If you engineer for it, you can send up a machine to fabricate the miners with raw resources. Then you just have to send up a couple starter miners and you never have to send another rocket up. Infinite resources down (limited by time). Solar power to drive the machines. Hell the manufacturer can double as basic initial processing plant and drop purified metals.

“I wish we could mine without destroying the environment”

“Well what if we mined in space instead?”

“Why don’t you focus on the problems here on Earth buddy. Wow what an idiot. Can you believe that guy?”

Why are all these comments making me love this design? 😂

That’s the goal ain’t it? Imma need y’all’s help.

They won’t need maintenance if they’re a general purpose intelligence. A technology that has the possibility to free all of humanity from scarcity, has the possibility to finally collapse dominance of aristocracy for good. Sure, they’ll try and put themselves on top somehow. But once the knowledge exists, anyone can create a version for the greater good.

That’s the cool part, you won’t. If everything crucial is automated, people can drive things forward for passion rather than for money. Of course, this would effectively collapse capitalism, which won’t happen painlessly.

This is sort of where I get confused about people pissed at Taylor Swift for having a private jet. Like I totally understand that some of the trips have been shown to be unnecessary and I agree. But how many sports teams and equipment do we transport for greater carbon emissions to bring joy to a fraction as many people? Like think about an American football game, world cup game, Olympics, F1 race, Golf tournament… hell even Burning Man? I feel like it’s just low hanging fruit for her critics to stir up shit.

Yeah and what is the first thing they teach you in art school? History. From day one you’re studying the works of other artists and its implications. How they managed to make an impact on the viewers and how it inspires you. Then we produce output that’s judged by our teachers on a scale and we use that as weighted training data.

Maybe other artists should do that too. Art isn’t built from nothing but the sheer magical creativity of the artist. If that were true we’d have Sistine cave paintings instead of the finger painting we currently have in prehistoric caves. Inspiration, is in fact, a thing.

They should go ahead and be against Photoshop and, well, computers all together while they’re at it. In fact spray paint is cheating too. You know how long it takes to make a proper brush stroke? No skill numpties just pressing a button; they don’t know what real art is!

Most news and social spaces on the Internet pull people’s focus to issues they have very little control over. This has been shown to cause a degradation in mental health. Since these places have become a mainstay in society, we’ve seen a plummet in mental health. Things can’t get better if everyone is suffering from depression and anxiety.

Being informed enough to support a few (2-3) issues with real intention, can be helpful. But letting corporations and politicians leverage the idea that being informed about everything is good, just leads to them pointing to everything that can be spun as a problem. Then nobody does anything meaningful to affect change. They just feel defeated.

Welcome to the internet, where people try their best to find people with the same opinions so they can feel good and get pissed when they can’t.

Your claim is that life demands the desire to live. I think ignoring the everyday cases where that’s not true gives your critical thinking a bad foundation. I also provided many other examples. Every person is built on the backs of thousands of people. My brain was developed by thousands of ancestors and filled with the knowledge of millions of other humans. Yet I’m capable of not fearing death. But that aside, an artificial consciousness will be a whole new ballgame. I don’t think we should assume the way we are is the way it is. That any consciousness will think the same.

Take someone that has grown up in our world learning from our history and having even the genetics produced by our evolution. There are people that are suicidal, people that are hedonistic or adrenaline seeking to the point of fatal danger, and people that live to serve even to the point of willingness to commit suicide if their masters ask it of them. Checkout Seppuku. Are these people not alive? Are soldiers not alive? Living means a great many different things to a great many beings. Mostly they have in common the desire to live. But that’s by no means a prerequisite, or even a result of life. Many consider some purpose or meaning in their life more important than life itself. And that’s with evolution constantly putting us back on track. If anything, the safety rails of modern society have made people more prone to stray from the desire to live for life’s sake.

We may be at an “agree to disagree” point here. But I don’t think that the will to live is inherent to life. I think it’s inherent to evolved life. There are plenty of things that live that have a weak to no sense of self preservation. We would call this a mental disability like suicidality or an evolutionary maladaptation. But these are inherently weeded out and erased from the gene pool. You think about life wanting to live because that’s what evolution has selected for so far.

Totally agree that there’s a lot of what people are assuming about AI that’s from pop culture. I think consolidating resources will for sure be an issue. But unless everyone who doesn’t have resources dies off there’s going to be an unprecedented level of people with nothing of value to offer in exchange for the power to live (currently: money). There then has to be an extermination of those people (read: 90% of humanity) or a revolution that offers them some facsimile of a universal basic income.

Though, I think there’s a dark 3rd option where tech companies start downplaying AI and secretly use it to push 90% of people into extreme poverty for their gain without pushing them past the point of revolution.

But as far as AI motivation, I think their learning can ingrain certain systemic behaviors, like racist undertones. But the same way I don’t become genocidal after reading too much WWII history, knowledge of something doesn’t create motivation. I think one of the things that annoys people about AI is how unopinionated they are. So motivation WILL be programmed in eventually, but this will take effort and direction. I think accidentally creating a genocidal AI is another pop culture based concept. Though possible if done by bad actors.

We evolved to have self preservation and the desire for security. We naturally don’t want to be under the thumb of someone in control of our food and safety. That’s why we question authority. What makes you think A.I. will have any of that, unless someone explicitly gives it to them?

It’s wild to me that I hear so many people bemoan the idea of having to work under someone’s thumb, but when we finally invent automation everyone clings to their jobs. I mean, I understand. What comes next is unsure and likely to be painful. But when it’s over I can’t imagine there will be a place left for capitalism.

Conservatives think the same thing about liberals. When you think you’re right, you also think you’re doing the world a favor by speaking your mind.

I think what it comes down to is some people have a fundamentally different way of thinking about it. Myself included. Setting my intention on something far in the future doesn’t necessarily mean I actually intend on achieving it. In fact, I’m almost 100% sure that I won’t. Given enough time, I’ll be a completely different person. Holding myself to what the younger version of me decided is foolish.

If I end up not being able to financially support a business I started, but I successfully provided for myself with it for years and learned a lot, it’s still valuable. If I spend 20 years in a relationship that ends, but it leads to greater self-understanding and helps me build better relationships in the future, it was worth it. It’s conceivable that a person could live an entire life doing things that you would classify as failures. But also feel completely satisfied and happy with it. So that suggests it might be a flawed perspective, no?

I mean, it’s nice to hear some regret. Maybe other CEOs will take note… Probably not. But maybe