I’m sorry but I just flatly reject this and think it’s trivially wrong. EA will be a massive force for bad in the world if it degenerates into some sort of regulatory scam where we try to throttle progress in high-growth areas based on nothing but prejudice and massively overblown fears about risk. This is a recipe for turning the whole world economy into totally dysfunctional zero-growth states like Italy or the UK or whatever. There’s a reason why Europe has basically no native tech industry to speak of and is increasingly losing out to the US even in sectors like pharma where it was traditionally very strong. This anti-bigness attitude and desire to impose regulation in advance of any actual problems emerging is a lot of the reason why. It places far too much faith in the wisdom of regulators and not enough in markets to correct themselves just fine over time. The fact that you picked the massively price-competitive and feature-competitive smartphone industry as an example of market failure is a prime example of Euro-logic completely divorced from basic economic logic.
Also, I feel that I’m replying to something a bit out of context here. I do feel that a lot of people on this forum hold similar beliefs though, and I think that it’s connected to how people are AI alignment and even life: libertarianism sees the world as a “stage/arena” and people as “warriors” or smth. This is one way of life, perfectly good for some people I guess.
It is a system, every system has assumptions. Here the assumption is “people want to be in a state of continuous war”. That assumption does not hold for all the people.
No, the assumption is simply we don’t want to poor and starving. There’s a lot of very very, very poor people in the world. I would like their situation to improve. That means some economic growth. All the EA bednets and givedirectly and all this crap blah blah are absolutely worth zero, nada, nyet, compared to the incredible power of economic growth. Growth is so powerful because fast growth in one place can drag along loads of other places: look at how China’s rise massively boosted growth in the countries in its supply chain. In fact you can make a pretty good argument that global development has been a complete disaster for decades in every other country apart from China AND those countries in its supply chain! Vide https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development/
Obviously this is a huge number of people and worth celebrating despite the growth failures across LatAm and Africa, but it means we can do better and it also means that boosting growth in the West through e.g AI, LLMs (not atm, a hallucinating chatbot is pretty useless but maybe we can make it good!) is potentially an absolutely massive win for the world. So accordingly I am massively skeptical towards the growth-killing Euro-regulatory impulse towards tech because it’s clearly a) working out badly for Europe) b) very very bad for the world if it somehow got applied everywhere
At the same time you say “boosting growth” and also you’re for “breaking eggs to make an omelet (go big or go home, move fast and break things, those)”
So it’s like a train that is very fast and innovative. The people on the train are getting to their destination fast
The only issue is that the train is rolling over people chained to the tracks :)
And you are the train machinist and you say “progress!”
Well, in another life you are the one chained to the tracks :)
Can we just move like 10% slower
Again. In bold
JUST 10% SLOWER
CAN YOU HEAR ME
OH YOU LIBERTARIAN
JUST 10%
Just a bit of regulation. Just enough to unchain the people.
I feel when you hear regulation you assume that there’s gonna be Putin-style regulation
Putin is not the only way. Not the 146%
EU is not the only thing about regulation that exists. Not the 30% (I don’t know. It’s a number not reflecting anything in particular I just made up)
JUST. 10. PERCENT.
Just to inform the patients of the mental health startup.
Just add a bit of public oversight into AI.
Just at least break up Insta and FB so they compete like they should
Just rehire the Google ethics team and let them inform the public about biased and what to do, fix the biggest issues. Possibly done in a few months or so?
You’re in the US. I’m in Europe. I am waiting to order my European UK smartphone with a physical keyboard, as do a lot of XDA-dev ppl, once the company, fxtec finally starts shipping again :)
People are not the same.
If people in the US democratically and consensually want to have products that are are “innovative even if harmful”, that is ok to me.
Dragging the whole world into this (Altman has worldwide plans) is something I am not on board with. Even in the US not everyone, not everyone at all agrees that “disrupting” things is good.
Say, artists. A whole profession that tech made it’s enemy. A whole set of friendships broken, “disrupted” in the name of “progress”
You see it this way, “brave silicon valley achieves all tasks with libertarianism”. I see it as “an inferior product such as iPhone and Android dominates the market because they lobbied everyone and broke capitalism :)”. European companies had alternative plans for how phones look like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900
It had open-source customizable social media clients (no walled garden), root out of the box, and “a single app for messaging where contacts are merged when a person has one on WA and one on FB”). Of course, a touch screen. And you can type whole books on it.
Again. This phone doesn’t look like what Nokia was doing 5 years before that, at all. This is innovation.
This is a better product in terms of features for a lot of people. It is innovative.
To sum up, I still feel that slower, small and multiple-company, and regulated “just right” capitalism produces steady innovation and safety. Unregulated, monopolistic capitalism produces things like McDonald’s: massive, exploitative, low quality, not changing much in 10 years, kinda harmful, addictive...
