I'm just playing devil's advocate here, so no need for pitchforks....

But consider that our employers have free will, and freedom under the law. They aren't required to hire us. The only reason they do is because it is profitable for them to do so. They have every right to eliminate our jobs if they find something else they would rather do than hire us.

We aren't entitled to jobs. We need them, but that does not entitle us to them. We are never entitled to what others have built.

So, stopping them from building AGI, just because we want to force them to keep paying us more to do the same thing AGI could, is an entitled attitude.

On the other hand, if large numbers of us wind up unemployed and starving, all talk of entitlement will become moot. We will just turn violent. That's what hungry and hopeless people do. So, whoever builds any kind of AGI replacement for most of the work that earns us a living will need to do *something* to prevent the violence. Maybe it won't be UBI specifically, but something similar. Food distribution centers, free low-end housing, etc. It would be an enormous shift toward socialism in one way or another.

It's either that or AI killbots.

Either way, it seems inevitable to me that we will automate intelligence as much as we possibly can. Those with the means have too much to gain. These protests will have no impact.

In order to take steps forward, we have to face our fears, stare down our demons, and enter into unknown territory.

Should we just accept technological stagnation forever, because we are afraid of what we might be able to achieve?

Life is grim for most of humanity...starvation, no hope of upward social mobility. Almost all wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a tiny few corrupt elites. We need a game-changer. AGI might BE that game-changer. Maybe we should develop it, and see what it can do, BEFORE passing judgment on its capabilities.

Hollywood says we will lose control of it...but...Hollywood writes fiction. The only way to know for sure what we can do, is try! If it goes south, we can pivot. But let's not be frozen by fear until after we see something that presents an actual threat. Until then, we are just scaring ourselves with ghost stories.

I understand what you are saying. I agree that, in theory laws are supposed to protect equality and safety and be "just" and so on.

But I counter that this is a feel-good delusion. It is a story we tell ourselves because we like how it sounds. We want to believe that this is true. We want the law to be righteous, and fair, and serve us all equally. We really, really want this, as it makes us feel safe and helps us to keep a positive attitude about life and so on. So, I fully understand why you believe this. I really, truly do.

But it's still naive. That is why I said specifically that "Laws are not handed to us by God." The only way that law could ever live up to such an ideal is if it was forged by a perfect being. But, as you and I both know, all laws are forged by humans.

And not just any humans, politicians. The same narrative might apply to them: that they are our noble leaders, motivated by a higher calling to devote themselves to the service of the greater good. But we know this is false. It is plainly and obviously false. We see their corruption in the machinations of government every day. And it isn't even possible in theory that it should be otherwise. Consider:

In a democracy, politicians attain power by winning votes. Well, voters qualify as a "mob" and so have a mob-level of intelligence. They vote for whoever makes them the best promises, NOT for whoever is most qualified. Voters don't even have a way to assess who is more qualified. All they can see (and all they base their decision on) is who is the most charismatic, who promises the most desirable things, and (often) who is on "my team." That, my friend, is the best we can do, and it is a recipe for bad decisions.

Any honest politician will make realistic promises and often some unhappy predictions, and thus will be thoroughly defeated by the politicians who straight-up lie about what they can deliver, talk a slick talk, and play to the most petty elements of the voting populace. The honest ones are eliminated right at the gate. And if any honest ones somehow do attain office, they can't do anything by themselves. The system of checks-and-balances forces them to deal and compromise with all the liars and power-hungry narcissists who have also attained office. AND, as if dealing with the devil weren't bad enough, they face bribes and other temptations to fall to corruption themselves.

One cannot bear the ring of Mordor, and remain pure.

These, my friend, are the people who make our laws. It's not "once in a while" that something bad makes it into the set. It's a matter of course. It's merely "once in a while" that anything good comes out of this mess, and THAT is not driven by fidelity to lofty ideals of what the law should be, but by raw practical necessity (in order to BE rich and powerful, there must be a strong economy to support that wealth, so there must be at least some laws that keep the economy strong, and that requires at least some benefits to trickle down to the lowest echelons of our society).

And I still haven't mentioned the fact that the public often desires bad laws themselves. Sometimes, there is strong popular support for laws that are harmful and do not benefit the greater good, and inasmuch as the public has any voice at all, they push their politicians for this. Consider the very long stretch of history when the public insisted that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry, women should not be allowed to vote, blacks should not be allowed freedom, and so on. These things DID change over time, but we would be kidding ourselves if we believed that "the masses" were now a fully enlightened group that only demanded good and noble laws.

So, in sum, our body of laws is deeply flawed. It has a decent core of good laws but they were made only because they were necessary to keep the economy strong. The rest are just the end-result of rich-and-powerful people struggling against other rich-and-powerful people in this playing field, each trying to gain the most advantage over the other.

