We could also literally have Star Trek. Think of all the scientific discoveries we could make if we had armies of scientists the size of our labor force.
But we will have to (painfully) shed our current hierarchies before that comes to pass.
Man if only there was a singular episode that covered this exact topic in Star Trek and resolved that no, actually slavery wasn't any different for artificial life.
Maybe so but humans have this strange primal need to hoard resources.
Probably a remnant from prehistoric times when it was a matter of life and death.
Will we ever be able to overcome this basic instinct that made capitalism such an unstoppable force? Will this ancient PTSD be ever cured?
I find the insinuation that mental illness is a fundamental part of the human experience to be deeply revolting. There is no excuse for hoarders and rapists.
The hypothetical “right to exist” is typically juxtaposed against its adversaries’ rights/efforts/privilege to wipe them off the face of the earth.
If a nation-state, or ethnoreligious group, has rights, then efforts to destroy it would not gain popular support.
Do ethnoreligious groups have a right to survival without suffering genocide? Does the international community, or Security Council, have a duty to prevent genocide, or the extinction of any particular nation-state?
You confuse nation state and people in this question. Yes the international community has an obligation to prevent genocide, and the destruction of a nation state if that coincides with the destruction of its people, but these things are not necessarily the same. The Security Council has no obligation to prevent a peaceful union of two states that would make one or both of them cease to exist. Nation states do not have rights, people have rights.
> Yes the international community has an obligation to prevent genocide, and the destruction of a nation state if that coincides with the destruction of its people
No, it does not. That's not how sovereignty works. nation states' obligations are only towards their own nation. Even honoring of treaties is expected only in so far as it is in the best interest of their nation to do so. There is no grand human coalition that has an obligation to intervene on behalf of the innocent being harmed by wars and genocide. it's a nice idea, but consent of the governed and all. Those people would have to first get their government to consent to participating under organizations like the ICJ.
In the sense that humans as a species exist, and nation states exist on the same planet, I suppose there is. But sovereign nationhood means a nation isn't subject to any higher earthly organization. Each nation does whatever it wants more or less. A community implies participation in a shared social structure. Even the UN is at best a diplomatic organization, not an organization that is an extension of its member states. Typically, when you hear about the "international community" that means the US and certain western European nations using that diplomatic cover to justify something. It isn't Paraguay and south Sudan chipping in their troops to take some action, or funding some effort.
In simpler terms, for any supposed international community to be valid, similar to governments, it needs the threat of violence to enforce its will. That means you have to volunteer yourself or your children to enforce that community's will. The rest is just details, I'm sure you'd want to have a say in exactly what the agreement is over the specifics of the "international community's" will would be, and therein lies the obstacle.
In the 90's there was some post-soviet political capital and overall good will credited to the US and its allies as a result of a new era of hope and prosperity and all that soft power stuff. That's why bombing Serbia and things like war crimes for milosevich and his pals was a thing. It was NATO, not the international community then. same as Afghanistan. There has never been any actual "international community" that did anything but pass resolutions at the UN. There has never been even so much as a truly international peace keeping force deployed anywhere by the UN.
It all just comes down to whether this supposed community has the right to do anything over other non-participating nations' sovereign real while maintaining any semblance of legitimacy. interference is interference, whether the US is kidnapping a dictator, or bombing one, or assassinating another, it can be done, but not with any legitimacy, and it is usually the US that's the arm that swings the sword.
Solutions to more actual problems are more expensive. It’s easier to ask millions of people for $0.01 than it is to ask thousands for $100. Things that are easy to sell to millions of people for $100 are rarely innovative (transportation, food, entertainment, etc), and if they are, they’re world-changing (cars, supermarkets, smartphones, etc).
I don’t think it could be the most important skill to have. The most common, and the most standardized one for sure, but if coding agents are doing fundamental R&D or running ops then nobody needs skills anyway.
> As it turns out, neural nets “won”
> The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much.
I get the feeling you don’t know what you’re talking about. LLMs are impressive but what have they “won” exactly? They require millions of dollars of infrastructure to run coming around a decade after their debut, and we’re really having trouble using them for anything all that serious. Now I’m sure in a few decades’ time this comment will read like a silly cynic but I bet that will only be after those old school machine learning losers come back around and start making improvements again.
Neural nets are used in way more applications than just LLMs. They did win. They won decisively in industry, for all kinds of tasks. Equating the use of one with the other is a pretty strong signal of:
> you don’t know what you’re talking about
Consider: Why did Google have a bazillion TPUs, anyway?
The market hasn’t been built out yet. There’s that post from a couple days ago where someone frontloaded the entire UX of an operating system onto an LLM, so you just tell the hardware what you want to do and it does it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47557165
The growth is there but it’s going to be a marathon, not a sprint. I don’t know why everyone’s in such a goddamn hurry all the time
I mean they did execute a wealthy banker a couple years ago. So I think the mercantile class occupies a different place in society there than in America
One thing I will give to them is the MSVC ecosystem. (Something something developers)
No doubt it’s starting to show its age but it’s like watching a lion die. Win32 amenities just being automatically available is quite sick and I wish there was something similar for Linux.
It’s like windows devs and users live in alternate realities, I’m sure a lot of cool things can happen if they bring some of that dev love over to their UX.
I'm not disagreeing that humans 200,000 years ago were approximately anatomically equivalent to humans today; I'm disagreeing that they would be just as intelligent without today's language, technology, or knowledge. I don't think you can define or measure intelligence in a way that ignores those things.
Eh I don’t think it’s something we can ever discount. Some cavewoman could’ve daydreamed the entire theory of general relativity in her own private language while weaving a basket and we would never know because she never felt the need to talk about it. On the other hand there are people today who will emit novels of profound nothingness.
Technology and language is sort of like speaking in this sense, it’s evidence of mind but it’s not mind. And the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence and all that
And, you know. Being laid off seems part of the culture nowdays
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