Not to mention the aluminum plant was making something actually useful to society at large. What is there now is a giant space heater used to scam people.
Are the areas that we are placing windmills regularly navigated by submarines? And wouldn't windmills cause as much, or more, issues for an adversary submarines?
That sounds just like the argument used to replace programmers and we see what kind of hell that's causing.f
Which is not to say you're wrong, but maybe we should look at ways of making the transition better, easier and less stressful. Perhaps actually giving people a choice, rather than having technocrats ram it down our throats.
I think that choice is already happening in a way that is as natural as we're going to get. I found the recent legal business with Perez Hilton kind of interesting. Take this passage from this story https://www.cjr.org/feature/perez-hilton-og-original-news-in...:
> Still, there was a problem. Hilton’s insurance would not foot the bill for a lawyer to defend against a subpoena. He would have to cover his legal costs out of pocket. Instead of finding an attorney, he did two things legal experts always advise against: he decided to represent himself and to use ChatGPT to help draft his legal briefs. At first, this did not go smoothly. An early filing written by ChatGPT, which Hilton nicknamed Dad, invented several legal references. “There’s this phenomenon called ghost law,” Hilton said. “They make up citations, they make up anything.” After a set of embarrassing errors was called out on social media, Hilton started double- and triple-checking every citation, and asked ChatGPT to review its own output. The process went more smoothly from there—so much so that Hilton came to see AI as a great legal leveler. “Now that I know that I can so effectively use ChatGPT, I’m not going to be paying a lawyer unless it’s absolutely necessary,” he told me.
The (imperfect) tools gave him the ability to keep his case alive, and he was eventually taken up by the ACLU. While Hilton is far from a sympathetic underdog, the levelling effect is pretty compelling.
Maybe it should be. The system here in the US has produced some great innovations at the cost of great misery among the non-wealthy. At a time when technology promises an easier life, it only seems to benefit the wealthy, while trying to discard everyone else. The light at the end of the tunnel is a 1%-er about to laughingly crush you beneath their wheels.
I don't think this is the strongest argument. Every technological revolution so far has initially benefited the wealthy and taken a generation or two for its effects to lift the masses out of previous levels of poverty, but ultimately each one has.
To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.
I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.
I don't know about for all perpetuity. If history has shown, anyone that reaches the pinnacle eventually becomes complacent, technology improves by becoming faster/cheaper/smaller. That just means it is prime to always be susceptible to a new something coming along that stands on the shoulders of what came before without having to pay for it. They start where the current leader fought to achieve.
So has America. But the definition of poverty is not absolute positioned, to borrow a CSS analogy. Poverty gets defined relative to wealth. Overall, this is a good thing. But knowing that your poverty is rich compared to the poverty of two generations ago doesn't satisfy humans who gauge their relative social position and are unhappy with it.
Have you ever seen one who was starving? Do they lack access to clean drinking water? Are there malnourished children, without access to schools, begging in America?
Have you ever been to a country where there was extreme poverty?
When people talk about China eliminating extreme poverty, that has a specific international definition. From Wikipedia:
Extreme poverty is the most severe type of poverty, defined by the United Nations (UN) as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services". Historically, other definitions have been proposed within the United Nations.
Extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day in 2018 ($2.66 in 2024 dollars), set by the World Bank.[0]
The average homeless person in America spends several times that amount on drugs, and all of the above services are available to them. Homelessness in America is a societal failure, but it does not meet the definition of extreme poverty.
I don’t know about that. The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America. While American capitalism has many faults, oppressing the bottom quintile is not one of them. The US median income is consistently top ten globally.
Median income doesn't tell much if you don't factor in the cost of living. My salary sucks compared to what I would earn in America, but when I factor in things like free healthcare, daycare and higher level education, I'm better off here.
The US does a good job of selling the idea of living here and getting rich, though it does a better job of selling it to people who aren't already embedded in daily life in the US. While we have, perhaps, much lower numbers of extreme poverty compared to a lot of countries, as one of the richest countries, and growing richer by the day, we should have zero extreme poverty. The people with the will to fix our poverty lack the money and very few with money have no real desire to help the less fortunate.
The smelter was providing jobs that fed money into the local economy. I'm sure much less money is coming out of the mining operation.
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