That is absolute utter nonsense. Like beyond nonsense, much closer to fiction than a differing view of reality. But understandable through a lens that innovation and productivity gains are a means of exploitation. Modern systems and societies are not slavery. They're a default opt-in system of incentives that drive people to contribute more to society if they wish to extract more from it - and we even support a growing class of individuals who contribute far less than they extract, happily.

Unless you're talking about the literal slavery that still happens in developing nations, in which case, there are less total slaves and orders of magnitude less slaves per capita than (I think close to) the majority of written history.

From my perspective you're moralizing against technology in the same silly way people moralize for it, and a significant portion of that is well captured with this one statement: (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down. - If you make yourself ignorant to the positive effects of technical innovation and instead view it primarily as a mechanism of exploitation that "eventually very far from now _maybe_ brings benefits", that's no different than making yourself ignorant to the negative effects and viewing it as a mechanism of great benefit to which you should enrich yourself for bringing to the masses and "maybe hurts a few people but everyone benefits so much overall it doesn't matter".

I'll make my position very clear. Technology and innovation are the driving forces of quality of life improvements and are so obviously a moral good for society and mankind. However, innovation is never perfect, so it's necessary to have competent policy makers and governance structures that can regulate away the negative externalities of new systems that innovations can spawn, as rapidly and efficiently as possible.

If you disagree that technology and innovation are inherently an extremely obvious moral good, please look up the following graphs over the last 200 years, noting the year ranges of the industrial era and information age while looking at these graphs. 1. Life expectancy 2. Infant / Child Mortality 3. Extreme Poverty 4. Literacy Rates 5. Average years of schooling 6. Food Supply / Calories Per Person / Crop Yield / Famine Deaths

If your claim is that in the short term there are negatives caused by innovation, then… well yeah! There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it’s exceedingly rare to ever have pure upside in anything ever. Life is a series of trade offs and hard decisions. The Industrial Revolution literally lifted a significant portion of the population out of poverty, and also hurt children in the beginning. I’m very glad we have child labor laws that are strict and well enforced. If your claim is that the Industrial Revolution was a net negative because children died, I would like for you to pull up the chart of child mortality from before and after the Industrial Revolution and go ahead and tell me what you see.

On the other hand, I think lots of people over index on the harms caused because it’s so easy to. You’ve clearly thought at length about quantifying the harm of big tech and your work. But have you ever quantified the positive impact? You can rationalize the tradeoffs of your actions without moralizing the harms you caused.

It’s not okay for children to die in factories, but without those factories far more would’ve died from illness, hunger, etc.

You’re conflating Meta’s alignment issue with its overall benefit / harm to society. There is a singular, obvious thing that you interact with everyday that is very very bad (unless like me you don’t have it). And the invisible parts of what they do that are extremely beneficial are less obvious.

To be fair say from the list Meta is closest to being a net negative, like they’re the worst of the big tech companies and the only one I would refuse to work at. So I get what you’re saying, but to say they’re largely useless signals that you don’t know what they do and how they impact society at large, other than their very evil algorithms.

If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.

Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?

Seemingly opposing forces.

For my $250 deductible I basically just get a nice upgrade to the latest version / a brand new ebike for ~$200 / year.

The peace of mind alone with insurance (and a really nice lock) have fully mitigated this for me. I've been leaving my ~$2k ebike locked up all over San Francisco for ~3 years without it being stolen. (My first beater bike was a POS locked up in my apartments secure bike storage and it was stolen after I owned it for ~9 days so I figured I couldn't double down on the bad luck).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47854143

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Was this an oversight? Or did their new image generation model generate an image that was essentially a copy of an existing image?

Like, of course it's creating a job. If you create a million 1-year jobs every year, that's a million jobs.

If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity, it's an extremely low environmental & industrial (all contained clean rooms, no air pollutants, risk to local water systems, etc.) once in a lifetime boon for the local municipality.

The council members (probably, again depending on abatements & water/energy policy) did represent their constituents well.

