Jesus Christ, this is toxic as fuck. You are not a bad person for enjoying life. You are not a bad person for being happy or seeking happiness. Excessive consumerism isn’t great but you are still not a bad person for owning things. You are definitely not a bad person for trying to improve your life or the life of people around you.
I have no idea why they decided to attack renewable energy, it’s undeniably better than the fossil fuel systems it’s to replace. They say they’re against alternative energy immediately after complaining that a third of the world has no electricity. This doesn’t even make sense! They don’t want you to make electricity available to people, they just want you to feel bad about it.
Inequality sucks, but you are still allowed to enjoy things.
What does make you a bad person is actively seeking to make other people’s lives worse. For instance, making a comic with the sole intention of shitting on people just living their lives.
I have no idea why they decided to attack renewable energy
Huh? The comic is complaining nerds are wasting adulthood on speedrunning and drawing comics instead of doing research that improves the world (like renewable energy).
It doesn’t read that way to me, but either way my point still stands. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing something you like, and calling that “wasting adulthood” is incredibly fucked up.
The last line is literally telling people they are terrible for enjoying themselves. There is no excuse for that.
It’s a weird conclusion to take that the people working towards or excited about a world where AI robots have automated all labour and resources and services are free and near unlimited for everyone would want to limit that to only white people, or people who are rich now - since being ‘rich’ in a world with unlimited resources isn’t really a concept.
I can only talk with certainty about myself, but I would hazard a guess that the majority of people excited about a post scarcity world are not part of the bourgeoisie, and see it as a way to solve the social injustice issues we see now but are powerless to do anything significant about, not to further exacerbate wealth inequality - there would be no motive to hoard resources in a world without scarcity, when you can have most of what you ever dreamed of and so can everyone else, including the people living in what were formerly third world countries.
It’s a dream of a paradise, not a dystopia, and it’s a dream people are actually working towards, to try and make the world better. What is the comic writer doing to make the world better? Donating a fraction of the money that current charities need? Tearing down other people’s attempts at solutions? Complaining online about how other people aren’t doing anything about the starving children in Africa?
Not to say there aren’t legitimate fears of AI, such as a misaligned ASI being created that turns into a paperclip maximiser and destroys everything we care about. But that’s a very different argument than what the comic writer is making.
Increasing wealth has only ever been observed to fuel greater inequality.
I don’t see any evidence that the value that increasing automation is bringing will be distributed more evenly.
We produce enough food for everyone and still let people starve - equal access to AI is even harder to justify than equal access to food.
I’m not so sure about that. When we compare medieval wealth inequality to now, it was worse back then. Ew, a link to Reddit, but it’s got good info.
Not saying we don’t need to fix things… we need to destroy even the concept of billionaires. While things are bad, and trending worse, they’re not yet “literally eat the rich” bad.
Only when not looked at on a global scale (such as 1% owns 99% being assumed to be about the USA rather than global wealth). Mormengil’s opening response is very feels over facts (also the claim that there was no state support for the poor can be technically true, but churches and local elite as well as royal dictat were often involved in poor relief and charity in the Middle Ages), the later response are better detailed.
And in the 1200s, global wealth inequality and access to food was for much of the world better or comparable to where it is now.
But global wealth inequality and access to food got worse after colonisation rearranged American and then African economies for European, and then USAian, benefit.
AI is already filled with implicit bias towards the current status quo. It can be very tricky to get AI chatbots to give anything other than platitudes about inequality, and they’re often very quick to try to shut down or redirect talk of system change. To think that they’ll not reflect continued post colonial and extractivist systems of power seems, to me, shortsighted.
You would just have to let an superintelligent (aligned) AI robot loose and prompt it to produce enough food for everyone. It wouldn’t even be any maintaining effort, once the robot had been created. If it doesn’t have any negative consequences to the creators to have positive consequences for everyone else, and there are any empathetic people on the board of creators, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be programmed to benefit everyone.
As long as it doesn’t generate any negative externalities, sure. That’s a huge alignment problem though.
True, and I have my doubts on the alignment problem being solved. But that’s a technical problem, a separate conversation from whether even attempting it is worthwhile in the first place.
What’s the point of anything, anyway? Why is something made for entertainment or war intrinsically bad? This comic is making a lot of implicit value judgments.
Pictures for Sad Children was a great webcomic. Thank you for posting these.
It was one of my favorites when it was running.