You can call it cynicism if you like, but, can you show me some sort of mechanism by which our law-making process is protected against corrupt politicians and unenlightened voters? Or some mechanism by which the body of voters is protected against benightedness, or the body of politicians is protected against bad apples? Because if there is such a mechanism, it's invisible.

By that logic, religious people aren't allowed to have views on god either, since they have never met such a being but have only read about him.

Generally speaking, the bigger a group becomes, the lower its collective intelligence becomes. Individual people may be bright enough to have clear ideas about justice and equality and so on, but mobs are not.

From a practical perspective, most people are too preoccupied with survival and the pursuit of happiness to devote very much time and effort to political matters. They are willing to read about high-level summaries, and maybe gripe and grumble. But most of them are simply too busy to truly get involved, and truly sacrifice to fight for a political cause that they think is right.

Even the ones who are ready to get involved and make some sacrifice don't fully devote themselves to it. They might march in a few protests, and of course cast a vote, but in all cases they are still letting someone else tell them what their political positions should be. They are getting it from their church or their peer group. Very few of them devote themselves to a proper study of political science, ethics, and philosophy, along with continual monitoring of political events. Only career-politicians do that sort of thing (again, mainly for practical reasons; there simply isn't enough time in the day).

This means that, in effect, most of the actual political power in the world is concentrated into a very small number of people, even in democracies. It has always been that way, for these same reasons. These potentates must contend with the will of the mob "somewhat." If they harm the mob too much, the mob will revolt. But so long as they stay under that "too much" threshold, they can perpetuate all kinds of terrible injustices for the benefit of themselves. Even worse, this means that they must sometimes placate the mob by doing some unfair, unjust, thing that the mob is demanding (based on the previously-mentioned mob-stupidity).

To make matters worse, recent research into human neurology has demonstrated that humans, once that attain real power over other humans, lose the ability to empathize with them (or even think from their perspective). One hypothesis is that this is gives our species a survival advantage: our leaders lack-of-empathy allows them to make the decisions that prioritize the good of the group over the good of the individual. The exercise of finding the source is left to the student.

The bottom line is exactly what we see here. The world isn't fair, has never been and will never be fair, and it is largely due to practical reasons.

"Theft" is a legal term, source.

But Wikipedia has an excellent write up of the issue. Here are some relevant quotes:

"The practice of labeling the infringement of exclusive rights in creative works as "piracy" predates statutory copyright law."

"Copyright holders frequently refer to copyright infringement as theft, "although such misuse has been rejected by legislatures and courts"

"Courts have distinguished between copyright infringement and theft."

etc.

So, in common, non-legal use, "piracy" has acquired a meaning as a synonym for copyright infringement. But, legally speaking, courts do not consider copyright infringement as equivalent to theft. The two offences are covered by different sets of laws, so they are not the same.

Make it make sense.

Ok:

Rich and powerful businesses operate under a different set of laws than individual people.

That's pretty much it. I can elaborate a bit though:

Laws aren't handed to us by God. They aren't discovered by the scientific method. They are invented by human beings. In particular, they are invented by rich and powerful human beings who all share a common motivation: to remain rich and powerful. So, the purpose of the law is to protect their wealth and power.

Ostensibly it is to ensure fair and equal treatment for everyone, keep everyone safe, etc. That's mostly true only inasmuch as such fairness and safety are necessary to keep powerful people powerful. It's not true in some lofty, philosophical, "everyone is equally important" sense. Sentiments like that are just there to get public buy-in so that people don't revolt.

Meta, as a legal entity, is simply more important than any of the individual authors of those works. Their ambitions of creating a better LLM, are more important. So, the little people will be made to move. Their grievances will be heard, paid lip-service-to, and then ignored. There might be some token efforts, like some kind of legal clarity that will make it crystal clear that no other little people are allowed to do this sort of thing. There might even be something of a slap on the wrist to satisfy the mob's desire for vengeance.

But Meta will not be treated like some uppity nobody. Meta will be permitted to pursue its ambitions.

Use one laptop for banking, investing, and shopping.

Use a different computer for gaming, news-reading, social media, and casual browsing.

This is simply a matter of digital hygiene. Everyone should do it.

It's just another reason to buy from anyone other than Amazon any time you can.

That was an interesting paper you linked though I confess I only read the summary. The upshot is "the 401k system has failed to provide participants with sufficient retirement savings by the time they hit retirement age." So, that's why it has been pronounced a failure: the people who used it, as instructed, have reached retirement age with too little money to retire.

Well, that assumes that helping people to retire was ever the goal. It certainly was the ostensible goal. But remember that it was rolled in right at the same time that pensions were rolled out of the private sector. Companies were downsizing like mad to deny current employees any further vestment in their pensions, and of course killing the policies. The 401k was presented as an alternative.

