Its your first time, innit? Ive heard that every decade since the 70s. A productive society is a society that can afford a lot of goods and services and thus improvements in productivity leads to higher employment, not less.

GPT-4 isn't AGI.

Humans won't ever travel that far. Machines made by humans might.

Assuming it can optimize its own code. Humans can't exactly optimize themselves to run on better hardware. Even so, it wouldn't matter because access is already being distributed. GPT-4 is available to researchers and businesses and is currently being integrated into all kinds of products.

You have your head buried in the sand. The economy needs a chance to brace for millions unemployed.

Reddit’s days are numbered. “Dear ChatGDP5, please simulate for me a message posting platform focused on the topic of politics. Give me a mix of 10% learning new things, 10% lame inside jokes, and 80% correcting idiots who post obviously wrong things that I can sarcastically correct. Mix in my favorite recurring personalities from the last session.”

You’ve put a lot of thought and heart into your observations. I agree on several points. I appreciate your input and opinion.

World-shattering technology always has to be worked with. You are right that it can't be undone.

I think it's a large and clear mirror that we are constructing that, faced with a a new other, we immediately assign it the same flaws and risks we see in ourselves and thus fear that these will come from it just as these flaws come from one another.

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The thing is, once you make an AGI then the AGI itself should theoretically make better versions of itself. There's really no reason to sell the AGI because the AGI should find ways to make more money.

You drank way much kool aid, kid. You should take a break from social media.

Governments' jobs are to serve the citizenry, not just the top 1%. This "improvement" will claim millions of careers while allowing the super rich to oppress the lower classes in a wah never before seen. If you're not already a multi millionaire, you're not in their club.

> They should get wages and shares

As you note, that is not a new thing, in fact its a normal thing. So the reason Bezos is so rich is that he works for Amazon and was given the biggest allocation of shares.

Do you have a problem with that?

What if early Apple workers became billionaires (like early Microsoft employees).

Do you have a problem with that?

Or early Tesla factory workers?

Do you have a problem with people getting rich from their shares?

Until we find more efficient ways to run it or design better hardware, a single instance of an AGI will require all those hundreds of thousands of computers to run. ChatGPT was estimated in January to cost $3 million per month to run (Azure cloud resources) and it's still pretty far from an actual AGI.

They should get wages and shares. Why not? There are lots of companies that are "employee owned" and usually they do better because people will care more if they have some ownership of what they are creating.

Of all the ideas in the history of humanity, taxing improvement in productivity is the dumbest.

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"they" don't want this, or the birth rate would plummet. :(

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I too was seduced by utopian visions of the future, the problem is that so many have to fly in the face of laws of nature and physics in order to make them possible.

My personal vision is more pragmatic these days, I have thought a lot about what makes capitalism bad and ultimately it is the sacrifices made to the solution in order to sustain the problem so the "solution" can continue to be profitable. Planned obsolescence, weak or fragile material choice, subscription plans to permanent goods, reducing or making repair impossible, and simply making products that don't adequately solve the problem (example: Oxo used to make amazing cooking tools, now half of the stuff I buy from them breaks within the first year of use, forcing me to look elsewhere).

A replicator would be an amazing technology to develop, but physics prevents it from ever being useful. A matter assembler more like what is seen in the book Diamond Age is far more likely to be seen in the future, as it relies on the same principles that make 3D printers practical.

Just because a society is more advanced and has access to more energy, doesn't mean the society will automatically waste more energy. Especially when adopting new technology means using a hundred thousand to a million times more energy to do the same thing as something more primitive (and safer, and lower maintenance!)

I think the most ideal future will be full of low cost, high utility items that everyone can own in the quantities they need to go about their lives, and focus on self development much like Star Trek. We don't need spaceships, sonic showers, holodecks, or replicators to achieve a healthy lifestyle for everyone, especially with increasing automation. Using as little energy as possible means as much energy as possible is available - meaning scarcity is minimized. We have to learn not to fight over the remaining scraps.

The deepest problems for us are societal - we are not distributing the efforts of our labor equally among our people, and that creates a sort of population senescence that reduces the fruits that society produces - we won't find that amazing garage band (or similarly culturally enriching thing) because they are all stuck working 9-5 jobs that society doesn't even need in the first place, instead we could install self-cleaning bathrooms and fully automated fast food and have 1 repairman in place of 30 workers, meaning we have effectively multiplied the productivity by 30x. The wisdom of the older generations should not be wasted on low-skilled jobs they are forced to work instead of retiring (unless they want to work, of course).

We absolutely have to reduce income disparity and take care of those who cannot work. We should house the homeless, heal the sick, and make sure everyone is connected to good people around them so we can all maintain good mental health. I think we can go a long ways towards improving these things with a combination of practical solutions, good design, and stop focusing solely on how much income we're getting from these things.

Punitively taxing automation would adequately prevent the most negative effects of ai from coming to pass.

Did australia suddenly have a space program? Lol j/k

I don't know, but the first inhabitants of the lunar H3 mining plants will probably be.

If your business can’t sustain a living wage with cost of living increases it shouldn’t exist, plain and simple truth. Also you seem to put too much emphasis on what someone like Tim Cook does when in reality any experienced, competent individual in the company could make similar good and bad decisions. CEOs aren’t bastions of only the best ideas. Many of them make decisions that get themselves fired or kill the company and they pull their multi-million golden parachutes at the regular workers expense.

Agree. They are the gig now. But after all we in the future sub.