alt Hacker NewsI don’t want to go back to the past, I want to go toward a future that looks good and fair for regular people. Technology doesn’t provide some divine mandate to build whatever will make the owners more money with no regard for people or the planet.
I don’t want to go back to the past, I want to go toward a future that looks good and fair for regular people. Technology doesn’t provide some divine mandate to build whatever will make the owners more money with no regard for people or the planet.
> I want to go toward a future that looks good and fair for regular people.
Do we agree that moving towards a future that's somehow "more advanced" as compared to the present (i.e. isn't going back to the past) would likely require giving up some land, water, and energy? That is, that progress is always a trade-off?
We don't have to agree that an AI-powered future specifically is "more advanced". For example, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is IMO a future that looks "good and fair for regular people". But building solar panels requires energy and water, placing them requires lots of land, building batteries requires mining lithium which is bad for the local environment, building hydro power destroys ecosystems, etc.
I imagine you don't oppose this because it's overall better for humans and the planet. I'm just making the point that there are nontrivial trade-offs, and building anything requires the use of resources such as land, water, and energy.
If we're in agreement so far, then I think the main thing we're in disagreement about is whether AI is actually worth the cost. ("What does this 'future' do for us besides take our jobs?")
And to this I'd ask, how should we handle such disagreements in a free society? I may think that Mr. Beast recreating Squid Game was a profligate waste of human and non-human capital, just to make a buck. Or more seriously, I'm a vegetarian. Worldwide, meat and dairy production accounts for (very roughly) 80% of agricultural land use [1], 30% of agriculture's water use [2], and 15% of total human GHG emissions [3]. I don't think the benefit is worth the extreme cost.
People disagree with me about Mr. Beast and beef, though. They think that these are worth the cost to land, water, energy, and the planet overall.
My question is, how should we resolve disagreements of this kind, where one person thinks another person's actions are spending resources in a way that is not worth the return? It seems much larger than AI.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 [3] https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1634679