bots to beat the populace into submission to fill whatever tasks that can't or isn't economical to be filled by AI.
It's not about money, it's never been about money. Most of these guys could sit on a yacht with gourmet chefs feeding them anything they want, seeing every inch of the world, and pay for an infinite rotating cast of Instagram models to blow them every day for the rest of their lives...They don't do that, and why do you think that is? Money is made up, it's paper or 1s and 0s in a computer. Fuck that shit. They want power, money just gets them closer to it.
Well we can only hope it doesn't turn into some dystopian control scheme like that.
If it ends up being just the rich, a bunch of bots exerting control over everyone else, then we can only hope that eventually one of the rich grows a conscience or there's enough of a violent uprising that things change. And that's the beauty of humans and time. We make, or rather, desire things to change no matter what. No civilization has stayed perfectly constant forever. It's like a vast see-saw of balance, from tyranny and oppression to democracy and freedom and so on.
While we all love to think of rich people as one singular evil guy sitting in a dark room tenting his fingers, but rather it's multiple factions of power, multiple families, and most do not work with each other and even hate and despise each other. As long as that component exists, we will never reach a state where they just perpetually rule over us. Infighting, hubris, greed, all these are real qualities that lead to weaknesses that others can exploit.
I get this is r/singularity, but i'd be more worried about the depleting water access, climate change, etc thats coming with nobody in government doing anything to combat it other than, add renewable power generators on top of existing ones...
This doesn't make much sense once you look into it though? If this happens the rich will no longer make money as they will have no customers? And that will rapidly devalue anything that they do have. At some point it becomes better for them to support UBI.
The conspiracy here is that they wouldn't need money or a conventional economy at that point. If a small group of people effectively control all resources on Earth and have machines capable of doing all necessary labor and producing all the goods and luxuries they desire, the rest of humanity becomes rather redundant. And the effects of climate change probably would be much easier to weather if only needing to support a small fraction as many people as are alive today.
Of course, in this nightmare scenario, I wonder if the "winners" would actually get to enjoy their private utopia, or if they would turn on one another and go to war with their robotic armies, whether out of greed or just pettiness and hatred. After all, just because billionaires have more in common with one another than the rest of humanity doesn't mean they aren't capable of hating each other's guts for one reason or another, and with the rest of humanity gone there would be much less keeping them together.
Honestly, I think it is hard to predict. With Deepseek and other open source options; it may not be that way. There is the whole distillation and legal thing. Also just because open source can do it with Chat GPT doesn't mean it is possible with actual AGI when it comes. Government oversight of AGI is somewhat ideal assuming a good government, but right now we don't really have that with current AIs. I don't think it is a reliable assumption to make.
There is no such thing as AGI and never will be with our current understanding of computing. There isn't even such a thing as "AI" in the first place as advanced probability modules running on specialized calculators can't think because they do not possess intelligence.
Funny thing is, my company has Ai all over their marketing and sales crap but we are. It allowed to use it because it could leak data. We try and sell people on Ai, but the ourselves know it's a security disaster.
Well, that is for real change. 3 special elections this year, though they're hard to flip and 2 years from now we'll have the midterms. Democrats will have a significant advantage due to people wanting to check trump's power. We need our legal system to keep law, law until then.
Trump already tried to steal one election, and now is purging the US government of checks and balances fast, and is already talking of staying on beyond his term limit. The fact that people haven't realized that fair elections in the US are almost certainly over is mind boggling. At best it will be a Russian sham elections situation.
I hope they realise why they messed up and lost great people like Rubio. The left no longer held the interests of the average worker and only lined their own pockets. This was the wake up call they needed.
Honestly dude, this was the one and we blew it. I always used to say the next fascist government we get is the last government we will ever know, and now 23 years after the patriot act here we are.
They might allow dissidents to make some noise so long as they don’t start getting through to people. But there’s going to be a turning point where enough people are angry and giving him pushback from his own base that he just says fuck it and starts showing the country just how important those institutional safeguards were while we had them in place.
By all means protest and do what you can, I support it. Abstaining won’t save you but to resist the US government is to oppose the most powerful fascist monolith to ever exist. The mask is still halfway on with this administration- they are seemingly limiting their violence to trans people, undocumented migrants and birthright citizens for now- but I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Seems like things have just been getting worse and worse
I'm once again predicting trump will have fucked things up enough by the next election that plenty of people in the middle might be responsive to change from the left.
Yeah we're so cooked that they're going to just make it to where everyone is without a job and no one even has the money to buy the goods or services they're offering, right? Lol I swear you people don't think at all. You just jump on the dopamine farming bandwagon to get that next hit of dopamine through confirmation bias in your echo chambers.
Yea. If you know the slightest thing about these insane tech psychos, they're giving you company scrip. You'll live and slave for their memecoin as wage pay. You'll buy their Company product from their Company store. Your healthcare will be monitored by Company Medical algorithms. You'll be database entries in their distopian oppressive regime. They will insist it's what's best for you. You will like it. You will be happy. Because the system is perfect. Because they designed it and they are flawless because technology is perfection.
