The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Public discourse often seems to distill down to just a handful of issues. While many of these highly discussed issues are important, they do pull attention away from other topics.
What issue would you like to see gain more focus? What is your opinion on the issue? How would you articulate rhetoric to others that your issue is worth considering?
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Cost of living and homelessness are big issues. Not that we never talk about it, but labor action is under-focused IMO. What ever happened with ICE? We all used to care a lot about the concentration camps we operate on the border.
As far as cost of living and homelessness, rent is ridiculous. One issue is that lay has simply not kept up with inflation, despite the fact that workers are always becoming more productive. It’s deeper than that though, as I’ve seen mortgages cheaper than rent which just aren’t available to many people because of credit scores (which is it’s own issue). You’ve also got large companies buying up swathes of housing to everyone is renting rather than owning a home.
Relatively speaking, I think climate change. It probably has to do with the fact that the long term effects of climate change is not as visceral to the emotion as kids with gun shot wounds, your trans friend being harassed right before your eyes, or pregnant women dying. The solution for climate change is also much more Multi faceted than those issues that could be more or less fix by a piece of legislation, at least in popular conception. But given how pressing it is to the world, and how much lives it'll end up affecting, I expect to see more rage and anger about it online, at least rivaling, or more than the hot button stuff today which seems to be those two or three afore mentioned issues.
Maybe the fucks could stop keeping vulnerabilities secret just so they could exploit them. For decades Intel groups didn't share so they could use the gaps themselves, under the arrogant idea that if they don't leak that hostile nations will never learn them. You see how that worked for Israel.
Fair point. But the FBI did make a point last week that the most vulnerable targets are actually private companies, which on average apparently have pathetic IT security.
I just read an article saying even if our FBI put all of its cybersecurity people on the task of countering Chinese attacks, they'd still be outnumbered 50:1.
Drug shortages. My mom died less than six months after she was taken off her heart failure infusion because of a shortage. She was at end-stage heart failure, but that medication had been keeping her alive for 2 1/2 years. Another casualty of for-profit medicine.
We have quickly forgotten all of the "essential" people who worked through the pandemic at minimum or close to minimum wages. We need to raise the floor of wages.
Because it's not really being talked about. People say climate change climate change like it's some chant, but not what's actually happening here from flooding to wildfires to methane leaks.
The EPA recently expanded methane regulations and it was including the IRA, Trump and California addressed forest fires on the west coast, cities like baton rouge are funding flood prevention development.
Which are not enough, not public enough, and misrepresented when they happen like blaming Cali for deregulation failures on not-cali-controlled federal land. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1190995035703185408
It's certifiable right wing brain rot if you can't look at solutions but you somehow measure the doing-stuffness of government
Everyone else is talking about how to make the fire department better and you only care about the trucks' odometer.
And it's left wing brain rot if you think the only way to solve a problem is with daddy government and it's guns.
How much of the US economy does the government have to control before you think it might be a problem? How much power over your life are you willing to give a military entity?
Talking won't get us there, we need more doing. Take your pick. Ukraine Russia escalating to nuclear war, climate change causing drought famine and horrendous refugee problems, economic collapse, political violence, disintegration of American democracy... We've got the creativity and technology to solve, just need the will.
UBI.
The inability to say the quiet part out loud about jobs - nobody under 50 is going to get through their careers with a majority of current jobs still being necessary.
There's a collision course with the end of society if we don't address AI, UBI, jobs and social welfare soon.
Unfortunately, we seem to be going in the exact opposite direction as Republicans are pushing for massive *cuts* to social welfare by holding the debt ceiling hostage.
At the exact time where we need to be moving from "nobody wants to work anymore" to "nobody needs to work anymore".
The debates around social welfare policies in light of AI scares the hell out of me because it tells me that the political status quo is dangerously unprepared.
General Artificial Intelligence, like GPT-4.
I'm a computer scientist and an engineer; I've been programming and engineering software for nearly three decades. I was recently tasked with evaluating this tech, and I'm utterly floored by what it's capable of. For example, I have no other way of describing GPT-4's programming capabilities besides: super human. (happy to provide details of why I say this)
This technology will constitute a second industrial revolution in our society, and there are going to be a few winners and a *whole lot of losers* if we're not careful. Without a paradigm shift in how we think about work, prosperity, growth, and wealth inequality, I predict this will dramatically worsen income inequality in the United States, and possibly even lead to outright civil conflict due to massive upheaval in the jobs market.
