Google is also doing layoffs. They just aren't making the news because they are PA by PA and they are preceded by buyouts. But we've had layoffs every year since 2023.
Today more than one million people die annually of TB, a disease that is completely treatable with a fairly inexpensive medicine. We could pretty much eliminate TB from the entire world if we just distributed this medicine differently than we currently do. Yet still there will be thousands of deaths due to TB today.
Why would some fancy new gene therapy be different? We already know what happens when we have a treatment for a deadly disease. People without money still die from it.
Unless AI can solve the "people with access to capital would prefer to keep it rather than share it freely" problem, this doesn't actually lead to human flourishing. You need to pay for the labor-bot and you don't have any money to do so because there are no jobs available for you.
Given that AI doesn't seem to be solving the allocation problem even for things like distributing fairly inexpensive TB drugs to people who need them, I'm not holding my breath.
The EA people who give money directly to poor people are great.
The EA people who decided to spend oodles of money working on AI ostensibly to prevent an insane thought experiment and then converted that effort into a for-profit corporation while insisting that actually giving money to the poor is bad because you'll have greater future utility by spending it on AI are worthy of scorn.
> The EA people who decided to spend oodles of money working on AI ostensibly to prevent an insane thought experiment and then converted that effort into a for-profit corporation while insisting that actually giving money to the poor is bad because you'll have greater future utility by spending it on AI are worthy of scorn.
That was the e/acc folks though. Different acronym, even though they were a spinoff from the original EA folks.
He is currently suing the government to get the NLRB declared unconstitutional. He spent mountains of cash to promote DOGE, which sought to cut government funding for various programs supporting the poor.
He is actively making it harder for the poor by applying his massive wealth.
"Backs" would mean that he takes material steps to make this happen. He is the world's richest man. Surely he could be putting billions into lobbying efforts for this.
No. Dude is just obsessed with his sci-fi future and is throwing out shit like this to try to convince people that he's not the most venal kind of capitalist possible.
Gamblers do care about losing their shirt. Appified gambling is just remarkably effective at getting humans to keep playing. It'd be one thing if we didn't hook up all of the dopamine feedback loops that we've developed over the past decade to a gambling machine but that's not the world we live in.
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