Especially with Sanders who has sponsored or co-authored 2 laws[1][2] that have passed and were signed into law, and a few pieces of minor legislation renaming post offices.
[1] Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 2013
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/2095542398084415952
“We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Countries around the world must work together to prevent this nightmare scenario.
That is why today I am announcing new legislation to do just that.”
You actually support an intelligence beyond human control. Yes, you are evil. Anyone who supports anything that will obviously end humanity is evil. Notice I did not comment on pausing AI and I said ‘in principle’.
Your AI utopia requires an independently acting autonomous agent? What is the purpose of that?
And you are not seriously engaging with anything I’ve written I’ll add. The definition Bernie Sanders has for superintelligence involves it having the capability to “plan and execute the disempowerment of humanity”. That is going to lead to the end of humanity but feel free to quibble in support of what Sanders had set up as obviously severely undesirable.
>And you are not seriously engaging with anything I’ve written
Why should I? You've already declared me a traitor to humanity. You can't expect people to take your opinions seriously if you don't take theirs seriously.
In fairness, I personally believe anyone who thinks that uncontrolled super-intelligence will be the automatic outcome is an absolute idiot likely to have a below-average IQ, but that probably leaves me and most people on equal footing with you in the “no one actually cares what your opinion is” race.
Apparently, some people lack the technical understanding that an AI, by itself, literally can’t do anything at all and that it is the tools and harnessing provided to an AI that allows it to perform any type of action. Given this is such basic and fundamental knowledge to anyone who even attempts to understand how they work, I can only assume they are incapable of understanding. I would love to hear the intelligent basis for your ideas on how disagreeing with stupidity makes them a traitor.
I’m happy to supply the low IQ take so that you understand it friend.
This whole comment thread is not asserting that uncontrollable superintelligence is the automatic outcome. It is that everyone should agree it is undesirable, hence why I said that part of the bill may as well be virtue signaling. Anybody who thinks an uncontrollable superintelligence which can and will likely disempower humanity is a traitor to humanity. This should be obvious.
I remember reading a study which determined one basic property shared by people of low intelligence is the inability to reason about hypotheticals. Let me walk through this slowly for you, as you are the one who said this, “ I personally believe anyone who thinks that uncontrolled super-intelligence will be the automatic outcome is an absolute idiot likely to have a below-average IQ”.
IF someone supports an uncontrollable superintelligence, THEN they have bad intentions for humanity (=traitor).
I understand that you don’t understand. Reiterating that doesn’t help.
No one, at all, at any point “supported” uncontrollable super-intelligence. They questioned your idiotic reasoning of how not believing in your ASSumed outcome makes them traitorous. Which you’ve still failed to be capable of recognizing, thus making it all the more humorous to read.
I understand that is what you’re doing, but I’m not sure why you’re doing it. Because I’ve explained to you multiple times I was just commenting that Bernie Sanders needn’t include this obvious point in the bill. However I guess he should since there are people like you out there who simply cannot grasp obvious points.
Yes, you’ve been trolling everyone in this thread about how they are traitors in response to them questioning someone who stated that anyone who disagreed with pausing AI are traitors because they support “super intelligence”, not even “uncontrolled”. You didn’t “just” do anything, and you should probably try reading your comments and the context again rather than whatever obvious point you thought you were “just” making. I mean that is why you just made an observation and moved on? Right?
Nah, it was this instead:
“I was just saying they didn’t need to include some text, repeatedly, 28 times while saying people are traitors. But then I’m gonna try to say I wasn’t actually doing that even though I did it repeatedly, because obviously everyone else was just too stupid to understand my absolutely useless observation that I felt I needed to defend repeatedly because obviously everyone is too dumb to understand my incredible observatory powers, and people couldn’t possibly be disagreeing because I look like an idiot repeatedly trolling about people being traitors.”
Did you really think everyone was disagreeing that it wasn’t necessary? You really are something, fun times watching it though, but hey, you should definitely repeat that silly observation one more time.
“They included a provision to certify again that they agree with common sense, how unnecessary!” No kidding dumb-dumb… that’s why they do it…so people voting against it can be labeled traitors to humanity…like you’ve been doing…
Does it really need to be spelled out so plainly how useless your observation is and the net effect of your incessant replying to people who disagree with the person you decided to defend with your “observation”? Nevermind, apparently it does since your 6 defensive comments deep “just” making an observation.
