There are things being done which cannot be undone, and there are issues that were long predicted, and ignored, and the consequences are now bearing fruit.
If you haven't heard a real doomsday scenario that's likely, you haven't been listening to the right people, and you rely far too much on the fallacy of survivorship bias.
If you don't have a plan to replace a fundamental societal model, there are two potential outcomes, someone comes up with something because they've been working on it (and it works, which is rare), or all dependencies that rely upon that system fail, and the consequences occur. In other words, everyone starves.
Think about what no exchange being possible suddenly would mean, overnight, for our supply chains with logistics delivering just in time. We've seen it, during the pandemic, but that was just a small disruption, and not a continuing one.
Imagine it. Nothing on the shelves. No amount of money that will let you get what you need (toilet paper). No means that would let this occur in the short timetables of need. What happens. Prior to 2020, people would call you crazy if you said those things would happen.
Bad things happen if you don't have a plan to make sure they don't happen.
I agree with you, but no one listened back then, why would they ever think about listening now.
Capital formation comes first before everything else, not the other way around, when you have nothing to trade that's of value it simply can't happen, and inevitable hyper-inflation/deflationary cycles begin which once started can't be stopped.
These people think, survival is guaranteed, jobs are guaranteed, the how doesn't matter; it happens because some politician says it does; reality doesn't matter.
That's the line and level of thinking we are dealing with here. How do you convince someone that if they do something, they and their children may die as a consequence; if they can't make that connection.
Communication ceases being possible in a noisy medium at a certain point according to Shannon. Pretty sure we've crossed that point, and where we may have been able to discern and separate the garbage previously, now through mimicry its all but impossible.
Intelligent people don't waste their efforts on lost causes. People make their own decisions, and they and their children will pay for the consequences of those choices; even if they didn't realize that was the choice they were making at the time they made it.
> I agree with you, but no one listened back then, why would they ever think about listening now.
Because we lead vastly better lives today than 100 years ago, when everyone was also raging about technology stealing jobs. The economy has to adapt to technology changes, there is no other way. It is a self healing system. If technology removes a lot of jobs, then new jobs are created. It has to be this way, don't you see?
It can be a self-healing system, and capitalism is generally self-healing, but the former is not necessarily the case in all economic systems.
There is a critical point where factors, and producers leave the market because requirements cannot be met in profit in terms of purchasing power (invariant to inflation). You might think those parties are all that there is, but that's not the case, there is a third-party, the state and its apparatus.
With money-printing, any winner chosen by the state becomes its apparatus. Money printing takes many forms but the most common is debt, more accurately non-reserve debt.
That third-entity is not bound by profit constraints and outcompetes rising in the wake of the destruction it causes, and this is not self-healing, its self-sustaining, and slow, and it does collapse given sufficient time.
New jobs aren't being created in sufficient volumes to provide for the population. If anything, the jobs have been removed en-masse on the mere perception that AI can replace people.
You seem to rely heavily on fallacy in your reasoning. Specifically, survivorship bias. Things are being done that cannot be undone. There are fundamental limits, after which the structures fail.
You're saying I rely on fallacy, survivorship bias, but you have no way of knowing what is coming, and yet you state it so authoritatively.
I resort to evidence from history, because these same arguments happen decade after decade, and the doom scenario has not manifested yet. I also find the anti-AI view narrow minded. You're only able to imagine one scenario, the dystopian scenario. And yet none of know this is the likely outcome. It could well be that AI actually does increase the means of productivity, we invent new medical cures, we invent new ways to grow food, we clean up our energy generation, work becomes more optional as governments (who desperately want people to keep electing them) find ways of redistributing all the newly created wealth.
I don't know which will happen, and neither does anyone else.
This is naïve, the government and corporations are already working towards the dystopian result. Just because we don’t “know” doesn’t mean people can’t make an educated guess. You need people to put Llms on the good path before you can say the bad path won’t happen. Right now people are loyal to corporations that offer it, that’s the bad path.
Its like predicting avalanches in avalanche prone areas.
You may not know the individual particle interactions and forces that will inevitably set the next avalanche off, but you know it will happen based on factors that increase the likelihood dramatically.
For example the event of an avalanche increases the more snowpack there is, and it goes to zero when snowpack is gone. The same could be said of LLMs.
You know corporations will do absolutely anything even destroy their business model, so long as they make more money in the short term. John Deere is a perfect example of this, and Mexico just finally took action because we couldn't, that culminated in ~14bn drop in capex on Wall Street for the the stock. It was over 10 years in the making, but it happened.