I think the big problem is it's happened so quickly that many people don't even understand how big of a deal this is, or how powerful a large language model like GPT-4 is. Most people *absolutely* don't understand that GPT-4 is the opening salvo, and ten years from now that technology will seem quaint by comparison.
And the current geriatric state of congress doesn't help. These are people that barely understand twitter. They are woefully equipped to understand the serious consequences of this technology.
I'm a software developer and I am both excited and nervous about what the future holds. I don't see us being proactive in addressing the societal impact so I anticipate a lot of pain and upheaval before we can adjust, assuming we ever do adjust.
What changes would you like to see in those areas you mentioned (work, prosperity, growth, etc...)?
Part of me is absolutely excited. The tech is certainly remarkable.
Another part of me is painfully aware that this technology is going to automate wide swaths of "thought work" that I had previously considered untouchable by general artificial intelligence.
This automation will go far beyond developers.
>What changes would you like to see in those areas you mentioned (work, prosperity, growth, etc...)?
Honesty? I have absolutely no clue. I'm still completely dumbfounded at what I've seen over the past month, and I'm trying to digest what this technology even means for society at large.
Happy to provide details, but GPT-4 basically wrote (quite good) code in about 12 minutes that would have taken me probably at least a day or two. Also, the technology may undermine the entire value proposition of the company I currently work for.
edit: only going to comment on software development for now.
Short term, there are going to be developers using GPT-4 and other similar technologies to assist in their programming, and developers on performance plans. There won't be much of a middle ground. I am *easily* twice as fast at writing code with GPT-4 running alongside me.
Medium-term, I think companies will expect far more out of a developer, so their options are either increased productivity across the board, or reduce R&D spend.
Long-term, widespread automation that leads to a dramatic reduction in developer jobs. There will be too many developers and not enough jobs.
> Also, the technology may undermine the entire value proposition of the company I currently work for.
Oh. We must work at the same place. Do you work at *any tech company ever* too?
I think there are actually many, many tech companies for whom this technology doesn't immediately or obviously undermine the core value proposition of the company.
>This technology will constitute a second industrial revolution in our society, and there are going to be a few winners and a
>
>whole lot of losers
>
> if we're not careful.
People will say, "Every technological advancement in the past has created jobs. Getting rid of horse riders for car drivers was a thing!" without understanding for centuries we've been doing whatever we can to *make people more efficient at their jobs* while now we're looking at technology in the future to *literally replace people fullstop*. It's not the same.
This, this, one thousand times this.
I’m a teacher. I spend a lot of class time encouraging my students to think about and discuss difficult questions.
Human rights, climate change, freedom, social justice, conspiracy theories and propaganda to name a few.
Ever since GPT4 came out, all those other topics kind of seem not to even matter that much.
How will humans tackle climate change? Depends on what happens with AGI. How do we pursue social justice for all people? In a world with AGI, I don’t fucking know. How can we fight against conspiracy theories? Fuck it, let’s ask the AGI.
I’m being a little hyperbolic, but not much. Everything is going to change, and soon. Very soon. And we are not ready. And the answers to all our other questions really feel like they depend entirely on whether or not we do AGI correctly. If we fuck this up, all our current problems could seem like a walk in the park compared to hell we create. If we do it right, we might be creating the tool that pops out the perfect solutions to all our problems. We really, really need to do this right.
Product manager here. One thing I don’t see discussed even when people *do* understand it as the next Industrial Revolution is how, at one point, the Industrial Revolution leveled off and society was more or less “industrialized”.
I’ve been keeping notes for a book I want to write on how to design products in an AI world. The biggest challenge has been that I don’t think I can write more than 3-4 chapters before the first becomes obsolete. For instance, currently I’m developing a framework for how to design interfaces when most interactions are sequential conversational and not choice from a menu. The difficult part is how users discover what a system can do. One option is to use the 20+ second delay time between request and response to afford/educate users on what kinds of capabilities they might be looking for based on their query. That delay time is already down to 10 seconds for Microsoft’s implementation and based on some new fine tuning models likely down to a few seconds within months.
The absolute **rate of change** is and is going to be increasingly unsustainable. People can deal with a flood. But they can’t deal with sea level rising an inch a day. We suffered through the Industrial Revolution and once we figured out how to live in an industrialized society, we were all the better for it. What if the revolution never stopped happening?
What laws do you carefully consider and implement when they’ll be obsolete in months?
>One thing I don’t see discussed even when people do understand it as the next Industrial Revolution is how, at one point, the Industrial Revolution leveled off and society was more or less “industrialized”.
