in the United States, any business which can pull of scenario where a small group of rich people is exploiting large group of poor people is never going to fail - hence Uber is not a good comparison :)
Some people who actually live in Mississippi do so by choice, ya know, and feel that it's important to contribute to the improvement of the citizenry. But yeah, take the local minimum and compare it, apples to oranges, to a local maxima of a top EU country. Even so, there's still a lot going for Mississippi.
Oh I am well aware, but that's more of a slam on those countries for having such poor economic product. Low GDP means lack of growth and lack of opportunity in the future.
Then consider that Luxembourg and Ireland only top the list as a result of being tax havens for the world's rich. The picture looks grim.
Mississippi isn't well populated but most European countries are...so while those countries may be nicer places to live now, Mississippi's future looks brighter.
20 years of totally flat GDP growth capped by a brutal recession was more than enough for Sweden to switch gears and backpedal on an enormous amount of social welfare policy in the early 90s.
The scenario usually bandied about is AGI self-improving at an accelerating rate: once you cross the threshold to self-improvement, you quickly get superintelligence with God-like powers beyond human comprehension (a.k.a. the Singularity) as AGI v1 creates a faster AGI v2 which creates a faster AGI v3 etc.
Any AI researchers still plodding along at mere human speed are then doomed: they won't be able to catch up even if they manage to reproduce the original breakthrough, since the head start enjoyed by AGI #1 guarantees that its latest iteration is always further along the exponential self-improvement curve and therefore superior to any would-be competitor. Being rational(ists), they give up and welcome their new AI overlord.
And if not, the AI god will surely make them see the error of their ways.
We assume a self improving AI will lead to some runaway intelligence improvement but if it grows at 1% per year or even per month that’s something we can adapt to.
Assume the AGI has access to a credit card and it goes ahead and reserves itself every GPU cycle in existence so it's 1 month is turned into a day, and now we're back to being fucked.
Maybe an ongoing GPU shortage is the only thing that'll save us!
It seems to me that non-General AI would typically outcompete AGI, all else held equal. In such a scenario even a first-past-the-post AGI would have trouble becoming an overload if non-Generalized AIs were marshaled against it.
Or contain, or counter, or be used as a deterrent. At least, I think that's the idea being espoused here (in general, if not in the GP comment).
I think U. S. VS Japan is not.necessarily the right model to be thinking here, but U.S. VS U.S.S.R., where we'd like to believe that neither nation would actually launch against the other, but both having the weapon meant they couldn't without risking severe damage in response making it a losing proposition.
That said, I'm sure anyone with an AGI in their pocket/on their side will attempt to use it as a big stick against those that don't, in the Teddy Roosevelt meaning.
I think that was part of the LessWrong eschatology.
It doesn't make sense with modern AI, where improvement (be it learning or model expansion) is separated from it's normal operation, but I guess some beliefs can persevere very well.
Modern AI also isn't AGI. We seem to get a revolution at the frontier every 5 years or so; it's unlikely the current LLM transformer architecture will remain the state of the art for even a decade. Eventually something more capable will become the new modern.
Every single government employee and their family/friends vote in local elections, and other people do not. You will not win an election without their votes, and you can use opaque compensation like DB pensions and whatnot to hide and punt forward the costs of the compensation.
You will never find a non taxpayer funded entity promise something like this:
>After 30 years of service, LA lifeguards can retire as young as 55 on 79-percent of their pay.
Go ask an insurance company how much an annuity for even $80k would cost starting at age 55 until death. It would be $1M+.
Social Security averages out your earnings for your whole lifetime to calculate the benefit, and that is with the power of the federal government. City and state governments regularly promise employees final average 1, 3, 5, and at best 10 pay formulas. So you see cops/firefighters/lifeguards/etc spiking their overtime and working 80 hours per week for the last few years, doubling and tripling their DB pension benefit.
And you simply will not see this outside of taxpayer funded entities.
Another part of the challenge is overtime -- it ends up costing a lot to pay out time-and-a-half on an already fat paycheck. I think we should figure out some binding pre-commitment to forbid or at least minimize regular overtime. Something like "if > 50% of one employee's worth of overtime is required a new role must be opened instead of paying overtime".
I understand that unions like OT for their members (of course they would!) but as an employer it's insane to be handing it out as regularly as government employees get it.
No, I think it is still too complicated of an issue to burden voters with understanding. The better solution would be restricting all employer employee compensation arrangements to cash only.
That would solve politicians being able to pay with unaccounted for benefits that become a burden decades later, and increase labor price transparency and result in better functioning markets once employers are out of the health/vision/dental/public transport/retirement benefit business.
And a third bird it kills is reducing the advantage big businesses have over small businesses.
These waterfront lifeguards have a lot more in common with EMTs and firefighters than have with the teenager who watches septagenarians do laps at your local pool, and they're compensated as such.
No CEO or programmer dies in the line of duty, yet you can't throw a rock on this site without hitting thkse kinds of compensation.
Exactly, the average techbro's output working at a FAANG company likely ruins more lives than the average lifeguard saves. The compensation is clearly just.
I recently flew between Oahu and Molokai. My return flight was delayed seven hours. I literally could have paddled a canoe home faster. Mokulele deserves all the negative press it gets.
