Speaking of smart people, Anne and I recently heard a very smart person rant against AI: “I want all the medical advances, and I want to automate all the drudgery parts of work….” But he wants to “pause” AI – no “job losses,” no “slop,” no “environmental impacts,” no “exacerbating inequality.”
And everyone gets an “unspoiled” world, infinite wealth with no inflation, sex-on-demand with a super model, and a unicorn who shits diamonds.
Of course, the AI “pause” would, by his own notes, lead to more drudgery, sickness, and premature death*. But only for others.
Those who already have everything almost never truly worry about those who don’t.
Historically, those on top always complain about and catastrophize literally every single thing that could change the situation: ice, the telegraph, machines / robots, artificial intelligence (starting in 1863, picking up steam in 1959), nuclear power, genetic engineering, computers, the Walkman, the internet, etc.
They always couch their opposition to progress for others in apocalyptic terms like “threat to humanity” or even “the future of life in the universe.” And they are always 100% sure that their concern is the real deal.
Locking in their status just happen to have god-level importance.
Wealthy well-off white whiners are the most immoral folk on the planet. Their active hostility to progress for those suffering is utterly repulsive. (Just one example.)
Being a self-centered, self-important whiner isn’t a meaningful life.
A meaningful life actually care about actually improving the actual lives of actual suffering individuals. There are more than you can imagine.
- Noah Smith: Lifting humanity out of poverty is Job #1.
- Michael Lewis: If you are successful, you are lucky, and you owe a debt to the unlucky.
* From here:
I recently spoke with mathematician Steven Strogatz about mathematicians being indignant, even moved to tears, by how many problems OpenAI seemingly solved in ways that threatened entire fields of research. But Strogatz also told me about MIT computer scientist Regina Barzilay, who survived breast cancer and later helped train AI on hundreds of thousands of mammograms to predict breast cancer years in advance.
Strogatz asked Barzilay, “Do you understand what your AI is doing?” She said, “No.” He asked, “Doesn’t it worry you that you don’t understand your own invention?” And she said, “Why would we limit a life-saving model to what humans can understand?” I’m sympathetic to the mathematicians’ tears. [!] But if an incomprehensible model can save my life, I don’t care that scientists don’t understand its inner mechanics.
Note from Q: Barzilay's team's Mirai model was validated using mammograms from seven hospitals across five countries, with promising results. But a 2026 study found that although Mirai discriminated between higher- and lower-risk patients better than conventional models, it also overestimated certain cancer risks. Source.
Kinda another example of this.
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