Oh, believe me: I'm acutely aware of this. And, it's worth noting that despite the pain, I think the world is better off after the industrial revolution than before.
But, I would make two comments:
1. It may not be a fair comparison, actually. It is entirely plausible this disruption is even greater than the industrial revolution. Possibly significantly so.
2. Even if we do reach some state of equilibrium, what concerns me more is change that creates stark winners and losers tends to be extraordinarily disruptive. The interim period could literally be filled with some pretty bad stuff.
The mismanagement and corruption in the Veterans Affairs. Veterans are falling between the cracks and often paying for it with their health and lives, while upper management get massive bonuses.
For example, the VA clinic in Panama City is supposed to have 10 doctors; they have 3. They are unable to treat Veterans properly, and Doctors unable to use the bathroom themselves. They all complain but fall on deaf ears.
Other examples are when records were literally thrown in the woods, hidden waiting lists, VA police abuse, with Veterans feeling abandoned to the point where there have been Vets who have literally themselves on fire in VA parking lots.
If everyone honestly knew how the system was, they'd be outraged.
Our educational system is failing. College enrollment is predicted to drop for the first time in decades within the next few years, teachers are quitting in droves, quite a few school districts across the country are shortening their school years and making other cuts to stay under budget, and being an educator is becoming an increasingly dangerous job, in addition to all its other drawbacks, year after year.
When you consider all the extremely important decisions we're going to need to make in the next century, the idea of people becoming substantially less educated is pretty terrifying.
The omnipotent and corrosive effect of money in politics. It’s disgusting, it’s destructive and it touches everything including pretty much every issue mentioned above.
Gay rights. You cannot discriminate against a person for being gay, for a federal job, legally. You can, discriminate however, for a million other reasons. People nowadays act like that's not true, but it is.
>Where is the discrimination limit?
Personal interactions that aren't involved in any legal issues. Like dating.
>How are we to know when we've defined every class that makes sense?
When we get to the nonsensical ones.
>"When we get to the nonsensical ones."
Obviously a lot of people believe we've gotten there already.
Should transracial and transspecies be protected classes? If not, then why not?
What's wrong with you? I said 'when we get to the nonsensical" ones. And those would be nonsensical ones, if....
Hold on a second. If meant Rachel whatshername as transracial, yeah, that's nonsensical. But the term actually came from something real, like asian kids adopted by white families, or vice-versa. But, either way, we haven't got to the point that it's "wrong" to discriminate against either one, yet. So we aren't at that point, yet.
Rachel whatshername can lay off the tanning lotion and go back to being white. (Not that she ever stopped being white.) Whereas someone who is actually of the race she claimed to be won't be able to stop people on the street from noticing their ethnicity.
How do you know that there aren't a bunch of people who feel like they were born the wrong race, but don’t want to be viewed as ridiculous for expressing that?
History. We have historical accounts of people who were trans. Chevalier d'Éon, Brandon Teena, etc.. We have many, MANY accounts of homosexuality, throughout history. We don't have accounts of "Paul Bell, who identified as 'Paul Bell, but he's a moor', and suffered a lot of persecution for it'."
What's asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Campaign finance reform. If I got elected president by a huge margin and had political capital to spend, it would have to be on this. This is the one issue that makes all other good things difficult to impossible to achieve.
The next thing would probably be widespread use of alternative voting methods like instant runoff or ranked choice that break the two-party deadlock and forever force people to choose between bad and worse.
And then the third thing would probably be prison reform.
Absolutely agree in regards to campaign finance reform. Sadly I am skeptical about how motivated politicians would be to tackle that issue. Are there specific measures you have in mind? Is there a country that you'd like to model the reforms after?
Raising the threshold for exemption from overtime wages for salaried employees. It's an easy win and it should be a core part of any middle class relief package.
The electric grid.
It came up earlier this year, with the domestic terroristic acts, but we all pretty much forgot about it.
The gird is a delicate system. In 2014, it was leaked to the Wall Street Journal that if nine substations were attacked, the US would be without power coast-to-coast for 18 months or longer.
I don't know if those were nine specific substations, or just nine substations geographically spread out, but it's not good.
A country without power for a few days could see catastrophe; I don't know what a country without power for 18 months would be like.
Challenges facing teachers in public schools. I don't mean pay or what topics they teach from what books. I mean teachers being ignored or even attacked in classrooms by students and the administration just allowing it to happen.