You are literally unable to hold a hypothetical in your head, just like in that study. It’s amazing. I’m trying to help you understand what this thread is about but you simply cannot do it.
Okay so a conditional works like this. There is a proposition A implies B. This does not mean A is true or false. It means that if A actually were true, then B would also be true.
We're going to use it to do incredible things that would otherwise be forever beyond our ability - a post-work economy, science fiction technologies, advanced mathematics, etc.
How do you know that? If an advanced alien species visited us do you suppose our interaction would be limited to their sharing their knowledge with us?
In the USA, thousands of people are killed every year by car drivers. This is tolerated without a peep, relatively speaking, even though 20 times as many pedestrians are killed by drivers as are killed by mass shootings that dominate the news and voter issues.
So I predict the number of people we will tolerate being killed every year to have good AI will be more than zero, much more.
We decided after the Sandy Hook massacre that it was okay for a few kids to die in shootings every year so that people could keep their gun rights. Thank the gun lobby.
You can thank the Oil and Car lobby groups for Congress' silence on car issues.
As long as that sweet sweet blood money keeps flowing into the pockets of politicians, nothing will get better.
I think this is a false comparison. We do indeed tolerate a number. But we also regulate heavily to try and minimize that to a point where we do not negatively impact society (i.e. speed limit of 65mph on Highways, not 10 mph).
I think right now, given this is all very new, we can and should be looking at regulation as we start to identify what shoudl be the upper limit.
In my view, AI is our best shot at a post-scarcity society where massive redistribution has no/few downsides. If all labor is done by AIs then the price of everything will go to near zero and everyone can have a government mandated middle class lifestyle. Therefore I find it ironic that leftists oppose AI progress.
"Technology will free mankind from labor and usher in an era where everyone is simply allocated whatever they requre" was a staple of leftism up until the USSR collapsed.
The difference is that today, unlike in the 20th century, there's a feasible path to post-scarcity. It's not "around the corner" but there's a path if you squint. Myabe it won't pan out, but it's worth a shot. The irony is that leftists want to ban AI to preserve scarcity thereby protecting people's jobs.
I think the difficulty for many people is not imagining a path to post-scarcity, per se, but instead that they have been given no commitments by their government or business leaders that they will get to benefit from it, after it is achieved.
It’s one thing to say something like: AI will enable lights out manufacturing and replace virtually all employees in that sector.
To which those employees respond: What will happen to us?
And they are told: things will be great, you won’t need to work in the factories any longer, and we will have no shortage of goods.
Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”
Well, historically, it's sort of worked out on its own. Automation displaces workers but also creates new jobs in other sectors. We have maintained full employment at higher wages.
That said, some displaced workers have experienced substantial difficulty moving to other industries, especially if those new jobs are in different cities or countries. And it is also possible that this time is different, although I'm not convinced.
That can work as long as consumption can increase infinitely to meet increased production. Unless consumption continues to increase, we will find ourselves unable to produce those new jobs in other industries.
But said history was not peaceful. Business leaders repeatedly attempted to use these transformations in tons of ways to screw over workers - for example, the only reason we no longer have lots of small children being mangled or killed at their factory jobs is because of workers who protested against unsafe working conditions and child labor. I see no reason to expect anything better from our corporate overlords of today, who are generally gleefully supporting fascist movements, or getting involved in illegally decimating government programs.
Given how much control capitalists have over almost every mechanism for organizing, I don't even know if such labor movements would still be possible today.
> Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”
This process will take generations. Over time, people will work less and less as productivity steadily increases (we already see this in the pre-AI era as technology has accumulated). Eventually, AI will do all necessary labor and goods/services will be incredibly cheap. Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.
Also, it's possible that this technology just doesn't pan out. There could be a bottleneck or a nuclear war or whatever. Maybe it just stops scaling, or it stays in the realm of text-generation and can't replace manual labor. But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
> This process will take generations... Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.
I think the crux is in how fast you think the technology is developing. The widespread view in Silicon Valley is that drop-in remote workers will be a reality within a couple years. Sam Altman is already claiming that AGI has been achieved [1]. Jack Clark from Anthropic puts a >50% chance on recursive self-improvement by the end of 2028 [2]. This is an enormous sector of labor being made redundant in a very short amount of time.