Why was the country's economic leadership united in this action? Was it because they honestly believed that the pension system was letting people down, and this 401k system would make all their employees be better off? If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

The pension was an excellent deal for employees, which is exactly why employers axed it. It involved too much money trickling down from the wealthy to the working class. They wanted more of that money to trickle up. So they replaced it with a system that forces you to purchase stock on an ongoing basis, thus sending your money right back up into the coffers of the wealthy who control most of the economy. The flow here is a little bit indirect, since 401k programs don't necessarily include stock in the specific company that one works for. But that wasn't necessary for the big picture. The groups that pushed the plans on us are in a different position than we are when it comes to the stock market. They are well diversified and can make trades and take actions that are unavailable to us (and that most of us don't even know about). So their wealth increases overall when our participation in the market increases overall, regardless of specifics.

So, the 401k plan worked beautifully. It distracted us enough that we didn't unify in political action against the dissolution of the pension plan, and it left us converting a big chunk of our wealth into stock holdings which wound up benefiting them overall.

The fact that it leaves many retirement-age people with too little money to retire is just a side benefit. Keeping them in the workforce longer helps keep salaries down overall.

So, from their perspective, it was a supreme success.

Aside: despite the greed and evil on display here, stock investing (wisely) is still the best option for wealth accumulation for us. It benefits the upper 1%, but it also benefits us (more than just regular old interest would). This is still the best deal in town, even if it is a deal with the devil.

Hey, kudos on raising your kid to be a critical thinker.

Personally, I think rsilvergun made the mistake of speaking in absolutes (saying things like "Nobody wants their kid..." and "no parent is going to..." etc.). Clearly, that is untrue, there are parents (like you) who teach their kids to think critically and are unafraid of having their own ideas challenged by doing so.

However, it seems like many parents are in the category that rsilvergun describes (whether they realize it or not). Even if it is not all parents, it is clearly enough parents who get involved and demand that their particular sore spots are removed from the education criteria. Enough that a public education is not very good, these days.

That's just one problem, of many, with public education. But it's not one I think we can easily solve. Critical thinkers are likely to remain in the minority (at any age group), and so they will always be outnumbered by those who want to impose their under-thought irrational ideas on the education of all children.

The journalists that write up these articles always try to explain very specific scientific observations in a simple non-scientific way. And the end result is always ridiculous. Sometimes the journalists don't even understand the science, and other times their explanations are similar in form but not substance to the phenomena they are talking about. But it always has the feel of "wow, the world doesn't work the way we all experience it!" to get clicks.

The world of ordinary human experience sits on top of a very large stack of "emergent phenomenon." The reality that underlies it all operates according to principles that are very unfamiliar, and intuitive, to us, precisely because they are so different from ordinary experience. So, things that can happen "down there" don't translate well to things that can happen "up here."

Your car won't be doing any quantum tunneling. You aren't going to be entangled with your twin sibling. And we won't be seeing any effects coming before their causes in the supermarket. Even if these things are easiest to understand, when thought of this way, at the quantum level.

Powerful people use their power to avoid accountability, ensure that their power cannot be taken away, and acquire more power. This is a universal truth, regardless of economic model. It is not something that is somehow unique to capitalism.

Also, all economies need regulation, including ones based on capitalism.

You say that as if anything else would do better.

Working from home (in jobs where that is practical) gives people superior work-life balance and greater satisfaction in life and work. More time with their families without sacrificing the time they must focus on their duties, plus options to live further away from hubs to save much-needed money and benefit from cleaner air. It also reduces air pollution overall since they don't need to drive nearly as much. It is such a win for so many people.

I understand that traffic accidents went up during and after the pandemic, in absolute numbers. I didn't believe this until I read the stats myself. Apparently with lighter traffic, people drove like maniacs. As sad as this makes me, it is no argument for a RTO policy. On the contrary, it's a stronger argument for driving as little as possible (since it is clearly dangerous) and for beefing up traffic law enforcement.

On the other hand, working from home opens employers up to new kinds of fraud. One being people who just slack off, another being people who present a completely false identity, and another being people who outsource their time to foreigners (in a scheme that would be illegal for the employer to do directly). So, those risks are problems that employers need to find a way to deal with. I could see why they might find this problematic, and push for a return to office for these reasons.

But those aren't the reasons. Not the real ones. Mostly our employers care more about the sense of power they get from pushing us around, and their false belief that they make more money this way, than they do about our health, happiness, or families. They pay lip service to a fanciful narrative about "office culture" that we all know is a bunch of hooey, and makes it obvious that they aren't motivated by any true, practical concerns.

Unfortunately, the balance of power is not even. The rich rule, so I also fear that this better way of living will be taken away from those of us who are fortunate enough to have roles that would otherwise allow it.