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So the answer to a problem the police and authorities already know about is a surveillance state for everyone? How are ever more cameras going to fix the drug abuse/homlessness problem?

Reminds me of Winston in 1984 doing his best to look like he doesn't have thought crimes in his head. What are we doing here?

We could have had this same argument about social media 15 years ago before hard evidence showed it's not quite the net benefit to society it was touted as.

This is one way you know billionaires have too much sway over the government.

Only C-suite members and billionaires have political representation in the US.

The industry can be regulated and taxed like anything else.

Yeah, and it should be. But the USA, at least in this current moment, builds regulations catering to corporations and the rich over people's general needs. So the regulations that are on the table at the national level are ineffective.

It's easier for normal people to influence local regulations, but local regulations just push the problem somewhere else. However disdain for AI is so widespread that this is actually kind of effective.


disdain for dumping industrial sludge into rivers is quite high too. if you don’t demand regulated domestic production it will just get moved to the least regulated place with the best underlying economics, I imagine you know this though…

Yeah, I agree with you! Regulation of that kind of environmental problem works better the more land is covered. National is best, statewide is meaningful (if you are in a geographically large state). Local is better than doing literally nothing, but it does have the nasty side effect of pushing the problem out of people's sight :(

> AI can scale intensively and extensively. AI can be scaled up by upping the compute budgets. AI can be replicated and copied indefinitely. AI doesn't have the innate human "I don't live to work, I work to live" overhead. AI can outclass human intelligence by a long shot.

These are claims about future AI, not actual facts. Part of the counter argument is the world will already be awash in AIs institutions and individuals make use of. An ASI would arise in a world that is already full of formidable intelligences that provide a check on what it can do. This is what happened with the evolution of replicators/life. No species was able to fully dominate the biosphere because there are too many other capable replicators, and there are always tradeoffs in capabilities.

We imagine the possibility of an unrestrained god-like ASI ruling the solar system. But it's just that, an imagination backed by the assumption that self-recursive improvement leads there. Problem is, the real world never turns out to be that simple.

It's probably the case that alien ASI replicators aren't devouring the universe either because of various restraints.


Infinities aren't a physical reality. Resource are always limited, physics is limited at the Planck scale. You can only do so much compute in a finite volume of space, and there will only be so much energy available.

As for simple needs, humans also have complex ones around social interactions and the need for mental stimulation.


Infinity is....subtle.

They are more characterized by how they grow and when they stop than by their "physical reality". Proof of this is in that different infinities exist - characterized precisely by how fast they grow, i.e., one "infinity" is "larger" than the other.

My point is, getting hung up on "infinity" as being unrealistic is not the point. It is the tool with which to understand how thing behave. The same as any calculus problem - you take the limit to the infinity to understand how the function behaves.


Not sure the college graduating class feels great about AI.

Trump's approval rating is in the mid to high 30 percentile even according to Fox News polling. He's lost most of the independents and minority coalition vote who naively thought the economy go back to what it was in his first term pre Covid-inflation. Never mind his love for tariffs and fossil fuels.

I don't really understand what the 35%+ still sees in Trump. Massive fraud, abuse of power, covering up Epstein files, more war in the ME, the president is ranting at 3am on his social media. He's falling asleep in meetings and looking more frail all the time. And worst of all, he's still trying to undermine elections.

Guess I have to accept the fact that 1/3 of the American public wants an authoritarian figure to rule over us without any real checks or balances. They don't want anyone in Congress or the courts to oppose his excesses.


> I don't really understand what the 35%+ still sees in Trump. Massive fraud, abuse of power, covering up Epstein files, more war in the ME, the president is ranting at 3am on his social media. He's falling asleep in meetings and looking more frail all the time. And worst of all, he's still trying to undermine elections.

None of this is particularly different from what he said he'd do. This is a felon who tried to overthrow the 2020 election. But the US decided he was the person they wanted to preside of their country for 4 years.

And that 35% was about nearer 50% before their gas prices went up. Its nothing to do with Epstein, 3am rants, sleeping, shitting himself, pulling broadcast licenses, stealing billions from the tax payer and from pension funds, or about war, its solely because a few people are having to spend a little more to full up their monster trucks

If trump decided to give a $3 a gallon subsidy on gas prices his ratings would shoot back up.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people


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