alt Hacker NewsI can like the concept of the engine, and the leverage it provides, but I hate traffic and get anxious about having an accident on the freeway. And the people behind the industrial revolution have destroyed the climate.
I love computers and the internet, and the internet has ruined a lot of people and things around me.
It's possible to be interested in a new technology and enjoy its leverage while still being extremely apprehensive about how it intersects with game theory and politics. The race to the bottom of the barrel keeps coming for the jugular of every cool new thing.
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I’ve been starting to think that a lot of the variance in how people see the world can be explained by whether their attention is drawn to first-order localized effects, or nth-order distributed effects. This is not the same thing as optimism vs. pessimism, but it sure is correlated!
This resonates with me and I suspect a lot of others here. As always life is more nuanced that many would have argue.
Well, we have a good understanding of the benefits that the industrial revolution and the computing revolution have given us.
The AI situation is different. The technology is obviously extraordinarily powerful but the benefits to humanity are still nebulous and there are many very obvious harms like the one we're discussing. So to describe yourself as "aggressively pro AI" you must believe that future, as-yet unrealized benefits will outweigh the harms. I don't think that's a crazy thing to believe but it deserves scrutiny and demands elaboration.