In 2024, 77M Americans voted for a Trump administration. I was not among them, and I still consider this to be a contender for dumbest decision a majority of that 77M will make in their lifetime. Altman's job is to represent OpenAI. Not my political preferences. Making an enemy with the current government of the country you're incorporated in would be Trump-Admin levels of incompetence.

Reading his actions of playing friendly with the admin as being an organization he relies on for protection is a bias / tilt as ridiculous as the tower of Pisa.

> Blue-collar communities are not going to read his description of an AGI apocalypse and reconcile it with OpenAI's defense contracts. Altman himself empathizes with the "anti-technology" sentiment precipitating his pushback, but refuses to denounce the "AGI" nonsense and apocalyptic marketing spiel. The post is a contradiction from front-to-back, and Altman does nothing to assuage it.

I think anyone with a brain can easily see that his position is simple. 1. AI is _extremely_ powerful. 2. AI can be used as a force of good unlike anything the world has ever seen. 3. AI can be used as a force of bad unlike anything the world has ever seen.

If you start here, it's actually unbelievably easy to reason through _exactly_ what he is saying. Of course AI can be apocalyptic. Burying your head in the sand and saying there is no possibility of an AI apocalypse would be unbelievably irresponsible. It would be like Oppenheimer claiming everything's fine we have MAD so don't worry about these nukes I'm building.

> Why can't Altman apologize for his role in enabling war crimes and extrajudicial surveillance?

Wild strawman. If this is your question, no wonder you're so confused by what you're reading.

I'll say it again because I think half the world is in a state of AI induced psychosis right now. You're obviously intelligent. Intelligent enough to reason through everything I pointed out here. You're short-circuiting your own brain and choosing not to (reason objectively) by starting with a conclusion and working backwards, feigning ignorance to protect your foregone conclusion.

fwiw, this is ridiculous and I won't be replying again because I have better things to do than defend the CEO of OpenAI. I don't even give a shit! I was genuinely curious and your response was so extremely void of logic, reason and empathy.

He very well could be! I’m not commenting on Altman because I don’t know.

But if you applied the same logic to myself in a relatively similar situation, I’d be appalled at your lack of empathy and emotional intelligence.

Genuine Q

Despite that, the single mechanism that works so well in a competitive market, the threat of competition, (this time) worked just the same in a 2 person market where you would expect the inefficiencies of a price fixing regime and for all decisions and investments to have to pass through (and have funds allocated to) an army of lawyers, politicians and special interest groups.

That is objectively what happened and reframing it into a negative light is a choice grounded in emotion and not analysis.

Have you ever taken an economics course? Nobody finishes a basic micro/macro course without an introduction to game theory. Game theory is the EXACT reason that N=2,3,4 markets struggle with competition and provide insights into the regulation and “rules” needed for markets with very low suppler cardinality.

You thinking that anyone else expects a local ISP market to function efficiently and competitively is a failure of your own understanding, not of the system.

> It's a bit disturbing and dystopian that one counldn't think of any other way to 'distribute things efficiently' than markets ... but worse, that even contemplating that there could be 'other ways' would be 'silly'.

It's not disturbing, nor dystopian. And I didn't say there isn't any other way of distributing things efficiently, but there is no way of distributing _more_ efficiently.

Ultimately, you understand the beauty of markets, or you don't. Under the right conditions (fair markets, open information, competition, no monopoly), the invisible hand of the market distributes more efficiently and fairly than any individual or team ever could, without requiring the labor of an expert to be spent doing something that the invisible hand of the market could, leaving them to use their highly valuable skillset in some other way to actually benefit mankind.

My argument is specifically predicated on the fact that a housing market is well positioned to benefit, and doesn't because of poor policy decisions, like rent control, overly restrictive zoning, poorly designed tax schemes, etc. - which you assumed it isn't and then broadly and generally said I don't understand market limitations, agreed with me in a super roundabout way, and made sure to include some irrelevant nonsense about power arbitrage instead of value creation wrt housing. You lack focus and brevity. Truth comes from understanding things simply, not complicating the domain until you can apply any lens you want to view it in any way you choose.