this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Pictures for Sad Children was a great webcomic. Thank you for posting these.
It was one of my favorites when it was running.
Jesus Christ, this is toxic as fuck. You are not a bad person for enjoying life. You are not a bad person for being happy or seeking happiness. Excessive consumerism isn't great but you are still not a bad person for owning things. You are definitely not a bad person for trying to improve your life or the life of people around you.
I have no idea why they decided to attack renewable energy, it's undeniably better than the fossil fuel systems it's to replace. They say they're against alternative energy immediately after complaining that a third of the world has no electricity. This doesn't even make sense! They don't want you to make electricity available to people, they just want you to feel bad about it.
Inequality sucks, but you are still allowed to enjoy things.
What does make you a bad person is actively seeking to make other people's lives worse. For instance, making a comic with the sole intention of shitting on people just living their lives.
I have no idea why they decided to attack renewable energy
Huh? The comic is complaining nerds are wasting adulthood on speedrunning and drawing comics instead of doing research that improves the world (like renewable energy).
It doesn't read that way to me, but either way my point still stands. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing something you like, and calling that "wasting adulthood" is incredibly fucked up.
The last line is literally telling people they are terrible for enjoying themselves. There is no excuse for that.
If you are not producing or in another way being in service to society, can you claim any human worth or dignity? /S
I'm wasting adulthood on university degrees and doing research
Speedrun guys, research is not worth how much it destroys your life.
I've done far too much research getting to where I am now. Thankfully not research. Couldn't handle academia, government and private sector is a much better option.
Edit: I forgot to say how much research sucks and agree with the point of ruining your life.
It's a weird conclusion to take that the people working towards or excited about a world where AI robots have automated all labour and resources and services are free and near unlimited for everyone would want to limit that to only white people, or people who are rich now - since being 'rich' in a world with unlimited resources isn't really a concept.
I can only talk with certainty about myself, but I would hazard a guess that the majority of people excited about a post scarcity world are not part of the bourgeoisie, and see it as a way to solve the social injustice issues we see now but are powerless to do anything significant about, not to further exacerbate wealth inequality - there would be no motive to hoard resources in a world without scarcity, when you can have most of what you ever dreamed of and so can everyone else, including the people living in what were formerly third world countries.
It's a dream of a paradise, not a dystopia, and it's a dream people are actually working towards, to try and make the world better. What is the comic writer doing to make the world better? Donating a fraction of the money that current charities need? Tearing down other people's attempts at solutions? Complaining online about how other people aren't doing anything about the starving children in Africa?
Not to say there aren't legitimate fears of AI, such as a misaligned ASI being created that turns into a paperclip maximiser and destroys everything we care about. But that's a very different argument than what the comic writer is making.
Increasing wealth has only ever been observed to fuel greater inequality.
I don't see any evidence that the value that increasing automation is bringing will be distributed more evenly.
We produce enough food for everyone and still let people starve - equal access to AI is even harder to justify than equal access to food.
I’m not so sure about that. When we compare medieval wealth inequality to now, it was worse back then. Ew, a link to Reddit, but it’s got good info.
Not saying we don’t need to fix things… we need to destroy even the concept of billionaires. While things are bad, and trending worse, they’re not yet “literally eat the rich” bad.
Only when not looked at on a global scale (such as 1% owns 99% being assumed to be about the USA rather than global wealth). Mormengil's opening response is very feels over facts (also the claim that there was no state support for the poor can be technically true, but churches and local elite as well as royal dictat were often involved in poor relief and charity in the Middle Ages), the later response are better detailed.
And in the 1200s, global wealth inequality and access to food was for much of the world better or comparable to where it is now.
But global wealth inequality and access to food got worse after colonisation rearranged American and then African economies for European, and then USAian, benefit.
