amag · HackerTrans

And in Sweden, another "nordic socialist country", there's no tax on property nor inheritance, as well as very low taxes on invested capital. There are about 1.5x more USD-billionaires per capita in Sweden than in the US. I think there's room for some more taxes.

amag

vorig jaardiscuss

You mean I can't sue society if I die nine years into retirement?

amag

vorig jaardiscuss

> are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average?

That may be true, but will we (who are in our 40's now) have the same quality of life at 90-95 as a now 75-year old will have at 80-85?

amag

vorig jaardiscuss

Of course there is no guarantee that your 65-75 years will be good, but it's a lot more likely that your 65-75 years will be good than your 75-85 years.

amag

vorig jaardiscuss

This is truly sad. As a Swede I fear my country may follow suite. The retirement age in Sweden used to be 65 and now it's 67.

Looking at older people around me, most lead a much less active life after 75. So, if we were lucky we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted before old age and age-related diseases start affecting us so much we become limited to a much smaller world. But now we have maybe eight years and if we follow Denmark, five years.

I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.

amag

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Well, people in offices need new shiny phones every year and new Teslas to get to the office after all...

amag

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I really wish people would stop talking about MD5 already. It is almost never the answer. On a modern CPU you get HW accelerated SHA-256, it will always be much faster than your best software MD5. If your SHA-256 hash is too long, chop it up, it will still be better than MD5 for the same bit length.

amag

2 jaar geledendiscuss

> Perhaps the doom isn't so imminent?

Perhaps, or perhaps we don't know what the fall of civilization looks like? I remember watching a talk by Jonathan Blow where he poses that question. Did the Egyptians who built the pyramids realize when their civilization fell or did it just look like business as usual until it suddenly didn't?

amag

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Last I used it, even pretty small grammars took forever to build. I had to be very diligent not to let the grammar cpp-file depend on anything else in my codebase.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

If you for instance work with software developers, true vulnerability shows at a code review not at a occasional game of soccer or similar. Few software developers identify themselves as great soccer players so it's not a threat to their identity to be perceived as bad at it.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Also consistently forgetting the 15 times larger population.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

As I've said countless times in other comments, this is not a shallow job security issue. My post is about how I believe AI will change us as people and society in a much more fundamental way than we may think. In ways we might not have considered. And not all for good.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

> The bleakness you feel might be due to a poverty of imagination.

Thank you for your diagnosis. It may _also_ be due to the opposite. If you know anything about how the brain works, you'd know that in general more imaginative people are more anxious.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

No, I don't think it is simple. In fact I think it is impossible. Just looking at the division in this thread tells me that there will never even be an agreement for taking such a stand much less follow through.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

> AI does not make stuff like this go away. It actually frees more people to become these imbue-ers of meaning, if they are so inclined.

Yeah, but in that very example I feel the value and narrative behind it is in the memory of the grandfather's toil. When we no longer toil, there will be no horse shoes for our grandchildren to make sculptures of.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Of course it's an absurd argument but my point is that in a fully automated world in abundance we will have 10 billion tourists.

Also I like to differ between performing and creating. For instance playing the piano might still be worthwhile but creating new music will lose its allure as AI will do it for you, faster and better. Saying that it's the same thing as there has always been someone who is better at creating than you, is a flawed argument. With AI there will be an infinite amount of creators that are better than you. Also AI isn't just competition, it's also your ally but the kind who'll say "step aside and I'll fix this for you."

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Yeah, but it's only possible because we, the software engineers, make it so. We could as a collective refuse to work on AI but we won't because it's a pretty, shiny, object with far too much lure for us to resist.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

No need when I can examine myself to know myself :). While not actively working for it, I'm at least inspired by the FIRE movement. I am also self-employed so I don't see job security as the meaning of life.

Still this whole thread has been illuminating, maybe part of my fear comes from identifying strongly with being creative and making things, and seeing that turned into something automated.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Thanks for this optimistic post and to be clear I don't expect alphacode to put me out of a job. I've seen the hilarious examples where people get ChatGPT to for instance claim that abacus-based computing is faster than GPU-based computing.

We're far from there with AI yet but we're on a trajectory and that's what worries me.

But in the short term I definitely agree with you.

amag

4 jaar geledendiscuss

> Our society currently affords ample opportunity to "productively" avoid those questions.

I fully agree.

> Some people already have answers to those questions, and stand to gain from that toil being removed.

I used to believe that but with the recent improvements in AI, I think it's only true to an extent. Not all personalities are equal. As AI's power in the creative fields increase those fields will more and more become a question of who has the most money to throw at AI processing. Superficially it might seem the same as two-three centuries ago when rich people had famous artists paint them but it's not.

I fear where we're at with AI is the beginning of the end for human creativity. Of course I hope I'm wrong. I hoped I was wrong about my skepticism when I first learned of Facebook in 2007, but as it turned out it has and continues to be a net negative force in our world much bigger than I could imagine.