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Sure, but there's an important economic subtlety here: to the extent that work is goal-aligned, it doesn't need to be paid. You could do it independently, or as partners, or something. Whereas every hour worked doing the employer's bidding, and every dollar paid for it, must be due to goals that aren't aligned or are differently weighted (for example, because the worker cares comparatively more about feeding their family). So it makes more sense to me to view every employment relationship, to the extent it exists, as transactional: the employer wants one thing, the worker another, and they exchange labor for money. I think it's a simpler and more grounded way to think about work, at least when you're a worker.

I think all AI research makes AGI easier, so "non-AGI AI research" might not be a thing. And even if I'm wrong about that, it also seems to me that most harms of AGI could come from tool AI + humans just as well. So I'm not sure the question is right. Tbh I'd just stop most AI work.

Interesting, your comment follows the frame of the OP, rather than the economic frame that I proposed. In the economic frame, it almost doesn't matter whether you ban sexual relations at work or not. If the labor market is a seller's market, workers will just leave bad employers and flock to better ones, and the problem will solve itself. And if the labor market is a buyer's market, employers will find a way to extract X value from workers, either by extorting sex or by other ways - you're never going to plug all the loopholes. The buyer's market vs seller's market distinction is all that matters, and all that's worth changing. The great success of the union movement was because it actually shifted one side of the market, forcing the other side to shift as well.

I think this is a good topic to discuss, and the post has many good insights. But I kinda see the whole topic from a different angle. Worker well-being can't depend on the goodness of employers, because employers gonna be bad if they can get away with it. The true cause of worker well-being is supply/demand changes that favor workers. Examples: 1) unionizing was a supply control which led to 9-5 and the weekend, 2) big tech jobs became nice because good engineers were rare, 3) UBI would lead to fewer people seeking jobs and therefore make employers behave better.

To me these examples show that, apart from market luck, the way to improve worker well-being is coordinated action. So I mostly agree with banning 80 hour workweeks, regulating gig work, and the like. We need more such restrictions, not less. The 32-hour work week seems like an especially good proposal: it would both make people spend less time at work, and make jobs easier to find. (And also make people much happier, as trials have shown.)

I think the main question is how to connect technological progress (which is real) to moral progress (which is debatable). People didn't expect that technological progress would lead to factory farming or WMDs, but here we are.

  1. I’m worried about centralization of power and wealth in opaque non-human decision-making systems, and those who own the systems.

This has been my main worry for the past few years, and to me it counts as "doom" too. AIs and AI companies playing by legal and market rules (and changing these rules by lobbying, which is also legal) might well lead to most humans having no resources to survive.

I feel like instead of flipping out you could just say "eh, I don't agree with this community's views on gender, I'm more essentialist overall". You don't actually have to convince anyone or get convinced by them. Individual freedom and peaceful coexistence is fine. The norm that "Bayesians can't agree to disagree" should burn in a fire.

I'm no longer sure the question makes sense, and to the extent it makes sense I'm pessimistic. Things probably won't look like one AI taking over everything, but more like an AI economy that's misaligned as a whole, gradually eclipsing the human economy. We're already seeing the first steps: the internet is filling up with AI generated crap, jobs are being lost to AI, and AI companies aren't doing anything to mitigate either of these things. This looks like a plausible picture of the future: as the AI economy grows, the money-hungry part of it will continue being stronger than the human-aligned part. So it's only a matter of time before most humans are outbid / manipulated out of most resources by AIs playing the game of money with each other.

Amazing post. I already knew that filtered evidence can lead people astray, and that many disagreements are about relative importance of things, but your post really made everything "click" for me. Yes, of course if what people look at is correlated with what they see, that will lead to polarization. And even if people start out equally likely to look at X or Y, but seeing X makes them marginally more likely to look at X in the future rather than Y, then some people will randomly polarize toward X and others toward Y.

I think we're using at most 1% of the potential of geniuses we already have. So improving that usage can lead to 100x improvement in everything, without the worries associated with 100x population. And it can be done much faster than waiting for people to be born. (If AI doesn't make it all irrelevant soon, which it probably will.)

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