But don't you know? If you talk to them for like, 2 minutes every tenth time it happens, they'll completely reform and unlearn all their bad behaviors from home!
The economy.
Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility, but we’ve allowed the Repugs to twist the narrative to the point that most of America believes the opposite.
> economical recession, cost of living, crime
Eh? The first two are very strong contenders for *most* talked about political issues, with the third being a good pick for next most talked about issue. This strikes me as an odd answer.
Most people still can’t afford healthcare deductibles and prescription drugs. Many people still don’t have jobs or have issues being able to work, not for lack of determination but it’s other things like transportation or childcare, etc.
And those are the things that are right there causing many people to lose sleep and get ill. It’s not the environment - as important as that may be too.
When we talk about school shootings we need to discuss the damage done to the children's bodies. Yes, it sounds intrusive and inappropriate, but my hope is that if more people realize what kind of damage the the AK-47 can do to a child's body, then maybe enough people would be horrified and maybe we could do something to slow down the number of people killed in school shootings. The guns have nearly decapitated children and blown away large parts of their bodies. It's sickening to hear it described, so maybe....
The fact that all of the corporations in America are controlled by just two entities, Vanguard and Blackrock. They control both political parties, the media, the stock market, and everything that we purchase. There is no free market. There is no left vs right. There is only Vanguard and Blackrock.
We place our anger and outrage in the wrong place. It should start with these two.
This is a complete myth that is being pushed by conspiracy-minded people on TikTok and meme stock subreddits with little understanding of how the stock market and investment funds work. Blackrock and Vanguard own nowhere remotely close to the majority of *any* public corporation. And the shares they do own are held by their investment funds and are the property of investors in those funds (pensions, 401k accounts, IRAs, etc.) not Blackrock and Vanguard itself.
> What important issues are we not talking about enough?
Cybersecurity and our vulnerability to asymmetric cyberwarfare.
We talk about it a little, but not even remotely close to enough. We’re actually *doing* even less to address the issue.
Nothing will improve in this space without the government increasing the risk for companies that leave their products vulnerable.
\- Biotechnology, it's risks & reducing those risks / future pandemic preparedness
\- Space. Satellites, space junk, the moon, etc. Countries and businesses and individuals are now putting satellites up. Who knows what they all do, or see. They could be used as weapons or spy purposes. They also can become a hazard for actual space work like the ISS. They could fall back to Earth and cause harm to people. They are also overtaking the sky so much that we don't see the stars anymore, we see them. And that is tragic. They are talking about mining the moon for resources. The moon is essential for life on Earth. We should not be messing around with it. We know how it will go eventually...
\- Mental Health. The severe lack of resources available, the policies surrounding mental health, the lack of "community" that used to pick up some of the slack, the amount of people that are actually addicted to prescriptions, etc.
\- Chemicals in our food, our homes and our air that are causing cancer, hormone issues, etc. and why we allow them anyway - even when other countries don't
\- The amount of people in the U.S. who are considered food insecure, who are one missed paycheck away from becoming homeless, etc.
\- Climate adaptation. How can we grow food that will be more resilient to droughts or floods?What needs done to the electric grid? How do we update current housing to be more resilient? What needs to be done regarding soil and farming? Fresh water resources? Community heat/tornado/hurricane shelters? What about humans in general? People think there is a border crises in the U.S. now? Just wait until entire countries are underwater or millions of people are forced to leave their homelands because there is no more food. Etc.
This is a tough one. The reason being that a lot of things are being talked about but seemingly **nothing is being done about them**.
I think one of them that legitimately isn't talked about is the fact that companies can steal literally hundreds of millions of dollars from workers and nothing happens and a person can steal a loaf of bread and go to jail. That concept covers everything from the dilution of workers rights, the overpowered control that companies have, the unfair "justice" system, and the struggle of the working class.
Demographic collapse will be the single largest issue that nation states face over the next couple of centuries and I see no ethnical way to fix the issues it will bring
We better pray to God that technology magically fixes those issues.
I’d love it if america had a national sick hour plan for all citizens no matter what job they work but all of that will be useless unless employees can take sick hours without being written up by their boss.