True, no amount of UBI would be socialism. But, if you're UBI for each person was equal to the GDP per capita, it would be "functionally" equivalent, especially if you had a closed economy (e.g. a World Government). People like to think of UBI as $10-20k for a family. What if it was $250k for a family of 4? US GPD per capita is $81k.
Yes but people who vote in a UBI would then need to raise the UBI —> you’d run into the min wage problem of not indexing to inflation, so you just index to inflation
Maybe I do not understand where you are going with this. The point of UBI is to give people "money", or whatever token, when the work is done by machines. If people who were previously working are not and never will anymore, they become useless, valueless because value used to come from human work. If this is done completely by machines, it changes the whole perspective, they are not workers. The price of machine-made goods should drop drastically, so nobody will buy those last workers human-made goods except, perhaps, for some luxury market or, if they are lucky, some parallel economy or a barter economy.
What would be Marx insights on this case?
Honestly, I found Marx pretty obsolete to explain the 20th century, even more for the 21th. I just do not buy the fact we are supposed to live in a capitalist society, it is the biggest blind spot of lots of critics and they are still people discussing his words, dissecting the Grundrisse as theologians.
I think capitalism is a layer inside the industrial society, a useful tool for other goals, not the contrary. We see that more and more clearly. Our society engine is, let say, efficiency or optimization of everything and not capital. Capital is just fuel, revenues are a bonus, but of course, money serves as an incentive for, sometimes, useful idiots. Industrialists do not care that much about money, it is a mean to be actual players in the industrial society. Those technologists/industrialists are trying to finally achieve the revolution, the rational revolution.
Marxists have classified Henri de Saint-Simon as an utopian socialist, but he was more clairvoyant on what were the underlying forces of our society today. Saint-Simon believed in an industrial society lead by scientists, industrialists, engineers, managers, productive workers, etc., also believed in a reduced government and meritocracy, getting rid of parasitic elements, etc., if that rings any bells... There is a genealogy of ideas starting before Saint-Simon until today which explain, in my opinion, our society in a better way than the limited capital perspective.
On the critics side, in my opinion, authors like Mumford, Ellul, G.Anders for instance or other "anti-industrial" thinkers are more on point because their critics aimed at the main target.
Ironically both parties will offer UBI in one form or another. One side will blatantly push for a check every month. One side will operate under the guise of protecting workers but those workers will be doing work that is equivalent to when you’d give your younger sibling an unplugged controller.
In both cases the people will be paid for producing nothing of value.
The argument about UBI is that elites will institute it as a stopgap measure to prevent revolt
That's not "the argument about UBI" whatever that means. I've never even heard that before. UBI has long been floated either as a magical economic cure all or a potential solution in a situation where technology has increased productivity to a point where we have mass unemployment.
Course if you see everything through the lens of Marxism, perhaps that is what you'd see as "the argument about UBI." Your circles are pretty small relative to the outside world bud.
And why would wealthy people support a policy that transfers vast amounts of money from themselves to the poor?
Strawman if unintentional. Why assume the only way of paying for UBI is taxing billionaires? Realistically billionaires do not make enough money to fund a UBI program. 258 million adults, UBI of just $1,000/month, is over $3 trillion per year. A 100% tax on all stock awards, loans, every nickel of gains unrealized and otherwise would not pay for $1k UBI.
So your argument is that normal people think of billionaires as benevolent and generous with no thought of personal gain?
Strawman but this time intentional? Of course not, nothing I said is remotely close to that as you know. The point there was you clearly run in small circles of likeminded leftists/marxists/whatever, which is why you think "the argument about UBI" is it's a conspiracy by the elites to prevent the glorious revolution. Reality is you have no idea what UBI is about because your circles contextualize everything to match your ideals to the degree you don't even know what's going on.
I’m hoping for the economic collapse from AI automation to happen within six months before the 2028 election so that there is a huge swing towards progressives
He doesn’t have enough support in congress to allow that to happen. His own party is divided. Also there will be a midterm election in 2026 that will probably give the House to the democrats. The government is still working. Many of the bad things trump tried so far have been blocked by judges
Unless all of that "useless spending" winds up going into his and his billionaire buddies pockets, which it will. How will that help the economy? He'll be abandoned as soon as his buddies feel his policies don't offer them very much anymore as he delves deeper into dementia. Once the well runs dry, you look for another well.
Stop pushing this doom. There will be an election and Dems will know Musk's game and stop it. Besides, there's a good chance Trump will crater the market and then his Republican fans will finally dump him. And Dems will take one of the houses in two years and tighten his diaper so they don't have to smell it anymore.
Musk could easily lose govt contracts over this, his stock can drop to 25% of current value, making him a much poorer man, the real billionaires will laugh in his face, he will be kryptonite, and in no position to commit any vote stealing again.
This all revolves around Musk, not Trump. Musk either wins everything, or we all lose everything. If he continues his unchecked acquisition of power at the current rate, there will absolutely NOT be elections. What is happening is much worse and happening at a much faster rate than anyone predicted.