The more concentrated the marketshare to decisionmaking, the greater the damage, and the more impact bad decisions have compared to good decisions. You tread water until you drown.
> You're saying I rely on fallacy, survivorship bias, but you have no way of knowing what is coming.
Just because you happen to be blind in this area, doesn't mean all people are blind. In the day after tomorrow, you had that group at the library that chose to follow the police officer despite warnings that going out into the storm would kill them. What happened? They died.
That is how reality works, it doesn't care about belief. Its pass fail, live die.
The thing about a classical education (following the greeks/roman western philosophy) is that you can see a lot more of reality accurately than someone who hasn't received it, and an order of magnitude more than someone that's been indoctrinated. You know the dynamics and how systems interact.
The dynamics of systems don't just disappear, there is inertia, and you can see where that is going even if you cannot predict individual details or a timeline. It is a stochastic environment, but you can make accurate predictions like El Nino/La Nina weather patterns with the right know-how and observation skills. Everything we know today originated from observation (objective measure), and trial and error.
This framework is called first principles, or a first principled approach. Its the backbone of science, and it ties everything that is important to objective measure, and the limits of error. When dealing with human systems of organization, you can treat the system in predictable ways at the sacrifice of some of the accuracy, but that doesn't negate it completely.
These are things that matter more than other things, and let one predict the future of an existing system, if carefully observed. Like a dam where the concrete has started cracking might indicate structural weakness prior to a catastrophic collapse.
It is not governments job to redistribute wealth. That is communist/marxist/socialist rhetoric, and it fails for obvious reasons I won't get into. Mises sums it up in his writings back in the 1930s. You like to claim you base reasoning on history, but you have to include parts that you don't agree with to actually be doing that.
Just because you don't know what will happen doesn't mean others can't. These are fundamental biases to your perception that rigorous critical thinking teaches you to avoid so you are not dead wrong.
There are people that see the trends before others because they follow a first principled approach, and they save themselves, or may even profit off that when survival is not at risk.
The blind will often cause chaos to profit, thinking no matter what they do individually they can't end it all. The exact same kind of fallacy that you seem to be falling into, survivorship bias.
There are phase changes in many systems. The specific bounds may not be known or knowable in detail ahead of time, but they have been shown to happen, and in such environments precursor details matter.
The moment you start dismissing likely outcomes without basis, is the moment you and those you care about go extinct when those outcomes happen and you are in the path of that outcome.
No one knows everything, but there are some people that know more than others.
It is a fairly short jaunt in the scheme of things from the falling dominoes caused by elimination of entry level positions (and capital formation as a whole), to socio-economic collapse (where no goods are produced or can be exchanged).
The major problem is no one is listening to the smartest people because they are no longer in the room, only yes people get into the room, the blind leading the blind. That has only one type of outcome given sufficient time. Destruction.
The people seeking total control and power end up actively selecting against the evolutionary pressures that reward intelligence; the very thing that would normally allow them survive in chaotic times. Their choices doom themselves, and their descendants, as well as any who could not see through or stop their lies. Hubris.
Knowledge which should have been preserved, is lost, and all that's left is a vast void after a short period of time where everything chaotically slips through their fingers and all then find peace in nothingness.
When the consequences are so dire and visible, you treat those decisions with care, but that was not done because people were blinded.
The things people are saying now about these things I was saying right after the weights for open models were released to the public late 2022. Inaction is an action itself.
You've basically got a 10 year window from the point where you begin removing entry level positions, 2 years you lose the most competent people; they can't find work and seek out other areas, 5 years you start to permanently lose generational knowledge; the practical parts, and by 10 years, no amount of money will let you find those people, they won't exist anymore because there was no economic benefit (infinite cost). We are 3 months away from 2 years; on this timetable.
Supply chains fail, food systems fail, people then starve, as order devolves into chaos.
The simple fact of the matter is, the most intelligent people who should be participating in discussion on important existential matters like this, are not participating.
They are not participating because they know and realize that what people see today in communications is not a discussion. They have realized that for the most part, the communication channel has been jammed past Shannon's limit, with false narratives that are not actually coming from real people. Objective reasoning and statements are drowned out by the flood of lies. Its an attack, one long predicted but ignored.
What happens anytime communications are jammed and you don't realize it? It leads you to improper decisions which have a cost in blood instead of in resources. The bigger the impact, the longer the dynamics take, the more harm there is.
Worse, the simulacra released to do these things behave as a toddler behaves, or rather quite worse as an evil malevolent person towards manipulation and total control neglecting reality.
