20 Comments

Excellent work, thank goodness someone is doing it. I just wish Europe had a few Brian Chaus.

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Thank you so much!

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Great stuff, Brian. Time to accelerate. I will be in DC in April and would be great to attend some kind of AFTF meetup.

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Please DM me https://twitter.com/psychosort/

If you can't chau@affuture.org works too

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I’m glad you are able to diagnose the various consequences of technological stagnation. Maybe you’re right that AI will make almost every pair of hands more productive, and this in turn will create a boom in material comfort and prosperity

I have my doubts. The NIMBY movement will abort in utero the power plants and transmission that AI will need

The NIMBYs will strangle housing supply, so all these gains in efficiency will all flow exclusively to elderly landlords

Lastly, I strongly suspect that all these efficiencies will translate into unemployable hands. Maybe UBI will make up the income destruction, but I have even more doubts about government paying for UBI compared to doubts about the NIMBYs

Still, I wish you luck and I salute your courage in taking up the fight

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I agree with pretty much everything you said and am so glad someone is doing this but just as a tactical matter I think it would be better not to quote Thiel. There are plenty of pro-tech people on the left and the last thing you want is to get this cause associated with partisan politics and on the left people hear Thiel and think of him much the way they think of the Kochs.

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I'll be honest.

This came up in discussion and the reason for leaving it is to bait journalists into

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into that*

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Ok, thats not a bad consideration.

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Irrelevant; those people are the primary cause of the problems the AFTF is trying to stop. The left will oppose the AFTT no matter who is quoted or involved because ultimately they see it as a way to control AI and through it, society. Starting out by trying to appease them will just result in a total loss from the start. It's on them to get over their cancel culture, not everyone else to indulge it.

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No that's just not true of everyone on the left. I'm broadly left-centerist and I'm a fan.

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I would like to respectfully suggest that anyone who is so immersed in the sea of tech that he sees tech as the only answer might find a new perspective by taking a step back and examining the wisdom from sages throughout the eras. Prudence, patience, humility. The risks that we are taking with tech are getting bigger and bigger, from genetics to nuclear tech to drones to AI, which soon will be beyond our ability to control. If we do not find a solution to this ever-escalating human restlessness and get off of this teetering rollercoaster, then we are screwed. There are answers to tough questions that do not entail the ultra-high risks of leaping blindly into the depths of the latest tech abyss. If Chau honestly cannot imagine the risks involved in AI, as even most of the developers of AI can, it is either naivete or a lack of foresight, sort of like AIG selling us on credit default swaps prior to the financial crisis. I think that it is pretty clear to most sensible people that many of the impacts of AI will be marvelous but that some of them will be catastrophic. We are one species living on a vulnerable planet that is hurtling through space. The reasonably intelligent octopus has been around for a few hundred million years without destroying its home. Hominids only just showed up, and humans even more recently than that. This thinking is exactly the kind of hubris that is going to be the end of us.

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This was a promising comment, promising specifically to deliver (1) wisdom (2) of sages (3) across ages and delivering none. This is sub-gpt3 slop reflecting the hegemonic neuroticism unique to our era, not the judgement, decisiveness, and courage characteristic of pre-modern times.

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Any comment on the possibility of AI replacing the human race, or creating ultimate dictatorship?

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Policy should be made based on reality rather than cinema

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So there won't be AIs that are more capable than humans in every way, and there won't be ruling elites that use AI to keep themselves in power indefinitely?

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Jesus Christ, fucking Sam Altman.

Anybody who thinks we should collaborate with the CCP on anything should be sold into slavery under the meanest and cruelest master which can be found.

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So like the whole UN thing is a bad idea huh? Surely we should cooperate with the CCP on things that are good and not on things that are bad no?

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There are NO good things to co-operate with the CCP on. There can be no co-operation with a revolutionary terrorist organization bent on world domination. It's entirely zero-sum power play.

And of course the UN was a stupid idea. Seeing as how we made one of the five most important members a revolutionary terrorist organization bent on world domination on day one, and replaced another of the five most important members with another revolutionary terrorist organization bent on world domination in the '70s. The whole organization is irredeemably rotten, and should've long ago been tossed into the sewer by the civilized world.

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Not that the average authoritarian leftist is likely to support your premise anyway, but…

…you use the word “countryMEN” in your post, therefore you must be canceled.

Of course, if you replaced it with “fellow citizens”, that too would be a non-inclusive cancel-able sin…

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