Andrew Sage

And it ends with a paragraph I find kind of valuable here.

Returning to the oil metaphor, we are digging deeper into a trickier part of the rock.

Of course, we could be wrong, and humanity may have thus just been chipping away at a particularly hard point that will soon give way, creating decades of cheap ideas.

This is the hope of those who emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and the singularity and accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth at some point in the future.

Although we all enjoy science fiction, history books are usually a safer guide to the future.

In this case, history suggests that large increases in research effort are needed to offset its declining productivity."

And again, if you want to have the big ideas and the Star Trek future that all of these billionaires like Elon Musk pretend they want, what you actually have to do is be willing to put a lot of money into research and development without any promise of a profit.

Your motivation can't be, well, now we have to get a 200% rate of return on our investments.

It has to be, well, this would improve people's lives and make life more sustainable, right?

Like finding solutions to a lot of the problems with climate change, cleaning the air, like dealing with lack of access to clean water, lack of access to basic medical care.

These are not things where doing them means that your company gets an immediate profit and evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars, right?

That's just not the way providing life-saving aid to people works.

But the net value to the global economy,

would be massive if, for example, kids weren't going without food and access to clean water and had better access to education and thus were able to go into fields where they become researchers and generate ideas that eventually turn into profit, right?

Like, these AI fucks aren't talking about ideas.

They're talking about fracking the human mind, right?

That's what they want to do.

That's a good way to put it, yeah.

Yeah.

I think that there's another thing we're saying here, too.