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[–] 20 points 12 hours ago (7 children)

I don't think you understand the reality of our future. "Oh no! Stocks!" While literally everything is burning around us. Yes. Take it out. End the stock market and end the capitalist structure that's causing it. This is going to happen regardless. Might as well make it happen faster so it's more manageable than if we keep trying to prop it up.

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  • [+] -10 points 11 hours ago* (5 children)

    You aren't exactly painting yourself as an oracle here. Spouting doom will always leave you correct eventually, but being wrong for decades beforehand doesn't become insight just because something finally breaks.

    Why are you so confident that deliberately accelerating a collapse makes it "more manageable"? If the dot-com boom had lasted long enough for actual revenues to catch up with valuations, the eventual correction could've been far less severe. Buying time can give the underlying technology a chance to deliver. It's getting more efficient per token at an incredible rate, and there's enormous pressure to improve hardware efficiency too. At some point, falling costs and growing paid usage could make the economics sustainable, though neither of us knows when, or whether, that'll happen. You're assuming that time can only make things worse, then treating that assumption as a reason to burn it all down.

    Also worth noting the increase in power generation has pushed us to add 50% to our total global solar capacity in the last two years. That's fucking awesome and unlikely to stop increasing suddenly.

    I'm not saying nothing's wrong, or that all these companies are good guys, fuck no. But confidently predicting doom now is no more convincing than all the previous prophecies that predicted doom.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

    If the dot com boom... So we're just using hypotheticals to boost positivity?

    Often speeding up something, gives you more control. Think of riding a bike. Going long stretches and remaining upright is easy. But when your kid is in front and breaks unexpectedly, you have to slow and do that back and forth thing with the handle bars to remain upright. Now imagine letting the AI bubble pop now. Better for it to pop while there's still functioning governments, than when those governments are at the edge of breaking.

    Yeah solar is great, I agree. But we're still building fossil fuel power plants and solar has done nothing so far to stop that. It simply slows it. If the fall happens right now, everything collapses. We've stopped the acceleration of the climate crisis, and humanity has a chance to survive at 1.5C+. Humanity can rebuild. If we collapse at 3 or 4° C, we won't have any ability to rebuild, as there's a much larger collapse happening.

    The point is that society is going to collapse regardless. It's better for it to happen now because it gives humanity the best chance to survive. If we shut down civilization now, everything can come back. The earth can heal and we can survive. If it collapses in 2120, the earth is a much more formidable environment to try to nurture small cultures of people.

    And as of right now? AI is the #1 enemy to the environment. And for what? Fake videos? So if we can end AI right fucking now, it sets a much more livable future for human beings. And honestly, a much more humane one. So if capitalism has to go down with AI, and society has to go down with capitalism, it's the most humane option. At least people will have a chance. If we continue down the path we're on, there's really no hope for a future.

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  • [–] -4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (3 children)

    “So we're just using hypotheticals” meanwhile your entire argument depends on civilisation definitely collapsing, doing so later definitely being worse, and doing so now leaving humanity able to rebuild.

    I offered a possibility. You've built a whole prescription for humanity around your predictions.

    And your bike analogy involves slowing down and steering to avoid a crash. You're advocating deliberately crashing because you've decided a worse accident is inevitable further down the road.

    There's a lot wrapped up in that certainty, and its a sentiment that does personally annoy me for several reasons: You're assuming the problems you see won't be meaningfully understood or addressed by anyone else, and that because you can't see a workable solution, there isnt one. You're treating the limits of your own foresight as the limits of what's possible. Stop and consider whether you really consider yourself an unparalleled engineer and problem solver of the modern era. Dont tell me the answer, just ponder it.

    Then, when it comes to your preferred scenario, suddenly humanity can cooperate, adapt and rebuild after civilisation collapses. Why does human ingenuity get to do so much heavy lifting after the catastrophe, but count for so little in preventing it? There's a huge juxtaposition in that reasoning.

    You've scrutinised the future you dislike for everything that could go wrong, and waved through the future you prefer on everything that could go right. That's a very shaky basis for deciding everyone else would be better off enduring a collapse now.

    And “if we shut down civilisation now, everything can come back” is doing an extraordinary amount of work there. How are you keeping people fed, water clean, medicines available and nuclear facilities maintained? Who's coordinating any of that through the collapse you're welcoming? Those are fairly significant details to skip on the way to “the earth can heal”.

    You don't get to dismiss uncertainty in my argument while treating the most optimistic version of your own catastrophe scenario as a certainty, that's fucking nonsense.

    I get that you're concerned but this is irrational and you probably need to talk to someone serious if this is actually weighing heavily on you. If its just an idle rant, less so.

    AI isnt going to end, the big dog companies might go down, but you can run very good ones on your computer these days. Helps to look into stuff, the unknown is always scarier than the known.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago (1 child)

    tl;dr

    AI is built from mass theft and anything built with it deserves to be stolen.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    Companies having done that doesn't make it fundamental to the technology. That's just something a lot of people who base their worldview on article headlines parrot.

    Don't get me wrong, those practices are bad. But they come from the incentives and behaviour of the companies involved. The technology doesn't require them. That's a failure of a system that rewards companies for taking whatever they can get away with.

    All of this is a capitalism problem, focusing on the technology is a distraction that will never achieve anything.

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