embryo2 wrote:
DavidCooper wrote:
The key thing is to eliminate the mass of people who have been misled by propaganda and would vote against their own interests. If they display too many beliefs in false "facts" that have been disproven, their votes on the issue in question should not count.
But do you really know the actual interest of people? Who can judge carefully enough about people's interest? And what is a belief? If I believe in love would I qualify as "false fact believer" because there are a lot of divorces?
Perhaps something's been lost in translation here. The word "interest" in the phrase "in someone's interest" means what's good for them, rather than what they're interested in. For example, it's in the interest of that that baby to be kept away from that electric fire. So, I was talking about people voting against what's good for them, not understanding the impact their votes will have and that they are being tricked into voting for things that will harm them. Many people end up voting for things that make them poorer in the belief that it'll make them better off, and all because they don't understand the tricks that are being played on them by politicians who only care about making money for themselves.
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DavidCooper wrote:
Apple's desire to generate money is driving the product forward.
But the product can be better with more competition. And existing system blocks other competitors.
The solution to that is to work out how the existing system is blocking fair competition and to introduce laws to prevent that from happening. Perhaps there should be a better patent law which guarantees that the first person to have a useful and non-obvious idea will be rewarded for it in full without there being any restrictions on which companies can use the idea in their products.
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DavidCooper wrote:
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Do you really think corrupt government will allow AI to overthrow themself?
Will it have a choice? With AGI identifying all the corruption and helping to push the right people to the top, governments will be reformed: there are enough good people in there to make this happen.
Why do you think the AI will be of any help to the people? Who invest in AI? Only those who has enough money. How large is this part of the society? It's less than 1/1000 of the whole humanity. So, why do you believe the tiny part of the society will care about others? They invest to get advantage, when the advantage will be there they won't look at people's problems and just start using the advantage. And why they should use the advantage for their own bad? Why they should push good people froward? Why they should reform the government so helpful for them?
Are the corrupt people creating AGI? Do they have the intelligence to be able to do so, or are they mentally deficient in the way that corrupt people always are? Any genius working alone is capable of creating AGI, and with minimal funding: the only requirements are a functional machine and a power supply, but most of the groundwork can be done with pen and paper.
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It seems you are dreaming about AI that magically improve everything, but you forget about the goal that will be set for the AI. It's important to understand who will set the goal. And most probably it won't be you or me or billions of ordinary people. But it's very probable that it will be the bad guys who buy the governments for their good. Just because they have money for the AI. Aren't they?
If you're a bad guy with money to throw around, can you just buy AGI from more intelligent people who don't want you to have it and who understand full well what it's actually worth? No bad guys have enough money to buy something that's worth quadrillions.
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DavidCooper wrote:
The 99% figure is an illustration of the principle. The principle still applies if it's 49%, and it still applies if it's 1%.
Today if there's no way for a person to get some food and shelter then I agree that it's good to provide him with the required things. But if there is a way and a person just do not want to go along it then I prefer to look at the part of the income the person requires others to share with him. And if the part is too big then I prefer to tell the person that it's unfair to take a lot from others and it would be good to go along the way where he can provide the basic income himself.
You have to remember that the people who are still working will get the basic income too, so they'll be earning a lot more money on top of that by working, and that will still make it worthwhile for them. The basic income needs to start low and be increased over time until it gets to the point where just enough people still want to have the jobs that need doing. When you reach that point, you've set it at a fair level.
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With european standards of living it's obviously just impossible.
That isn't the case at all: the costs of having armies of people tied up in unnecessary work are huge (and result in high taxation to fund it), and once you've eliminated that you'll find that the real cost of living is relatively small.
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So, may be you think it's a good idea to preserve the europe from the billions of "not so lucky" people from the rest of the world? But do you see the refugee crisis in europe? And migration problems? Then how do you think is good the proposal about basic income for select countries who managed to suck important resources from over the world? Is it a good moral stance? Will the proposed AI think the same?
