@peterrhague Among other things, @Neuralink will enable quadriplegics to use their hands and walk again and the completely blind to see.
Jesus-level miracles.
Capitalism has raised literally billions of people out of poverty
It is the only system ever devised where you are directly incentivized to make life better for strangers.
This is incontrovertible.
Technologists and capitalists have saved literally billions of lives and improved the standard of living across the board, even as population has grown massively.
If you are asking “Why push back against anti-datacenter efforts?” I consider it a tragedy that anti-nuclear efforts largely strangled nuclear power in the US based on vibes, and I don’t want to see that happen to AI. Public opinion matters, and it shouldn’t be ceded unchallenged.
If you are asking “Why should I support AI efforts at all?” I believe we are in the midst of a transition more vibrant than the industrial revolution. Opinions formed a couple of years ago about the uselessness of AI are no longer valid. Millions of people and organizations are getting great returns from using it, and the demand for data centers is the market responding to the value signal. That is how progress is made!
this will change medicine forever
bringing quick and easy preventive full body scans to the masses is about the highest utility technology for human welfare
they may not have cured cancer, but detecting every tumor within a month of it being half a millimeter is pretty close
if @elonmusk paid 100% of his net worth ($1.4 trillion) as a tax it would only cover federal government spending for 77 days. this isn’t a tax problem…
No matter how jacked up the world gets, you can still choose to live a good life.
You'll never be able to control the world or everybody else in it. But you can control yourself and influence those around you in a positive way.
the purpose is not to remove young people from the internet. the purpose is to remove anonymity from the internet in a country where the government routinely punishes dissent with jail. the british caliphate is no longer free.
In the ancient world, the way many people gained great wealth was by forming gangs of strong men, beating up their neighbors, and taking their stuff.
People still speak with admiration of men like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, but they were little better than gangsters who enriched themselves through armed robbery.
This was a negative sum game, and assured that people remained poor and unhappy for thousands of years.
Eventually, however, we figured out that respecting each other’s rights, building things, and trading meant that we could play positive sum games instead. We could increase the amount of wealth, and all would benefit. As a result, we moved from living in unheated shacks to living in what our ancestors would’ve thought of as paradise in only a few hundred years.
However, there are still people out there who think that beating someone up and taking their stuff is a really great idea.
It is the great task of our civilization to shun such people, as they are not fit to be part of society.
Incomes not keeping pace with inflation has been the persistent economic issue for tens of millions of Americans for quite some time.
When Congress borrows trillions and runs massive deficits, it is still an effective tax increase — it just comes in the form of higher prices.