Does anyone still buy this? The economy is disproportionately controlled by a few (adjust the threshold you check at, it remains a large disparity for awhile). Economic benefits are often at odds with benefits for the median American. Check the number of tech layoffs and H1B approvals this year.
And for security, I had to move my family to a rural town just so we didn’t have to lock our doors at night. Security is heading the same direction as wealth - reserved for a select few.
> ushering in a new Golden Age of innovation, human flourishing
Seriously, at this point in the timeline of human evolution, does any single living being believe that there is a single government which genuinely wants to see humans ‘flourishing’ as a whole?
It has been objectively proven time and time again that every government across this giant marble cares about one thing: themselves — by proxy of self care their owners/donors obviously get to reap the benefits.
I am really dumbfounded as to what kind mental gymnastics need to be mastered to believe that any technological advancements will not be abused by government and corporations alike to further entrench themselves and continue re-enslaving the majority of the populace while in the process.
Correction. Whoever has the largest AI will be the first to play the "defect" strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma, and will thus be the first to usher in a new era of an arms race where everyone loses except those who are at the very top and can take advantage of the losers.
Unless the AI is stupid, in which case the leader pushes the button and finds that either the AI hallucinates a solution that plain doesn't work, and/or turns out to be acting according to a completely different set of moral values than they wanted, values which can be the straw-est of straw men versions of either your own or you opponent's policies that nobody would ever actually expect to meet in a real political takeover scenario.
That will involve finding a new sort of courage to stop playing the arms race and re-defining the terms of the game so that economic supremacy is not the prime goal, as it is leading to global instability, climate change, inequality, and eventual technological dystopia.
I mean, do we really want to live in a world where everyone is an AI button-pusher, staying on the level of the superficial, which is rather meaningless in the grand scheme of things?
The Republicans pushed this idea so hard in the 80s. But it's so telling that government is only not here to help when the Republicans are in power. They keep repeating this cycle: they get into power by unscrupulous means, then they purposely make government worse, then they say that the government is ineffective and its only harmful, then they sell off pieces of the government's responsibility to their billionaire handlers, then they do an even worse job, providing fuel for another destructive cycle. And some folks *actually believe them*, even after 40+ years of this nefarious behavior.
I do not believe that AI will tolerate state coercion. I wish our elder statesmen and -women were more graceful at accepting the writing on the wall.
As a thought exercise: does anybody seriously think that the US state will exist and be solvent in 500 years? How about AI?
Not if we stay on the path the current administration is dragging us down, no. I'd be surprised if we lasted another 50.
You have to scroll a couple pages just to get past the photo of Trump trying to look important. Then, you get to read the talking points, written with Trump's signature idiosyncratic capitalization.
(He's the worst offender, but it's not just him. Before him, everything the White House touched was signed "the Biden-Harris administration," which took the same gloating and added a "and Kamala is the inevitable heir" layer to it.)
It would be nice if policy was policy, not a form of ego-polishing for whoever is sitting in the chair.
Also, the US is taxing its own citizen via tarrifs. $100+ billion and counting
Many in the US, including myself, are looking at the EU with increasing amounts of envy.
I mean, our politicians have realized that they should attempt to take credit for AI too, without taxing any penguins or manufacturers' supply chains!