I’m sorry but I just flatly reject this and think it’s trivially wrong. EA will be a massive force for bad in the world if it degenerates into some sort of regulatory scam where we try to throttle progress in high-growth areas based on nothing but prejudice and massively overblown fears about risk. This is a recipe for turning the whole world economy into totally dysfunctional zero-growth states like Italy or the UK or whatever. There’s a reason why Europe has basically no native tech industry to speak of and is increasingly losing out to the US even in sectors like pharma where it was traditionally very strong. This anti-bigness attitude and desire to impose regulation in advance of any actual problems emerging is a lot of the reason why. It places far too much faith in the wisdom of regulators and not enough in markets to correct themselves just fine over time. The fact that you picked the massively price-competitive and feature-competitive smartphone industry as an example of market failure is a prime example of Euro-logic completely divorced from basic economic logic.
Also, I feel that I’m replying to something a bit out of context here. I do feel that a lot of people on this forum hold similar beliefs though, and I think that it’s connected to how people are AI alignment and even life: libertarianism sees the world as a “stage/arena” and people as “warriors” or smth. This is one way of life, perfectly good for some people I guess.
It is a system, every system has assumptions. Here the assumption is “people want to be in a state of continuous war”. That assumption does not hold for all the people.
No, the assumption is simply we don’t want to poor and starving. There’s a lot of very very, very poor people in the world. I would like their situation to improve. That means some economic growth. All the EA bednets and givedirectly and all this crap blah blah are absolutely worth zero, nada, nyet, compared to the incredible power of economic growth. Growth is so powerful because fast growth in one place can drag along loads of other places: look at how China’s rise massively boosted growth in the countries in its supply chain. In fact you can make a pretty good argument that global development has been a complete disaster for decades in every other country apart from China AND those countries in its supply chain! Vide https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development/
Obviously this is a huge number of people and worth celebrating despite the growth failures across LatAm and Africa, but it means we can do better and it also means that boosting growth in the West through e.g AI, LLMs (not atm, a hallucinating chatbot is pretty useless but maybe we can make it good!) is potentially an absolutely massive win for the world. So accordingly I am massively skeptical towards the growth-killing Euro-regulatory impulse towards tech because it’s clearly a) working out badly for Europe) b) very very bad for the world if it somehow got applied everywhere
At the same time you say “boosting growth” and also you’re for “breaking eggs to make an omelet (go big or go home, move fast and break things, those)”
So it’s like a train that is very fast and innovative. The people on the train are getting to their destination fast
The only issue is that the train is rolling over people chained to the tracks :)
And you are the train machinist and you say “progress!”
Well, in another life you are the one chained to the tracks :)
Can we just move like 10% slower
Again. In bold
JUST 10% SLOWER
CAN YOU HEAR ME OH YOU LIBERTARIAN
JUST 10%
Just a bit of regulation. Just enough to unchain the people.
And then I’m good with all you say.
I feel when you hear regulation you assume that there’s gonna be Putin-style regulation
Putin is not the only way. Not the 146%
EU is not the only thing about regulation that exists. Not the 30% (I don’t know. It’s a number not reflecting anything in particular I just made up)
JUST. 10. PERCENT.
Just to inform the patients of the mental health startup. Just add a bit of public oversight into AI. Just at least break up Insta and FB so they compete like they should Just rehire the Google ethics team and let them inform the public about biased and what to do, fix the biggest issues. Possibly done in a few months or so?
Just like a tiny winy bit will go so far.
You’re in the US. I’m in Europe. I am waiting to order my European UK smartphone with a physical keyboard, as do a lot of XDA-dev ppl, once the company, fxtec finally starts shipping again :)
People are not the same.
If people in the US democratically and consensually want to have products that are are “innovative even if harmful”, that is ok to me.
Dragging the whole world into this (Altman has worldwide plans) is something I am not on board with. Even in the US not everyone, not everyone at all agrees that “disrupting” things is good.
Say, artists. A whole profession that tech made it’s enemy. A whole set of friendships broken, “disrupted” in the name of “progress”
You see it this way, “brave silicon valley achieves all tasks with libertarianism”. I see it as “an inferior product such as iPhone and Android dominates the market because they lobbied everyone and broke capitalism :)”. European companies had alternative plans for how phones look like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900
It had open-source customizable social media clients (no walled garden), root out of the box, and “a single app for messaging where contacts are merged when a person has one on WA and one on FB”). Of course, a touch screen. And you can type whole books on it.
Again. This phone doesn’t look like what Nokia was doing 5 years before that, at all. This is innovation.
This is a better product in terms of features for a lot of people. It is innovative.
To sum up, I still feel that slower, small and multiple-company, and regulated “just right” capitalism produces steady innovation and safety. Unregulated, monopolistic capitalism produces things like McDonald’s: massive, exploitative, low quality, not changing much in 10 years, kinda harmful, addictive...