>our evolved relationship with food is not inherently good, and it's better for us to change our behaviors than to abandon our advancements and return to the food-scarce world we're adapted to.
So are you arguing we should change our relationship with human intelligence? What does that even mean?
>You can lessen your dependence on the specific details of how /loop, code routines, etc. work by asking the LLM to do simpler tasks, and instead, having a proper workflow engine be in charge of the workflow aspects.
"You can lessen your dependence on a specific LLM implementation by not using LLMs" is certainly a take but it doesn't really address the root issue of models getting nerfed to save resources after they've gained wide adoption.
A simple task ("convert this file from JS to TS, here are the types of all imported things") is much more likely to continue to work with a nerfed model compared to a complicated task ("convert this repo to TS, make sure to run tsc afterward and fix all errors"). The former is a subtask of the latter!
Taking a moment to create a workflow where these steps are separated (or rather, having an LLM build this workflow) and the LLMs are asked to just do minor leaf tasks increases your resilience to nerfed models.
To billionaires and corps, as should be the case anyway.
> Will likely cause some form of inflation.
Based on what?
> Will not provide enough money for a majority of people to survive on.
Depends on how much is provided - the simple fix is to provide enough.
> Has no significant political support in the US.
This is the biggest hurdle, and it's because so many on the right have been brainwashed by outlets like Fox News. It is indeed a hard thing to overcome. Eventually as the older folks die out, it will come about naturally.
I don’t understand why welfare is the answer. To me it seems we’ve super failed if that’s the case — just brings everyone down except a few ultra rich people.
UBI is not welfare. It is just a livable minimum wage, for everyone who works. For those who cannot work, it replaces welfare, but that is not it's primary purpose.
As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now.
It doesn't need to bring anyone down. It's just a different way of distributing what we already receive. For you ordinary workers, they will receive $X in a monthly check, and their salary can be reduced by $X (since the minimum wage can also be abolished).
That does mean that the desirability of some jobs will shift. Good. We have a bunch of very dirty jobs being done for minimum wage, even though demand is extremely high. I'd love to see the garbage men and chicken processors get more money for their dangerous work.
And if I get less for my cushy desk job, oh well. Especially since we seem to be putting all of the effort into replacing me, and none into the jobs that come with hazards to life and limb.
The annual minimum wage (at the federal level, not counting states with higher) is around $15k. There are about 267 million adults in the US.
That is double current federal and state welfare spending.
I'm dead tired right now so I'm sure I'm missing something, but considering that is far below the poverty threshold in any big city, I dont think we'll be solving anything by eliminating welfare in favor of UBI.
UBI is basically of no benefit to the upper middle class or wealthy, and it won't be enough for the poor who cannot work enough. It really only benefits the upper lower class and lower middle class the most.
That sounds right. But I think that's a reasonable goal.
It doesn't benefit the wealthy at all. They come off worse for it. (There are revenue-neutral versions but I don't think they suffice.) But I believe that they can afford it, and will find the result a healthier America that they won't want to abandon.
But surely you can see that if the main selling point of UBI is
"Everyone gets a livable minimum wage! Oh by the way if you had a cushy desk job, that's gone because Claude can do it, or you get paid peanuts to manage Claude instances if you're lucky. Don't worry though, you can still make big bucks by working as a garbage man or at a chicken processing plant"
A UBI is basically impossible to implement on a large scale without there being significant downsides. In what world does increasing the budget by a trillion dollars or more work out well?
If the promises of AGI pan out, there will be nothing a human will be able to do better than an AI. If humans can't contribute economically, what else could things look like?
well inflation is equivalent to a flat wealth tax that doesn't consider insoluble assets, and is entirely in the hands of the government that imposes the UBI.
"cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not a constant ever-looming devaluator.
True, but again, the other points are more damning.
We're talking about an increased federal budget in the hundreds of billions/trillions to support such a UBI. That will cause a massive increase in taxation on the people who can still find jobs.
To make matters worst, the government in 10-15 years will likely be spending ~25% of it's budget on interest payments alone. Hiking the federal budget up even more sounds like a hard sell.
I’m not saying it would be revenue neutral, but a UBI would (or should) eliminate a bunch of various other entitlements. Even social security should be relatively non controversial to get rid of.
You seem to think feeding the population is optional. The current form of government and personal asset accumulation is actually much more optional in the situation.
Look at Rome and what it had to do when the system shock of so many slaves disrupted labor. Wild that Roman patricians understood you have to...like...feed society, but modern right wing Americans don't.
There is currently more than enough total production for people to live quite well.
If AIs simply replace people, the same total work gets done. It's just a matter of who gets the profits from it.
It won't be that simple, to be sure. Nonetheless we already produce far more than subsistence, and there's no reason why a UBI would change that. If it increases the price of some commodities because now everyone can buy them, I'm ok with that. It already horrifies me that some go hungry in the fattest nation in history.
Inflation is more likely when the net number of dollars increases without a corresponding increase to production. Taxing earners at a higher rate doesn’t do this. Printing money at the central bank does.
If nearly everyone is already covering subsistence needs directly or via assistance (SNAP, food banks), why would UBI cause inflation? the only thing changing is who buys it
Yes, this poses political problems and it will have to be hashed out politically. Again, the problems with these are political not necessarily technological. And they are also tractable. There are many many possible ways this can play out and we should be careful which we choose. I just don't think the conclusion is foregone. There have been people's jobs displaced in the past. And things settled eventually. I won't argue they settled for "better" because many people are unhappy about many things, but I will say... the world is amazing.
At the risk of sounding like a longtermist, I think that when all is done, the result will be a net positive one, but it WILL cause strife for many people - probably me included. But I refuse to keep my childern's future hostage because I might have to reskill.
If you are speaking about the world, hundreds of millions in the next 5 years is probably closer to reality in my opinion. And from your question I think that you already know the answer.
>But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity
The internet didn't follow this trajectory. Neither did smart phones.
Surprise, surprise, it's the same people trying to make AI entrenched into our society.
Neither is the original assertion. There are thousands of examples of exceptionally well crafted code bases that are used by many. I would posit the Linux kernel as an example, which is arguably the most used piece of software in the world.
> [...] one beautiful thing than ten useful things
They didn't say beautiful/crafted things were not necessary.
They were critiquing viewpoints that all code needs to be.
Even if we (for humorous purposes) took their 1 in 10 ratio as a deadly serious cap on crafting, 10% of projects being "exceptionally well crafted code" would be a wonderful world. I would take 1% high craft to 99% useful! (Not disjointly of course.)
>It's interesting to watch the same class of people who told coal miners "they should learn to code" back in the early 2010s now getting the same comeuppance.
There are millions of software engineers in the US alone. Don't put all of them into a single bucket.
So are you arguing we should change our relationship with human intelligence? What does that even mean?
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