If you've ever had an argument with a toddler, you know inherently that they are just play-acting, with a tantrum held in reserve for when they are shown wrong. The same goes for the sock puppets, with malice held in reserve targeting blindspots towards torture and psychological harm for those people engaging in goodwill seeking a long-term future for their children.
When the distance between what is said and what we know to be objectively true is an abyss, evil wins, and everyone becomes victim to the loudest monster in the room, a monster which eventually comes to destroy us all.
Evil is not just some metaphorical construct but mainly describes the outcomes that result in destruction that are entirely preventable through choice and knowledge (truth).
The people who are truly intelligent have realized that without communication there can be no response, no counteraction, it is a runaway machine, a train running along a track at full speed that ends going over a cliff into the ocean where those aboard die, and those aboard don't know it because they've all put blindfolds on in merriment. Willful induction to blindness is a very dangerous thing.
Those that can are withdrawing and preparing for the inevitable consequence of these quite fundamental dynamics. We've passed a critical point of no return and no one noticed because their vision was obscured purposefully. They didn't realize the nature of the failures, which act as a wave with no forewarning aside from long discounted details that were ignored. A cascading failure based in hysteresis.
The only people that will likely survive this are the ones that recognized and prepared, a paltry amount are doing this compared to the number of people globally living today.
Instead of solving problems, and making careful choices, the aggregate of decisions from people over the past few generations were to blind themselves and others to the problems they created. To cherry-pick education, torture the rational, obscure reality, and live the good life with front-loaded benefits through money printing, thinking they'll be dead before the consequences can reach them, and sacrificing those of lesser intellect who were incapable of seeing through the lies.
The bill always comes due.
The slow knife penetrates without anyone noticing.
There are a lot of people that believe most of us will die within the next 10 years, and a rational discussion of these subjects is largely based in the fact that for the last three generations, we have faced numerous existential threats that instead of solving them, have instead all had the can kicked down the road.
Eventually what inevitably happens is you get convergence in time where you simply do not have the resources, and with the risk factors today, that convergence my cause societal failure.
Super Intelligent AI alone, yeah that probably is not a threat because its so highly (astronomically) unlikely, but socio-economic collapse to starvation; now that's a very real possibility when you create something that destroys the ability for an individual to form capital, or breaks other underlying aspects which underpin all of societal organization going back hundreds of years.
Now these things won't happen overnight, but that's not the danger either. The danger is the hysteresis, or in other words by the time you find out and can objectively show its happening to react, its impossible to change the outcome. Your goose is just cooked as a species, and the cycle of doom just circles until no ones left.
Few realize that food today is wholly dependent on Haber-Bosch chemistry. You get 4x less yield without it, and following Catton in a post-extraction phase sustainable population numbers may be fractional compared to last century (when the population was 4bn). People break quite easily under certain circumstances and so any leaders following MAD doctrine will likely actually use it when they realize everything is failing and what's ahead.
These are just things that naturally happen when the mechanics of things that are long forgotten which underpin the way things work fail to ruin. The loss of objective reality is a warning sign of such things on the horizon.
Don't discount that some people struggle with the object of parenthood more than others. Maybe they'd led a more selfish life, weren't brought up to be yielding, giving, or responsible to others, and their journey required more growth than they'd anticipated.
If they didn't know that they weren't prepared, how could anyone else?
As a younger man, I spent longer than most parents actively raise their children caring for elderly family. A minor difference to child rearing is that when you no longer need you to help your children or change their diapers, it's generally not because they've died.
When vetting how useful answers are, I and most reasonably intelligent people always pay most attention to the answers that are negative because you typically learn something that helps you better able to approach the problem even if it doesn't solve the problem which you are intending to solve.
Looking over this post, there's a problem here. Where are the posts that disagree? That are negative but provide constructive criticism, the very thing that provides value.
I see 62 replies here, and this isn't a new question, and there are many caveats which easily come to my mind when learning languages, and yet no ones saying a thing. It begs some serious questions about the environment you are asking in.
OP, I would suggest that before wasting your time listening to yes-people, you need some not-so-nice answers for perspective if you really want to solve that problem in an expedient way.
That should necessarily include can AI solve that problem for you really? What are the risks of learning language improperly in a professional environment where reputation is important? What are the risks of improperly conveying meaning you didn't intend?, and so forth; you get the gist of the line of questions you should naturally come up with when seeking the truth of things.
I'm reminded of all the Japanese anime fans that pick up phrases without understanding the meaning, which is what you are learning to convey when you learn a langauge: like men using watashi (instead of boku), using improper honorifics (-kun, -sama, diajo, aniki), and other aspects that while cute in an entertainment show reflect very poorly on the person if conveyed in reality.
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