I said that it should be done worldwide with the basic income set to the local costs of living. Over time, the differences would even out and it would be the same cost of living and the same basic income everywhere. If you ask yourself how it can be that the price of food in poor countries is so low while it's very high in rich countries, that should give you a clue as to how unnecessary work inflates prices in rich countries. It doesn't tell the whole story (not by a long way), but it is part of the picture.
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DavidCooper wrote:
The trick is to set the basic income at a level where enough people will still want more of it, and they can get more income by working, so the waitress will still be there.
Even in rich countries it's very disputable option. But I heard the Finland is going to set 500 euro basic income after a referendum. We'll see what will happen. And Switzerland wants even 2000 euro. Well, I whish them luck in dealing with the wave of migrants.
That is why the solution needs to be put in place worldwide. Poor countries are poor for a number of reasons, but it's usually because they're being ripped off by wealthy countries which allow their big businesses to make unfair deals with the help of corrupt politicians in those poor countries. Clearly, people in wealthy countries have too much and need to give some things up, or at the very least stop grabbing more while the rest of the world catches up, but quality of life is more important than the cost of your possessions. If you are no longer tied to one place by work, you don't need to keep flying away on short holidays, but can travel less quickly in environmentally sustainable ways (that don't involve stealing from future generations), and you'll see much more of the world. Do you even need a house when you can spend your whole life on the move? What are all the things you keep in your house? Do you use all that stuff or is it just a bind that shackles you to that place? I look around mine and it's just a museum that documents my past, but I don't actually use most of that stuff and need never have acquired much of it in the first place (in particular, the stuff that was given to me and which I didn't choose for myself). It isn't life enhancing, but a burden. I have a suit that I wore once at a wedding and once at a funeral. Why does it need to exist? Mountains of books, but most of them would be better in electronic form. All my music's now on a tiny MP3 player. Old film SLR cameras and lenses sit unused because I get better results with a small digital camera with a powerful optical zoom. Life is simplifying as technology gives me more and more in a smaller package, and at a lower cost. As machines take over in manufacturing, the costs keep going down and I can survive on less money. Removing people from work and replacing them with machines will make everything dirt cheap, the only limit then being sustainability: what we can have is dictated by what the Earth can supply, though what each of us can have is also proportional to size of the human population.
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DavidCooper wrote:
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but from the other side people without any motivation will become just satiated animals. Just drink beer and watch TV.
Would that be so bad?
But would that be bad if people will have a lot of children? Why do you think that drinking the beer is better than raising children?
What matters is that the population is made stable so that it stops going up to ridiculous levels which could very quickly lock us all into centuries of unavoidable poverty for everyone instead of us all living like kings. As for beer, I can't stand the stuff (it's like drinking mud), but if people love that over all else, they should be free to have it, just so long as they don't abuse or damage other people as a result. If they'd really rather do pointless work, that option will always be available to them, and they can then feel stupidly happy that they're "earning" their basic income.
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But people want iPhones and luxury cars. Once you provide them with basic food they will change their habits. Next you should provide them with the "basic" luxury cars. Desires are growing fast, how do you plan to manage them?
If they want luxury cars, they can work to earn extra money to be able to afford them, but they should also have to pay the right amount of tax on fuel to cover the real costs (which are currently being stolen from future generations). The basic income will be more than enough to cover normal transport needs (for people who no longer need to commute to work every day) and will pay for the same foods as they're eating today. If they want to pay a lot more for something fancy that a chef has spat on and do this on a frequent basis, they may need to do some work to earn a bit more than the basic income, but fancy food will become cheap too once machines replace chefs (and it'll taste just the same too once the spitting machine has been invented).
