Lugh

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
 

The new pope's choice of name was deliberate; he chose it to honor Pope Leo XIII who was Pope from 1878 - 1903. Leo XIII is famous for taking a left-wing stance on workers' rights in response to the Industrial Revolution, and calling for state pensions, social security, and other reforms rooted in social democracy.

It will be interesting to see what Pope Leo XIV calls for. Universal Basic Income? It wouldn't surprise me. The day is soon coming that humans won't be able to economically compete with ultra-cheap AI/robot-employee staffed businesses.

Some people scoff at the notion of the Catholic Church concerning itself with such things. If they do, they're underestimating the Church's vast soft power. Vatican City might be the world's smallest state, but the Catholic Church is arguably the preeminent global superpower when it comes to soft power.

There are 1.4 billion Catholics, and if the church decides to support UBI, it will have a vast reach to sway politicians in 100+ countries on almost every continent.

 

In an interview this week, Mark Zuckerberg said most Americans have only 3 friends, but they'd like 15. Never fear, he has a solution to how to get 5 times more friends. Meta will create AI friends for you. As it will own them, as befits the world's second largest advertising company, their primary purpose will really be to sell you stuff.

Even in an episode of 'Black Mirror', this vision of the future would rank as one of the bleaker dystopian hellscapes. It says something about how out of touch Big Tech has become with the lives of ordinary people, it never even occurred to Mark Zuckerberg how appalling this sounds to most people.

 

Switching Chinese factory jobs to America has been in the news a lot lately. Many people have pointed out it doesn't make much sense. Do Americans really want sweatshop-wage jobs making sneakers?

Another reason it doesn't make sense is that China is dumping those jobs anyway - replacing the humans with robots. The numbers are startling. If the trends of the last ten years continue, China will be creating 1 million industrial robots by 2029. By 2032, it will be creating more industrial robots, than there were new human jobs in the US in 2024. Robots may even be adopted on an s-curve, and be adopted in far higher numbers sooner.

Where is this heading? Will the robots keep the aging Chinese population economically afloat? Will using humans in factories instead of robots in the US be seen as a noble alternative to the socialism of UBI?

Source: Rise of China's Robotics Industry: from Manufacturing Arms to Embodied AI

[–] Lugh 4 points 9 months ago

It's interesting to wonder how many hitherto unseen patterns in science and nature AI will find.

[–] Lugh 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Human attention is a finite resource. There aren't enough people to be interested in all this AI auto generated slop. If anything a deluge of AI-generated slop will make people more interested in focusing on humans they find interesting.

[–] Lugh 10 points 9 months ago (8 children)

There's so much to legitimately worry about with AI, that we often lose sight of its potential good.

[–] Lugh 1 points 9 months ago

Building trustworthy AI won’t be easy, but it’s essential.

It doesn't seem a top priority for most of the people creating AI. I suspect we will mainly be learning from our mistakes here, after they've happened.

[–] Lugh 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

These brain-computer interfaces are usually discussed in the context of disabled and paralyzed people,  but I wonder what they could do for regular people as well.  It's interesting here to see how quickly the brain adapts to brand-new sensory information from the computer interface,  it makes you wonder what new ways we could interact with computers that we haven't thought of.

[–] Lugh 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Pony.ai will be operating robotaxis at the Hong Kong International Airport as shuttles for airport employees

Airport trips seem like perfect territory for level 4 self-driving vehicles. Many of the journeys to and from airports are from well established pickup and drop off points.

[–] Lugh 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It wasn't so long ago, when people tried to refute the argument that AI and robotics automation would lead to human workers being replaced, they'd say - don't worry the displaced humans can just learn to code. There will always be jobs there, right?

[–] Lugh 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The fundamental problem is this: we tend to think about democracy as a phenomenon that depends on the knowledge and capacities of individual citizens, even though, like markets and bureaucracies, it is a profoundly collective enterprise......................Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking.

I think there is a lot of validity to this way of looking at things. We need new types of institutions to deal with the 21st century information world. When it comes to politics and information, much of our ideas and models for organizing and thinking about things come from the 18th and 19th century.

[–] Lugh 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

OpenAI is on a treadmill. It has vast amounts of investor billions pouring into it and needs to show results. Meanwhile, open source AI is snapping at its heels in every direction. If it is true that it is holding back on AI agents out of caution, I'm pretty sure that won't last long.

[–] Lugh 1 points 10 months ago

Interesting to see that the G1 is still aimed at developers and is not for mass market consumers. I wonder how long it will be before there is a layer of AI software on top of what it currently is, that means it can be more widely sold.

[–] Lugh 6 points 10 months ago

Thanks, we'll keep track of what they are doing.

view more: ‹ prev next ›