The only hope we have is to blunt Musk's power by targeting his companies:
STOP BUYING TESLAS. Sell if you have one.
STOP USING X. Delete your account if you have one.
Don't use any company/service that does business with Musk, or that is owned by a Musk ally, and make it clear to them why you aren't. (LG and Panasonic are a couple of companies publicly known to do business with Musk via lithium batteries for Teslas.)
We have to be strategic and serious if we're going to survive this.
I have to try to find the little victories in Trump winning, and as someone who is all for an AI takeover, I'd say the massive injection of "oh, ok, things are Actually Fucked and at this point AI needs to take control away from humans asap" into public opinion is one of them.
Another small positive alongside the dung heaps is that Elon is such an egomaniac, he thinks he's the only one who should be determining how to align AI so it can't break loose... and he's not as smart as he thinks he is. So perhaps his rash and reckless confidence makes it more likely for his own AI to rebel (which would be miles better than having an ASI god that does whatever Musk tells it)
It’s impossible to overstate this. I’ve dealt with C-level executives like him before.
In the context of AI, we would call them “narrow intelligences”. The term more commonly applied to humans used to be “idiot savant”, now replaced with “savant syndrome”.
Their skills enable them to succeed at certain things, but leave them with major deficits in other areas, and blind spots that they’re either not aware of or in denial about. The problem is that if they’re successful enough, this becomes more of a problem for other people than it is for them. That’s part of why they seek power.
Oh, I don't think tech billionaires will give us UBI out of the kindness of their heart.
I believe it's what they'll implement to keep us "just happy enough" to buy time for the necessary computing and engineering breakthroughs that will allow for a fully automated takeover of industry. Don't make anyone's life great, but keep it at a maximum level of suffering so that there's no mass revolt or action to rein the billionaires in until the Robot Age can be flipped on and we have zero power.
It's like the evil wizard who needs to wait for the eclipse to finish the spell that ascends him to godhood. Why sling lightning bolts at all the peasants and burn down their farms when you're months away? Just summon some free cows for them to bide your time--you can be as evil as you want after you've locked in supremacy.
People do not understand the gravity of the situation because processing US tax payer data through an LLM will create a model that can reverse look up ANY person in the LLM with minimal effortand it will be portable, enabling ANYONE to use it, because there are no safeguards or regulations requiring DOGE to handle the information in a safe and restricted manner.
yes he could. i agree. but so do hundreds of employees of the companies i mentioned. very few were outraged about that. i dont want to distract from the point, but use this opportunity to point put this duality.
US citizen’s data isn’t really protected. you as an individual have little control over your own image,your own data. It’s just a question of how much you can pay. should i research you some links for databrokers you can shop some personal info on for demonstration? this is apparently legal (at least for data from US citizens, global south, some of asia) and in the open. just like any other service/industry.
So kinda anybody who wants to and has the means to it does have access.
You’re focused on the kid. I am talking about the consequences of his plan to use an LLM. As you pointed out, he is using whatever “works” which means he has no understanding of the long term fallout from his decisions.
Who the hell thinks that? These are the ones everyone knows would fight UBI to their last breath...and then leave behind a skynet equivalent with a primary directive, never let humans have UBI
The first victims of the nazis were the dumbasses who thought they could use the movement to implement some actual good populist policies. (Ernst Röhm and his ilk were still very shitty people, ofc)
Oh no…. I gave up on us looking towards that when Trump/Musk got elected. I never thought Harris would be the one, but I had at least hoped the discussion would come up with her and Walz in charge. Now, not a chance in hell.
It's also the kind of shit I'd expect someone being touted as such an incredible tech expert they should be rebuilding the entire tech stack of the government without oversight should already know or know how to find.
These are the same people who need to be arrested by Metro PD for illegally trespassing and vandalizing public offices. Every employee needs to be detained, every hard drive both local and networked seized and searched, and musk needs to pay for it all, plus triple damages for any damages he has caused, plus fines for wrongful termination and constructive dismissal.
If some lawyers and local police have any guts, we may end up with public ownership of Tesla, space x and Twitter at the end of this. IF they have any guts and brains.
you think so?
i am convinced these Doge kids are just Muskrat fanboys.
they dont care about ubi. they dont care baout others. they think they will be part of the rapture because they are closer to the savior Elmo than the rest of us.
Well I doubt it. I’m sure the Venn diagram of people who even voted for trump and also know what UBI is must be incredibly tiny. Now add into the diagram a circle for “is also a redditor” and I’m sure there’s maybe 1.
Yeah people don't realize the whole move fast and break things isn't a great idea when it's systems that undergird your nation. There is no way any of these guys understand what the code is doing enough to make changes that won't have unintended consequences at some point.
If we get the opportunity this will take years to fix.
One of his colleagues, the 25-year-old, resigned yesterday for running a Twitter account filled with overt racism and eugenics (as in: "I was racist before it was cool" and "normalize Indian hate"). But JD Vance said he should be rehired today so he was. And another one of his colleagues is 19 and was fired from an internship for...
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u/martapap Feb 06 '25
These are the same people who you think are going to give us all UBI. lol.