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The teachers that teach nonsense are the essential part of the system. How the science works, for example? Scientists propose a hypotheses and try to prove or disprove it. It's absolutely the same with the teachers - they propose a new way of teaching and look at the results. If it looks bad then (may be) some teachers can decide it's the bad attempt. And if it looks good then teachers can decide it's a good attempt. And administrators just enforce the framework for such attempts. They look at the results (on paper, of course) and decide what attempt is good for funding it. So, in essence they all do something useful. But, of course, the efficiency of the process is poor. And it's not because of teachers who teach other teachers and not because of the administrators. It's because the system is designed not for people's good. It's designed for monopolies only. So, there's no way to improve the efficiency because the monopolies are not interested. And magic AI won't help just because it will belong to the monopolies and will serve them at full speed.
My father worked for a long time in running all the local schools. Everything he tried to do to improve things was wiped out soon afterwards, not because it didn't work, but because if a new way of doing something worked too well, it caused problems by advancing children too quickly, so it had to go. There is a fixed schedule which leads over many years to exams that change very little over time, and anything that improves the learning process is considered unhelpful. The emphasis today is on getting more children to achieve well in the exams at the top end of school (so there has been some improvement in that regard, much of it enabled by new technology and the ability for children to learn at home) while continuing to fail to push the ones that find it all easy, the aim being to equalise them all and make sure that gifted people don't stand out and profit from their unfair advantage of having better minds.
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DavidCooper wrote:
We won't fix any of that though until AGI wipes them all away and tells us what we've been doing wrong all this time: it will have a complete picture of what's been going on and will see everything that's been hidden from us.
In fairy world a magical Santa Claus can wipe all bad people and reward all good people. But the problem is simple - it's not a fairy world.
Aim low and you'll achieve low. I think AGI offers us the chance to make something closer to a god than Santa. It also opens the door to evil fools making something more like a devil, so we have to aim for the opposite and get it in place before anyone has the chance to create a devil.
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Here the basic income is mixed with unnecessary jobs. How basic income can alleviate the unnecessary jobs problem? It will provide some people with a free lunch while leaving others with the same teachers who teach other teachers.
What are the teachers going to teach people to do? Unnecessary jobs that no longer exist? No, the whole education system will be reformed, providing education to those who want it and not inflicting anything unnecessary on them. The learner will be free to ditch a bad teacher and move into the class of a good one, so more efficient teaching will be allowed to win out. We'll still want to educate children to give them a good understanding of the world and provide a solid base from which they can go on to do anything they want, but that can be done through other means than school. There is an Unschooling movement, for example, that has demonstrated that children achieve the same exam results at the same age as schooled children even when they're not forced into classes at all and can spend all their time doing whatever they want to do instead. You can learn about this by reading Peter Grey's blog
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn. I personally don't like Unschooling because it's just as unambitious for children as school: I'd introduce something like a basic income for children so that they all have access to a decent amount of pocket money, but I'd link it to learning so that they're encouraged to improve their minds in directions that will help them if they decide to become writers, musicians, artists, or anything else that depends on thinking ability and skill.
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DavidCooper wrote:
If people have too many children, they (the parents) should lose the right to free healthcare
Do you think the children are evils?
Of course not: that's why only the parents should pay the price for reducing everyone else's standard of living. It is likely that the population will become stable anyway though once all resources are shared out fairly, but we may still need rules to ensure that our species continues to evolve in positive directions rather than degenerating.
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Well, we shouldn't control our beer addiction and for some reason we should control our numbers. Something is wrong here.
If people want to drink themselves to death, that's their business, but if people insist on increasing the population, that brings down everyone else's standard of living and therefore harms others.
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If there are the evil people behind, then why we should care about "recognized" solutions? The evil people will never recognize unprofitable solutions. So, who is the dumbest one - the evil who tells us he "doesn't recognize" something or are it we ourself who just foolishly believe the evil?
What recognised solutions? The only solution is an unrecognised one. The evil people are too stupid to realise that a world in which we all live like kings is better than one in which only they live like kings (while worrying the whole time about being lynched if there's a revolution).