> they also make their place they live and the rest of the planet a tiny bit worse due to the energy consumption
Energy consumption isn't the problem. It's how the energy is generated that is relevant to planetary health, and even then, whose to say the tradeoff isn't worth it. Crypto mining is estimated to take up 3% at most which means 97% is spent on other things. What makes this other 97% more worthy of this energy than crypto mining? The fact you don't see it as valuable?
Also many mining operations take advantage of stranded energy, so energy that would go to waste if not used for on-site mining.
But switching from Bitcoin to something based on proof of work is always going to use less energy. Bitcoin was innovative when it was invented, but now it’s antique, inefficient tech that’s still being used because apparently fame overwhelms all technological considerations.
Stranded energy is basically energy which should be used but its commercially a lot more efficient to do energy abitrage with a global finance market with a local energy market.
Thats the biggest shit of bitcoin ever.
And no 3% for provoding gambling and only a small amount of money value is a bad joke. 3% is not nothing.
We increased the climate change rate per decade from 0.2 to 0.4 due to the amount of co2. Everything hurts us here.
Bitcoin is responsible for a gas powerp lant in NYC being turned on again. It only mines bitcoins now. It creates just heat and co2.
Bitcoin is responsible for power stealing across the planet.
What's your definition of a "regular" database? If you need a distributed, well-sequenced, auditable trail of cryptographically signed operations representing the transfer of value, that quite literally can be fit to match the definition of a blockchain.
People who haven't done it probably underestimate the incredible amount of fiddly nonsense is involved in actually writing accounting software to handle a ledger.
Banks and brokerages very often use software written 40 years ago because it's so much trouble to get correct.
What are you thinking of when you say "complete collapse"? Zimbabwe's currency collapsed yet they still had access to electricity and a networks. It sounds like you're envisioning an apocalypse.
Banks racked up huge losses on subprime mortgages, get bailed out to save customer deposits which the banks continue to profit from, most bank execs walk away scot-free, and that's a vindication of the system? They literally gambled with customer funds, lost it all by enriching incompetent sellers of bad MBS, and got it replaced by the government. With the money supply being inflated from the replacement, the only people who benefitted were the bad actors who still have a share of the now diluted supply of customer funds.
From a stablecoin perspective holding USDC or USDT is almost like having a bank account with a bank who, for the most part, allows you to maintain your privacy as an individual. They don't need a name, address, phone number, etc. They also run on infrastructure that exists beyond any single jurisdiction and spans countries and continents. This means that bank account can be used anywhere that has internet and people willing to transact. No government can keep you within their confines by holding your funds hostage nor can political leaders (or others with positions of power) use those controls to silence public outcry or civil disobedience.
> but wages for the majority of them will go further and further down until they become roughly equivalent to the average minimum wage, if they are not outsourced entirely.
In your framework, can't this be said for all jobs in the long tail of technological development? This is also assuming we get to a point where there is no need for a human to coordinate models and prioritize tasks, otherwise the job will become that.
> Many people will attempt to transition to a non-tech field if the number of available jobs and the wages are not commensurate
In this world where AI is good enough that most tech jobs aren't present due to outsourcing, why wouldn't the progress extend to other 'non-tech' jobs? I assume you use 'non-tech' to refer to jobs with physical labor but the field of robotics is always getting better. With the cost of writing software for them going down to 0, we should expect jobs in this domain to be scarce as well.
> Rent won't really go down, and the price of other things will likely continue to rise or stagnate
There's only so high a landlord can make rent without losing tenants and stacking losses due to mortgages or property taxes. Otherwise they're just paying the government for capital that could be used more efficiently elsewhere.
> As AI 'knowledge' is populated by more and more countries with different languages and priorities, English- and some other language speakers will be squeezed out
English is the most popular language in the world even being used as common languages. by countries that don't have it as their native language. I don't think there's any basis for this.
> At some point, looking for work is something AIs will discourage us from doing, if they don't already
I don't believe this accurately captures where AI is today. It is not good enough to be left to its own devices in most fields.
> Are we not, like, pricing ourselves out of our own careers (and planet?)
Planet? If AI is being built to prioritize helping humanity, what reason is there to believe that a superintelligence would push us out? Unless you're assuming we'd mess up alignment so bad that they'd form other priorities where eliminating/removing humans is the best way to go about it.
Like the flawed paperclip AI thought experiment that assumes an AI with an unreasonably narrow goal can understand enough of the world's structure to combat humans on every front. Having such a narrow failure case makes it surprisingly hard to realize given we have a hard time aligning trained models to narrow things we want it to steer towards. For better or worse our training methods, and emergent behavior that arises from it, makes having such an inconsistently unaligned view of the world unlikely in my opinion.
> Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!
I'm not convinced you understand the sentiment of the parent comment. It's that one should consider all possible scenarios of one's actions when making requests of a powerful entity they can't control. The mechanics of government make it such that once something is under their control, it'll be more effort to remove those controls than what it took to initially add them.