So the actions taken in this specific administration over these next few years become pivotal. The industry is unregulated and currently undergoing explosive growth in a way we haven't seen since the railroads, in entirely the wrong direction to Sanders' interests. He is a major player in the political process, so of course he will take measures to get things under control.
> But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
That's why the bill is about "temporarily pausing" development, not banning it forever.
This is to say nothing of the catastophic risks that the bill is actually mostly about, not just the labor disruptions.
There is no such thing as a post-scarcity world. Some resources are inherently scarce, such as social status, lifetime, or political power. As a result, even when productivity increases the benefits are hoarded by the few who wish to stand above all others. This has always held true regardless of political system.
If it weren't for that, we already live in a post-scarcity world. But as such a state is anathema to the human condition, we continually strive to create new forms of scarcity that can separate the elite from the commons.
Scarcity of status, fame, power, etc may be inevitable -- but that's fine. After all, people need stuff to do.
But if we solve food, hunger, housing, education, healthcare, and entertainment then that's enough for me. And no, it's not "the current political system" that prevents us from solving those problems now. Rather it's that engine of production is human labor, which forces us to rely on incentives.
When was the last time the United States had a famine caused by there not being enough food rather than because we decided certain people don't deserve food? Everything you named is a political problem caused by the desire to concentrate status, fame, and power. These are not problems that lack a technological solution.
In some sense I agree with you that starvation in the modern world is a political problem. Evidence for that is the common observation that famines don't occur in functioning liberal democracies.
But food production relies on more than technology. Human labor is necessary to produce food, and so incentives have to exist for people to do that work (prices, free markets, capitalism, inequality, etc). So if we decide "everyone deserves free food" then we are undermining the production of food. Why would people work in the fields when they could just collect their free food? Scarcity won't be truly gone until food is abundant whether or not there are any people working the fields.
Doesn't that just shift the problem away from incentivizing humans to incentivizing the godkings who own the robots? The scarcity becomes robot manufacturing.
Why should the owners undermine the value of their robots by providing free food for all? Those robots could be put to better use fighting wars instead.
Today, the decentralized nature of human labor means we have to incentivize people in broad ways. But if there's like 5 AI companies doing all the labor with their robots, we can just tax them and redistribute.
The owners/workers at AI companies won't resist the redistribution. It will be seen as inevitable as AI performs a greater and greater share of labor. Also, the AI company owners/workers will accrue massive status and fame; which will become the new currency (like you noted in your first post).
> The owners/workers at AI companies won't resist the redistribution.
I find this to be a somewhat incredible claim. I don't find it easy to believe such a thing. You can bring up enlightened self interest if you want, but you're going up against the entire history of humanity. I think it's more likely that something else will happen instead.
For example, you're underestimating the influence that being the ones to control all the labor in a society will grant these entities. When they reject your demands and send in the robot military to maintain order, how are you going to resist? Why should they bend when controlling all the labor will allow them to win?
This is what happens when people get "the entire history of humanity" from Howard Zinn-like sources. Healthy, stable societies are not based on the threat of violence, but rather consensual submission to a rule of law. As a rule, humans cooperate, play fairly, and want others to admire and respect them.
Why would the people who have control over this enormous automated labor force agree to taxation? How will you make them pay up if they tell you "no" and hide behind their robot army?
1. The government is already mostly focused on the needs of the rich, so this is anything but guaranteed. But say the government tries to force the rich - how, the military? Depending on the number of robots and how much military equipment is available (since the factories are fully controlled by the rich), it would turn into a numbers game.
Yet even with fewer robots than necessary for certain victory, if enough households own a robot, the rich could easily force the government to stand down by taking a small percentage of the population hostage.
2. They don't care about reputation, or we wouldn't have examples like "doing funny arm gestures at an inauguration" or the openly corrupt dealings we're seeing these days. Above status and fame they primarily care about power, but enslaving everyone else would give them all 3 of those things. And let's not act like they're too rational to delude themselves into thinking they'd still be morally righteous - again, just look at so many recent examples.
