"Tech might bring more inequality, but what is the problem with it if it substantially increases everyones standard of living?"
The problem is that ultimately, wealth inequality decreases the standard of living for most people. There are a finite amount of resources. This world we live in is finite. And these resources are being concentrated at the top, in the hands of a few, which leads to less and less of these finite resources being available for more and more people. Although economics is of course complex to some degree, don't lose sight of this very simple mechanism because it is a reality.
"I would argue that is caused by regulatory capture and government interference (e.g. zoning laws) and not technological progress"
If by regulatory capture, you are referring to regulatory corruption influenced by lobbying, then yes, of course that is increasing wealth inequality, and thus decreasing standard of living. Regarding government interference - it's the exact opposite of what you say - proper government interference is what we need. Under current conditions our economic system is not distributing wealth properly. That much is evident and easy to see. And there will be worse living conditions under more stark wealth inequality as opposed to a more even distribution of resources. As mentioned, this world we live in is finite. If these finite resources are syphoned to the hands of very few individuals, this leaves less of these finite resources for the rest of human beings. And as mentioned, tech has contributed to accelerating this, for the reasons mentioned in my above post. So, as mentioned, what we need is government interference. This means taxing heavily the areas that the finite resources I have spoken of are getting concentrated in and redistributing them more evenly.
At some point, I became disenchanted with tech and working as a software engineer when I realized that tech doesn't ethically fit into our primitive economic organization right now. It's made me feel bad about myself and the career path I've chosen.
Basically, with tech, you can build a product with a very limited amount of people and resources with a potentially infinite customer base. And this means that this product can suck up money from the whole world and redirect it into the hands of very few. At its essence, this is the case. With tech, this phenomena is exacerbated to the extreme compared to other industries where more physical resources and labor are required to scale production and distribution of the product, which means more wealth getting spread.
At its core, tech has the potential to exacerbate wealth inequality in mind-boggling proportions.
The posters here seem to be highly skeptical of the need to regulate emerging AI.
I find that pretty disappointing and surprising.
Recently, they gave gpt-4 access to a terminal, the internet, and money. And gpt-4 itself is a software (and software in general has bugs, vulnerabilities, etc) black box that is incredibly, unprecedentedly powerful and not fully understood. Part of its training data is almost every known security vulnerability.
You guys really don’t see any potential problems with this? I mean really? Get a little creative here.
I agree with many of your points, but I think you misunderstand my intent a bit. It’s not about providing more info. It’s about providing a nurturing friend to help one in life.
In addition to this, this nurturing friend would try to convey some key and crucial points about developing as a human that I think are important to understand.
Humans need to get information/transmission of a few key points that leads to their own wisdom and discernment flourishing.
This bit of information would be built into my ideal ai, and it would convey it to human beings in the most beneficial way possible. It would even be built into its character.
And humans need a supportive and nurturing friend for the rocky road that is life.
Those are my intentions
By the way, the benevolent ai would advise you to stop taking in so much new info every day (doomscrolling, too much news), as it leads to disorientation, chaos, confusion, and discombobulation in one’s mind :)
Here is my thinking, can’t be too elaborate because I’m typing on a phone keyboard, but here it is:
We live in the age of information. The amount of information out there is limitless.
This being the case, the importance lies in how a human being interfaces with this vast amount of information and which information out of the vast ocean of information is presented. Therefore curation is important. User experience is important. Discernment of what is actually valuable for a human being is also important. And how the user interacts with it is also important.
Chatgpt is one form of crafting this user interface/experience. There are other ways to go about it. The feel of the interface itself, how it presents itself to the human, and what exactly it presents are all key.
This is very different than say, an encyclopedia in which there is no discernment/bias of what is actually important for a human to know + very bad ui/ux.
And also, most importantly, a human will die. An ai model will not. A human can only speak to one person at a time. An ai model could speak to countless.
I want to build a benevolent, kind, caring and nurturing AI that one can go to for learning, understanding and support in navigating this world and being human.
I want to dump key knowledge into it that I have been fortunate enough to discern during my lifetime and knowledge from others that I regard highly. Kind of like what characterai is doing, but highly fined tuned and customized.
What skills do I need to do this? What tech do I need to learn? What books, moocs, etc. or even just words to look into? Just looking to be pointed in the right direction, I’ll take care of the rest.
Definitely not trying to reinvent gpt3 or anything like that, but looking to leverage these tools and customize and fine tune them highly
This is utterly incredible. I have so many ideas after reading way too much scifi and watching Ridley Scott’s scifi series, Raised By Wolves (what if we could create a benevolent, kind and caring ai to help humans grow and navigate into this world, like Father in the series)?
I want to jump in, badly. How would one go about picking up the skills needed to create stuff like this? As pragmatically, concretely and efficiently as possible without getting sidetracked in overly theoretical distractions?
I’m a fullstack engineer and have an MS in CS and pretty good math chops, but I sadly only took 1 machine learning course in all of my formal education.
How do I get into this (gpt-3, chatgpt are also on my mind)? Please, any books, moocs, etc
"Tech might bring more inequality, but what is the problem with it if it substantially increases everyones standard of living?"
The problem is that ultimately, wealth inequality decreases the standard of living for most people. There are a finite amount of resources. This world we live in is finite. And these resources are being concentrated at the top, in the hands of a few, which leads to less and less of these finite resources being available for more and more people. Although economics is of course complex to some degree, don't lose sight of this very simple mechanism because it is a reality.
"I would argue that is caused by regulatory capture and government interference (e.g. zoning laws) and not technological progress"
If by regulatory capture, you are referring to regulatory corruption influenced by lobbying, then yes, of course that is increasing wealth inequality, and thus decreasing standard of living. Regarding government interference - it's the exact opposite of what you say - proper government interference is what we need. Under current conditions our economic system is not distributing wealth properly. That much is evident and easy to see. And there will be worse living conditions under more stark wealth inequality as opposed to a more even distribution of resources. As mentioned, this world we live in is finite. If these finite resources are syphoned to the hands of very few individuals, this leaves less of these finite resources for the rest of human beings. And as mentioned, tech has contributed to accelerating this, for the reasons mentioned in my above post. So, as mentioned, what we need is government interference. This means taxing heavily the areas that the finite resources I have spoken of are getting concentrated in and redistributing them more evenly.