It should also be expected that legitimate regime changes can put people in power that current lobbyists may disagree with. Lobbyists should then be conscious that by lobbying for regulation, they implicitly trust that the will of the people will always align with what they think is best for the industry being regulated in the long term (otherwise they wouldn't be lobbying or would do so in a way that confines the power to the current administration).
I can control government more than I can control Google or Anthropic.
Also your argument is along the lines of thinking I argue for: You say I shouldn't lobby for regulation I believe is beneficial because a future government might change the regulations to make them not beneficial. This implicitly assumes that the future government wouldn't implement the non-beneficial regulations if the current government doesn't do the beneficial ones. Possibly! But this is arguing that we should firmly establish principles, values and precedents that future administrations will feel bound by. And that I would agree with: Regulations and governance should arise from principles (practical details and grey areas will always require a ton of messy detailed negotiations, but within the confines of principles!). One of the things the current US administration has done is to show that it is possible to disregard principles if you are powerful with no consequences. You can lie about elections being fraudulent, watch your supporters storm parliament and get reelected a few years later.
But if principles don't matter to those in power then the conclusion is actually the opposite of what you say. While your allies are in power you should use power however you can to further your interests, because when others are in power they will not feel bound by your restraint, and at least they first have to undo your work.
> I can control government more than I can control Google or Anthropic
How true is this really? With the government, you can vote in various elections, or contact your representatives, and when it comes to important issues that will do exactly squat. You can also buy politicians or legislation, or run yourself, if you have the wealth and connections to do so.
With corporations, you can vote with your dollars, which again on important issues will probably do squat. Or you can try to get hired and change the company from within. Or if you have the wealth, you can buy the company (partially or wholly), or start a competitor and win in the marketplace.
In both situations there are options, and most of them are basically impossible for the small folk.
The illusion of control is stronger with modern democratic governments-but while it’s true that if we all voted for Vermin Supreme, he’d rule, it’s also true if we all stopped using Google they’d die quickly.
But neither is a realistic outcome. And neither do you personally have anything remotely near “control”. The reason everyone argues about this stuff online is that’s literally the only power we have.
However, the same effort and energy spent elsewhere can reap much, much bigger dividends down the line.
1 small guy changing stuff is basically impossible. But 100 million small folk sufficiently annoyed with something changes a government (for better and for worse), whilst having basically zero influence over a corporation (they're not the customer, they don't have enough buying power for a hostile takeover, they certainly don't have the wherewithal to destroy them by launching a competitor... which they probably don't even want to if they think what the corporation does is bad). The exception, of course, is that if the corporation bothers that many small people that much, a government might get around to listening to the small people's arguments more than the corporation's.
> But 100 million small folk sufficiently annoyed with something changes a government (for better and for worse), whilst having basically zero influence over a corporation
They don't have influence because you designed them to be so. You said they're not the customer and implied they have no influence over customers.
Your argument says 100 million small folk in the same government jurisdiction have more government say vs 100 million small folk have in a company they have nothing to do with. That seems clear.
The inverse relation could also be said though. 100 million small folk in different government jurisdictions have less say in a government they have nothing to do with than 100 million customers of the same company do with a corporation.
Things other governments do generally don't affect me as things other companies in the same market as me get away with doing, or things a company does in my neighbourhood though, and there are a lot more companies with power to hurt my interests than countries. Also there's the little thing called foreign policy that means 100 million people do, in fact, get to vote on how their government handles things other governments do which hurt them, to the extent their government has negotiation cards to play.
On the other hand pure market solutions mean "if you're not the customer, corporations can harm you and 100 million other people interests in their locality as much as they like".
The limitations of 100 million people's ability to stop the 10 million people across the border voting for something that will harm them come because international relations look less like a democracy and more like a market...
The President of the United States visibly hates me and keeps calling me a "Dumocrat". If Sundar Pichai did that, he'd be fired, and even people who despise my politics would generally understand why companies don't let their CEOs say such things.
But Congress won't fire Trump. All of my representatives would, if given a chance, but other representatives in other districts have no accountability to me and don't want to.
So I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that I have less practical control over the federal government than I do Google, even if the formal levers of power are meant to achieve a different result.
> This implicitly assumes that the future government wouldn't implement the non-beneficial regulations if the current government doesn't do the beneficial ones
No, there is another case you haven't covered. The situation in which regulation, made in the best of its ability to combat a problem at the time, now hinders progress more than it helps. Either the incentives were malformed and misaligned from the start, or the solution was targeting an ephemeral problem and written in a way where interpretations can be abused to target newer solutions for newer problems.
Energy consumption isn't the problem. It's how the energy is generated that is relevant to planetary health, and even then, whose to say the tradeoff isn't worth it. Crypto mining is estimated to take up 3% at most which means 97% is spent on other things. What makes this other 97% more worthy of this energy than crypto mining? The fact you don't see it as valuable?
Also many mining operations take advantage of stranded energy, so energy that would go to waste if not used for on-site mining.
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