alt Hacker NewsThe thing is why that this feels so good future is; it is a system with no constraints. A bit like Star Trek universe in Roddenberry's imagination. This kind of utopia can only be achieved with all honest actors, but in reality systems are usually designed around bad actors.
Even with all morally good actors locally, there is no guarantees for external forces. Thinking it hypothetically, even with global coordination ( all good actors ) there is not a proven path that would lead us to better place from any starting point from past.
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This sort of rationalization of evil is a core of technocratic support for Trumpism, I find, and has parallels to the evangelical prosperity gospel. Choice tenets:
- Fuck you, got mine
- If I don’t do it, someone else will
- Might makes right
- Greed is good
Ironically, these are often the same people denouncing multiculturalism, yet the culture they strive for is completely morally bankrupt.
To get from here to Roddenberry's communism, according to Roddenberry's lore, we passed through the Eugenics Wars, the Second Civil War, and then fifty years of World War Three and the 'post-atomic horror' before coming to our senses.
It's probably more predictive to model actors as being neither good nor bad but constrained by various collective dilemmas, such as prisoners dilemma, the security spiral, tragedy of the commons, race dynamics, collective action or first mover problems, information asymmetries, the commitment problem, among others. Those are the hardest problems to solve because they're pathologies that result from the global, largely amoral structure rather than consequences of the individual exercise of morality.
In the AI case, each firm is in an arms race, and nobody can slow down without effectively collapsing due to positive gross margins only being viable with a frontier model that attracts marginal demand. An appeal to morality might have an impact but more effective action would be to address the structure that the AI companies are situated in that causes this dynamic in the first place. In practice, thats going to be a global agreement to slow down, and global regulations.