Comment by nickpp
4 days ago
> upsides on the other hand seem to be the most insignificant things
An abundance of intelligence on Earth with all its spoils: new medicine, energy, materials, technologies and new understandings and breakthroughs - these seem quite significant to me.
There is absolutely no guarantee that those things will happen just because Claude takes your job. Taking your job doesn't require super-intelligence, it doesn't even require human-level intelligence. It requires just enough intelligence to pump out mediocre code that sort of works and being way cheaper to run than your pay.
Super-intelligence is a completely different can of worms. But I'm not optimistic about super-intelligence either. It seems super naive to me to assume that the spoils of super-intelligence will be shared with the people who no longer can bring anything to the table. You aren't worth anything to the super-rich unless you can do something for them which the super-intelligence can't do.
There is absolutely no guarantee that Claude takes your job either. But if you believe so much in AI, investing in it is accessible to pretty much any pocket, you don't have to be rich to partake.
And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone, not less.
Computers in my pocket and on my wrist, TVs as big as a wall and thin like a book, electric cars, flights to anywhere I dream of traveling, investing with a few clicks on my phone - all made possible to me by those evil and greedy rich in their race for riches. Thank you rich people!
> you don't have to be rich to partake.
You still need to be rich to partake. Most business ventures will still require capital even in the age of super-intelligence. Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless.
> And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone, not less.
There are plenty of examples of rich people hoarding their wealth. Countries with natural resources often have poor citizens because those citizens are not needed to extract that wealth. There is little reason why super-intelligence will not lead to a resource curse where the resource is human intelligence or even human labor.
> Computers in my pocket and on my wrist, TVs as big as a wall and thin like a book, electric cars, flights to anywhere I dream of traveling, investing with a few clicks on a website - all made possible to me by those evil and greedy rich in their race for riches. Thank you rich people!
Those rich people didn't share with you out of the goodness of their heart but because it was their best strategy to become even richer. But that's no longer the case when you can be replaced by super-intelligence.
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I feel like you're fighting the fallacy of "the rich" being collectively blamed for every problem, by giving them credit for everything instead.
We know that none of the goods you listed would be available to the masses unless there was profit to be gained from them. That's the point.
I have a hard time believing a large group being motivated and mutually benefiting towards progression of x thing would result in worse outcomes than a few doing so. We just have never had an economic system that could offer that, so you assume the greedy motivations of a few is the only path towards progress.
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Literally none of what you just said is true. All of those things happened because there was a market opportunity, there was a market opportunity because wealth was not just in the hands of the rich.
If you want to look at what historically has happened when the rich have had a sudden rapid increase in intelligence and labor, we have examples.
After the end of the Punic wars, the influx of slave labor and diminution of economic power of normal Roman citizens lead to: accelerating concentration of wealth, civil war and an empire where the value of human life was so low that people were murdered in public for entertainment.
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