The "cult of line go up" is why we aren't living in caves and eating each other. Come on, we can criticize the deleterious aspects of modern society without disparaging the idea of growth itself.
Who, exactly, is "an advanced society" in this scenario? VCs deciding they don't like money after all? AI lab leaders and workers who spent their entire lives pursuing this dream, only to suddenly give it up because of some cultist doomers? The government growing the right combination of authoritarian and competent enough to put the tooth paste back in the tube somehow?
Like it or not, there's no going back. Wherever we end up, I guarantee you it won't be 2022.
I'm "allergic to per capita" specifically in cases where it doesn't matter but keeps getting brought up as a bad faith retort.
As an example, it doesn't matter who emits CO2 or where from, since we're all emitting it into the same air, and the only thing that matters is the absolute amount. Similarly, I imagine it's cold comfort for domestic animals in subsaharan Africa that their torturers, rapists, and murderers are marginally less prolific than those in other regions.
Where we want to end up? Normies are still talking about the upcoming AI bubble pop in terms of tech basically reverting to 2022. It's wishful thinking all the way down.
But using the modern affordances of coercive states to benefit copyright holders is very much non-standard in the free world. Only a few countries do it to personal end-users to any meaningful degree.
Even easier if they just own the AI companies in the first place. Make them go public, and, if you're feeling especially redistributive, spend $X of public funds to purchase stock spread equally amongst americans/humans/sentient creatures.
>I feel like the author is catastrophizing a bit much here.
I feel like he's catastrophizing the ordinary amount for an anti-AI screed. Probably well below what the market expects at this point. At this point you basically have to sound like Ed Zitron or David Gerard to stand out from the crowd.
AI is boiling the oceans, and you're worried about a vending machine?
The set of real numbers is continuous and uncountably infinite. Any attempt to fit it into a discrete finite set necessarily requires severe tradeoffs. Different tradeoffs are desirable for different applications.
It's not a real issue, but it's truthy enough to generate real opposition to datacenter buildout and catalyze AI hate. So definitionally avoiding it from the get-go might end up being worth it.
Between Kissinger, Obama, the Myanmarese CIA asset, etc., it's basically the Nobel Crimes Against Humanity prize at this point. I'm surprised they didn't give it to the Orange Thing.