Yup, I can definitely imagine that it's different if you're working directly for customers and have the freedom to do things however you want to do them as long as you still make a living.
I can definitely see how the vast spaces "inside" of an AI model (more precisely, the space of every possible output for every possible input) are similar to the backrooms in that they are huge, related to human activity yet impossible for any human to fully comprehend, sort of "haunted" by humanity yet devoid of it, dreamlike, and so on.
The connection between AI and dreams is interesting in its own right. I am reminded of Google's DeepDream specifically, with its bizarre images that yet seem strongly reminiscent of how humans actually perceive things on some level.
>Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack
Well, except for roles where being human is an inherent part of the value for customers: bartender, prostitute, certain kinds of boutique sales, professional athlete, stage actor, etc. And for roles that have to be human for legal reasons.
Of course such roles make up a small part of the entire job market.
I never found there to be much soul and humanity in the job to begin with. Coding personal projects has soul, but for me at least the demands of high-velocity sprint-based software development to match business needs removed most of the soul and humanity long before AI got good at coding. And I mean, I totally understand why it has to be like that. In most businesses, you do better by shipping decent software fast than by shipping great software slowly. I don't have a problem with that in principle. But it does mean that for me, the software development side of things has never had much soul and humanity to begin with. It was just being a glorified assembly line worker, with the sprints being the assembly line. Of course, others may have had very different experiences, but that has been mine.
For me, AIs have actually made the job more soulful, not less. For one thing, it lets me use the part of my mind that is good at human language, not just the part of my mind that is good at software. This makes the job feel a bit less one-dimensional in terms of what parts of me are engaged while doing it. For another, I find it liberating to no longer have to think much about boilerplate code or to spend time roaming around the Internet looking up documentation of various language syntax and API details, the vast majority of which are arbitrary rather than being based on any kind of mathematical beauty. For me it makes the job more soulful that I can think of the job on a higher level instead of having to spend effort on arbitrary and tedious details.
Of course there is still the question of "will the job even exist in a few years, at least for more than a relatively small number of people?". But that's a separate question. For now at least, I am finding that for me AIs have brought a lot more soul and humanity to the job than it ever had before.
This is a very strong exaggeration of the reality. It's similar to saying "almost all Democratic Party voters want to turn the US into Soviet communism", and is about equally inaccurate.
>It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theoretically possible to take most of another society's market share in something by only slightly outcompeting it in price or quality), or it might even outright conquer society A.
A solution to the problem needs to address this issue somehow.
There is no "we" on this matter. Americans have been sharply divided about immigrants for a long time going back to the 19th century or even before. There is no such thing as an American consensus on immigration. Certainly you don't get to define what is American and what isn't. Neither do I. You're just one person.
"To think otherwise is anti-American, and you do not belong here." is just a useless emotional thought-terminating phrase.
Trying to follow the Constitution literally is hard and in practice, it's not done. The political system just interprets the Constitution in whatever way the consensus of the given moment wants to interpret it. The 14th Amendment is clear that all persons born in the US are citizens of the US. However, if you follow the 2nd Amendment just as literally, it means that the Federal government, at least, cannot make any laws restricting us from owning nuclear weapons.
Nice. Reading old books is a great way to be exposed to ways of thinking that have fallen out of fashion - some for (in my opinion) good reason, such as having been discovered to be incorrect or genuinely immoral, some for (in my opinion) bad reason, such as having become "politically incorrect", and some simply because they were forgotten.
But whatever the reason is why the ideas have fallen out of fashion, it can broaden the mind to encounter them.
You don't need to assume that I've been brainwashed by Western propaganda. I generally distrust both the Western and the Russian mainstream narratives about geopolitics.
I know it exists. I'm asking why he went on an extremely dangerous mission that had very little chance of success instead of using his energy on something that would have been more likely to achieve success, or on something that would have been equally unlikely to achieve success but at least would not have been extremely dangerous.
I'm not claiming that Putin is acting irrationally, at least not any more irrationally than other leaders - after all, politicians are still human.
My question is why Navalny would have believed that it would not be rational for Putin to kill him.
Lenin entered Russia at a more advantageous moment than Navalny did. The February Revolution had already happened. The government was new. Navalny, in contrast, entered a Russia in which the government was stable and had been around for a long time.
If he was an unscrupulous adventurer who was sure that his Western support would prevent him from being killed, then that leads to two questions:
1. Why exactly would he have been so sure that his Western support would prevent him from being killed? The Russian elite is not exactly made up of people who are squeamish about killing, and the risk to the elite from killing him would have been small.
2. Why not just stay in the West and do the unscrupulous adventuring from there? Sure, maybe the Western backers would not have quite as much use for you that way, but you'd still have a lot of influence and a cushy life.
I always wonder about Navalny - why did he go back to Russia? Did he really believe that he could do some kind of Nelson Mandela thing? Or that the Russian people would flock to his cause? I believe that the man was an idealist, I don't think you expose yourself to that much danger without being an idealist at least on some level or thinking that the possible personal rewards make the danger worth it, and I don't get the sense from Navalny that he was after personal rewards primarily. But with his experience in Russian politics, I feel like he should have known that the chance that his return to Russia would bring about any serious political change was extremely small. Not returning to Russia would have hurt his chances of causing political change as well, since that would have made him seem like just an agent of the Western powers. But returning to Russia at the cost of his life also did not accomplish political change.
I think that trying to stop AI development is more like trying to stop nuclear weapon proliferation than it is like fixing the ozone hole. I think the difference is that if one country works to fix the ozone hole, that doesn't make the other countries scared that they are falling behind in ozone hole fixing technology and might get conquered or reduced to subservience as a result.
Nuclear weapon proliferation seems to have plateaued recently, but I think that this appearance is partly deceptive. The main reasons it has plateaued is that: 1) building and maintaining nuclear weapons is expensive, 2) there are powerful countries that are willing to use military force to stop some other countries from developing nukes, and 3) many countries have reached nuclear latency (the ability to build nuclear weapons very quickly once the political order is given to do it) and are only avoiding actually giving the order to build nukes because they don't see a current important-enough reason to do it.
Those weapons are still all being developed and would be brought out in any actually existential war where they seemed useful. The agreements would last only as long as the wars were not existential, or as long as the various countries involved believed that use of them, and the resulting retaliation in kind, would be more destructive than not using them. But one way or another, countries still develop them.