3. Attitudes don't stop bullets.
Really, I'd love to be wrong on all this, and for the Epstein class to be better than what they show everyone. But our system makes the greediest among us rise to the top, and after so many blatantly cruel actions I can't believe anyone still gives them the benefit of the doubt.
The other difference is that the current admin is possibly the least likely in American history to support a massive redistribution and "government mandated middle class lifestyle". And the development of this technology has thus far been without the consent of those whose livelihoods are most threatened by it. It's no wonder Sanders and other leftists want more oversight.
The other difference is that the current admin is possibly the least likely in American history to support a massive redistribution and "government mandated middle class lifestyle".
If there's a way Trump can claim credit for it, he'll have no problem with it. He has no actual ideology beyond self-promotion and self-enrichment.
Labor is one thing, but there will always be some scarcity such as natural resources. I still doubt all labor could be done by AI alone at any point in the next couple generations.
Whenever I hear AI (or a token predictor in its current form) will solve some universal problem like hunger etc., a picture comes to my mind. . It's a picture of a mom breaking bricks with a hammer to be used for molding concrete, with a child nearby playing, who is tied with a rope to a pole. It's not an imaginary picture, it's real, etched in my memory from childhood. It's a reality that's driven by scarcity- of food and security.
How will AI solve this to bring post scarcity society?
Is there any evidence that "all labor" could be done by AI?
It doesn't seem to me like we have any guarantee that AI will contribute to public wellbeing. Right now, the public is socializing the losses while the industry privatizes the technology and cozies up to the federal government. LLMs will be usable for mass surveillance and war long before it ever leads us to a post-scarcity society.
HN has plenty of comments critical of AI training and AI in general. I don't think "Big AI" has downvote bot armies here, or if there are, they really need improvement because they clearly haven't been working lately.
First of all, lefists oppose AI progress _because_ all labor is to be done by AIs. If corporations and states only need you for your labor and that can be done more cheaply by machines, then why keep you around at all?
Second of all, the massive redistribution shows no signs of appearing anytime soon. In the meantime the industry is in the midst of hysteria about a "permanent underclass" [1]. And this is all happening using models built off of the works of all writers, artists, and creatives everywhere, which said creatives have to then rent from the labs.
I don't think everyone having a middle class lifestyle where prices go near zero is what AI bros mean when they say AI will create a "permanent underclass".
Actually, Heaven is our best shot at a post-scarcity society /s
AI has achieved the same religious undertones as your average cult. Is the new god of the gaps for some tech people. The wild card to achieve anything.
If people like him their way, we'd still be farming with shovels and weaving our clothes by hand.
Banning automation is shortsighted and stupid; you refuse to let people increase the size of the pie because you're worried it'll make your fraction smaller. But a smaller fraction of a bigger pie is still a bigger piece.
That's not what the bill is about. Did you read the article? It's explicitly about catastrophic risks:
> “Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control... That’s why I am introducing legislation to immediately pause the development of increasingly powerful AI and ban the creation of systems that humanity cannot fully control"
How is this supposed to stop development outside of the US?
If AI turns evil, it will probably not discriminate on which countries to destroy. So Sanders kneecapping the USA won’t slow China, which could result in global destruction anyway.
Without global agreement ( and intrusive monitoring ), it doesn’t seem useful.
If we're banning superintelligence, we might as well ban genies from granting wishes and aliens from outside the solar system from establishing residence on Earth.
Something gives me the feeling that Sanders and Chomsky were both put on this earth to manufacture liberal hysteria towards AI. It's a good thing that we discredited Chomsky before we knew about his Epstein connections, and I'm inclined to ignore Sanders' armchair fearmongering in the same vein too. It's artificial and bizarre, and a fear that I cannot empathize with given what we know and see from LLMs.
That is very rational. Finally some politicians realize that there can be AI treaties with Russia and China similar to the INF treaty (banned medium range nuclear missiles). The INF treaty worked from 1987 until Trump tore it up in 2019.
If Sanders were actually serious about trying to make the world a better place, he'd be more vocal about impeaching Trump and support Congress' efforts to do so. I get it, AI's an easy target.
(Don't get me wrong, I agree with the guy on many, many points. But attempting to ban development of something with so much money riding on it is laughably naive)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...