AI is already filled with implicit bias towards the current status quo. It can be very tricky to get AI chatbots to give anything other than platitudes about inequality, and they're often very quick to try to shut down or redirect talk of system change. To think that they'll not reflect continued post colonial and extractivist systems of power seems, to me, shortsighted.
I'm not sure that link does have good info.
That's a 0 point comment on ask historians, from 11 years ago, with no sources listed, no details and little explanation. The follow-up comments have a little more info but only from 1870, and even then it's only talking about land not wealth. Also the only source linked is a NY Review of Books article that 404s.
I think it's fairly safe to assume that wealth inequality was lower before industrialization. That really supercharges the power of capital, encouraging and rewarding larger and larger accumulations of capital. Before that it's also much harder to get reliable data.
Aristotle in the politics mentions a plan to cap wealth inequality at 1:5. Once you have more than 5 times the poorest citizen, your wealth is redistributed. He thinks it too radical, but could you imagine anyone talking about capping CEO pay at 5 times the janitor? That's unthinkable to us.
You would just have to let an superintelligent (aligned) AI robot loose and prompt it to produce enough food for everyone. It wouldn't even be any maintaining effort, once the robot had been created. If it doesn't have any negative consequences to the creators to have positive consequences for everyone else, and there are any empathetic people on the board of creators, I don't see why it wouldn't be programmed to benefit everyone.
As long as it doesn’t generate any negative externalities, sure. That’s a huge alignment problem though.
True, and I have my doubts on the alignment problem being solved. But that's a technical problem, a separate conversation from whether even attempting it is worthwhile in the first place.
We don't live in a limitless world. And adding robots will not change the limits. It just changes who does the work.
That's why I said near unlimited. Creating a Dyson swarm will give us near unlimited energy for anything we want to reasonable do. Robots can give us near unlimited food by working tirelessly on farms on O'Neill cylinders. The same cylinders can give us near unlimited space to live, while preserving the natural world on Earth.
Some people won't get their most outlandish fantasies, but the vast majority of people will get the vast majority of what they want, and everyone will get unlimited free time to be creative or socialise. Mandatory jobs, the great thief of time, will have been slain, assuming you believe the robots are not conscious. It would be a vast improvement on what we have now, for everyone.
All these mental gymnastics to avoid saying capitalism and consumerism is the problem. The "nerds" buying hardware aren't the issue when Intel and Nvidia have literally been confirmed to gimp chip releases when they have a grip on the market.
Ellipse head seems like someone who uses Twitter too much
What do you want, Mr. Ghost? Do you want us to stop making new technology and simply use what already exists, consuming more power and time than is necessary? Do you not want people to be free to buy what they want with their own money? The singularity people are stupid, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
We must all become speedrunners and cartoonists, the only ethical professions left.
Fuck you, I just wanna port DOOM onto this new chipset
I made it to the first black bar... Am I having a stroke? It doesn't make sense to me
What’s the point of anything, anyway? Why is something made for entertainment or war intrinsically bad? This comic is making a lot of implicit value judgments.
What utter nonsense.
Boring doomer shit
Rampant consumerism and tech saviourism are not solely the domain of "nerds", nor are they true of all "nerds". The group you are looking for is "people".
Plenty of people you would never consider nerds will throw away their old phone just to get the newer model. They will assume they have no responsibilities to the world or to the community because government/science/jesus will sort the big problems out. They will live in their own tiny worlds never even considering the bigger problems at play.
Why do you think this is a problem that only affects nerds?
Exactly who are you to tell me I'm "wasting my adulthood"? The same could be said about literally any pleasurable human pursuit.
There is a solution.
Read marx, lenin, and other socialist philosophers and politicians of your liking.
You live in a capitalist world, an inherently hostile ideology created by the few to rule the many, and you think you haven't been fed absolutely bullshit and lied to about socialism your entire life? Everything you know is a lie. They divided and conquered us a long time ago. Their lies are just housekeeping.
You must be awake. There is either barbarism or socialism and I've made my choice.