Can you send me writing or video of any serious thinker advocating for this? The OP is a common straw-man characterization of the position I described.
That's a mischaracterization. No one is _for_ inequality. The opposition you speak of is _for_ race/gender blind meritocracy. Anyone with a little knowledge of economics understands that groups of people cut across any dimension will always have different outcomes; Russian Americans earn more than French Americans, Japanese Americans earn more than Fillipino Americans, taller people earn more than shorter people, etc.
No one thinks inequality is desirable. The opposition you speak of think it's unavoidable. And bad public policy will have effects that make the situation worse for everyone.
It actually has been going away on it's own. There's no way anyone can deny America hasn't made enormous progress across gender/racial lines in the last 50 years. Moreover, there's no way anyone can deny the discrimination you're talking about is at a civilizational/historical all-time low. Compared to most of the world and history, America in 2024 is MUCH less racist and sexist, and yet people shriek about it now more than our ancestors did in the 60's and earlier.
Differences will always exist between groups and there are a plethora of economic reasons why beyond 'systemic racism/sexism'. Russian-American's aren't paid the same as French-Americans. Nigerian-Americans earn more than the average white American. Bostonians have a different average income than Texans.
30 year olds have a different income than 31 year olds. Blue eyed people earn differently than green eyed people. Taller, prettier people earn more than shorter, less pretty people. How do you propose we determine exactly how much of these differences are due to 'discrimination' vs. the hundreds of other reasons these differences might exist?
The world is unfair in a variety of ways. But one thing that's painfully obvious from a cursory investigation of public policy, is that way too often, well intentioned policy measures end up doing EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what they were intended to do.
For example affirmative action has been a demonstrable failure. If you're admitted to a school like Harvard with lower SAT scores simply because of the color of your skin, you do worse than going to a school where you would be in the top 10% of SAT scorers. On top of that, you give people a reason to believe you're less qualified knowing your race got preferential treatment. Congratulations, everyone is now worse off because superficially the policy sounded like a nice idea. Racism has gone up and you unwittingly f-ed over the person who you tried to help by putting them in a situation they couldn't compete in.
"If you have better idea of how to resolve that injustice, let's hear it."
Focus on restoring two-parent households cross-racially. The rise of single motherhood in America has a colossally negative impact on children, specifically for the lower-class. The effects permeate generationally. You could do this in a way that unites people instead of dividing it by race. Push for public policy that incentivizes two-parent households. Attacking race/gender-blind meritocracy is not the way.
You seem to realize yourself that categorizing people just on race/gender isn't compelling, which is why in your examples you also add the economic conditions to make your point sound correct.
The idea you espouse, in practice, justifies injustice. It's asking children to pay for the sins of their parents. And everyone (even the people who supposedly benefit from this idea) will suffer as a consequence in the long run. You unwittingly sow the seeds of _more_ racial/gender animus, not less.
DAE think this whole fiasco might've been intentional? Seems like such a glaring flaw in the system. The public reaction was predictable, as well as the stock reaction....
Tried not to. I know God implies monotheism and the Michelangelo painting suggests Christianity but I hope people can look past that if they don't like it.
Not asking anyone to bend reality. Most analogies/metaphors aren't perfect and require good faith by the listener to see the truth in them.
"A mind is like a parachute; it doesn't work if it is not open."
Some people can hear this and understand what Frank Zappa means. Others (perhaps like yourself) will sit there and whine "bUt wHaT aBoUt tHiS cAsE wHeRe iT sHoulDn't be oPeN!!"
I'll try summarizing Yudkowsky's main point as I understand it (however you should read him directly if you find me unconvincing).
Obviously the current version of ChatGPT and LLMs of today are not world threatening. The problem is we are blindly pushing forward and __we don't know__ what to expect. You say you think we are very far away from a point where alignment becomes an issue, yet _no one_ predicted AI would've come this far so quickly a couple years ago.
Natural selection is an algorithm that produced humans, which do all sorts of weird things that seem contrary and irrelevant to the goal of that algorithm (use birth control, build space ships)
With AI, instead of natural selection, we have gradient descent (a more sophisticated algorithm; it takes into account the derivative) and we are blindly throwing more resources into this algorithm hoping it will turn out ok.
Normally in science we can screw up and try again. But with AI it's different. If you create a super-intelligent AGI not aligned with humanity you are playing Russian roulette with life on Earth with 5/6 chambers loaded.
Yudkowsky's primary concern is literally just "can we build AI with some degree of certainty we won't destroy all of humanity?" which seems laughable, but genuinely, I haven't heard one person go up against him that clearly didn't expose themself as less thoughtful and intelligent about the matter _by far_ than Yudkowsky. I wish I heard an argument against him that was convincing.
Besides that concern, of course we have the more tangible, perhaps more probable concern of "bad actors exist in the world, what happens when we democratize (or simply create) the most powerful tool ever created?"
What happens when governments, corporations, and individuals can use LLMs to turn every communication channel (Hacker News, TV, Twitter, etcetera) into 99% AI noise with superhuman-quality propaganda, misinformation and advertising for their own self-interest? I'm sure there's a million other ways AI could be used by a self-interested minority to the detriment of humanity.
We can communicate securely on the internet because of cryptography (HTTPS vs. HTTP). If cryptography didn't exist any signal you ever sent over the internet could be observed and used maliciously against you (payment info, passwords, etcetera).
Listen to Eliezer Yudkowsky's arguments. Perhaps it looks silly to you but there are actually _extremely_ good reasons to be worried about AI progress without figuring out alignment first. What would happen if we gave humanity the internet before we had cryptography?
On a side note, it's troubling how many hyper intelligent and successful people in tech are happy to denigrate the opposition in bad faith.
Awesome!!! More fun than most of the jackbox style games I've played before. I only played with it a bit, in your experience does the AI do a pretty good job of judging people's creative solutions?
Friend, nature is uncivilized. War, violence, and fighting aren't things to be moved past as you say. They are things to understand, master, and apply appropriately. Hoping to move past war is as naive as hoping to move past hate. Marc taking up MMA is a pleasant character development for him, fighting requires much virtue.