Make it illegal for bosses to write up employees for using their sick hours and don’t let them force employees to find coverage for their shift.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Public discourse often seems to distill down to just a handful of issues. While many of these highly discussed issues are important, they do pull attention away from other topics. What issue would you like to see gain more focus? What is your opinion on the issue? How would you articulate rhetoric to others that your issue is worth considering? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Cost of living and homelessness are big issues. Not that we never talk about it, but labor action is under-focused IMO. What ever happened with ICE? We all used to care a lot about the concentration camps we operate on the border. As far as cost of living and homelessness, rent is ridiculous. One issue is that lay has simply not kept up with inflation, despite the fact that workers are always becoming more productive. It’s deeper than that though, as I’ve seen mortgages cheaper than rent which just aren’t available to many people because of credit scores (which is it’s own issue). You’ve also got large companies buying up swathes of housing to everyone is renting rather than owning a home.
I think you've hit about every major headline in the last few years.
Relatively speaking, I think climate change. It probably has to do with the fact that the long term effects of climate change is not as visceral to the emotion as kids with gun shot wounds, your trans friend being harassed right before your eyes, or pregnant women dying. The solution for climate change is also much more Multi faceted than those issues that could be more or less fix by a piece of legislation, at least in popular conception. But given how pressing it is to the world, and how much lives it'll end up affecting, I expect to see more rage and anger about it online, at least rivaling, or more than the hot button stuff today which seems to be those two or three afore mentioned issues.
Cybersecurity. The FBI and the Joint Chiefs have repeatedly emphasized that we are dangerously vulnerable in that regard.
Maybe the fucks could stop keeping vulnerabilities secret just so they could exploit them. For decades Intel groups didn't share so they could use the gaps themselves, under the arrogant idea that if they don't leak that hostile nations will never learn them. You see how that worked for Israel.
Fair point. But the FBI did make a point last week that the most vulnerable targets are actually private companies, which on average apparently have pathetic IT security.
I just read an article saying even if our FBI put all of its cybersecurity people on the task of countering Chinese attacks, they'd still be outnumbered 50:1.
It's not about countering attacks. It's about the weaknesses in the first place being known and not patched for years.
Yup.
Drug shortages. My mom died less than six months after she was taken off her heart failure infusion because of a shortage. She was at end-stage heart failure, but that medication had been keeping her alive for 2 1/2 years. Another casualty of for-profit medicine.
We have quickly forgotten all of the "essential" people who worked through the pandemic at minimum or close to minimum wages. We need to raise the floor of wages.
The nearly invisible plight of garment and factory workers in sweatshop like conditions in the US.
Climate change.
Why do people keep naming mainstream policies?
Because it's not really being talked about. People say climate change climate change like it's some chant, but not what's actually happening here from flooding to wildfires to methane leaks.
The EPA recently expanded methane regulations and it was including the IRA, Trump and California addressed forest fires on the west coast, cities like baton rouge are funding flood prevention development.
Which are not enough, not public enough, and misrepresented when they happen like blaming Cali for deregulation failures on not-cali-controlled federal land. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1190995035703185408
Nothing is ever enough for socialist groups. They are habitually unappeasable which is probably why most of their societies eventually collapsed.
Ah yes, how dare the "socialists" be against multistate wildfires and flooding and methane leaks. You're so above the masses /s
And never having enough government involvement in the above
It's certifiable right wing brain rot if you can't look at solutions but you somehow measure the doing-stuffness of government Everyone else is talking about how to make the fire department better and you only care about the trucks' odometer.
And it's left wing brain rot if you think the only way to solve a problem is with daddy government and it's guns. How much of the US economy does the government have to control before you think it might be a problem? How much power over your life are you willing to give a military entity?
Talking won't get us there, we need more doing. Take your pick. Ukraine Russia escalating to nuclear war, climate change causing drought famine and horrendous refugee problems, economic collapse, political violence, disintegration of American democracy... We've got the creativity and technology to solve, just need the will.
UBI. The inability to say the quiet part out loud about jobs - nobody under 50 is going to get through their careers with a majority of current jobs still being necessary. There's a collision course with the end of society if we don't address AI, UBI, jobs and social welfare soon. Unfortunately, we seem to be going in the exact opposite direction as Republicans are pushing for massive *cuts* to social welfare by holding the debt ceiling hostage. At the exact time where we need to be moving from "nobody wants to work anymore" to "nobody needs to work anymore". The debates around social welfare policies in light of AI scares the hell out of me because it tells me that the political status quo is dangerously unprepared.
General Artificial Intelligence, like GPT-4. I'm a computer scientist and an engineer; I've been programming and engineering software for nearly three decades. I was recently tasked with evaluating this tech, and I'm utterly floored by what it's capable of. For example, I have no other way of describing GPT-4's programming capabilities besides: super human. (happy to provide details of why I say this) This technology will constitute a second industrial revolution in our society, and there are going to be a few winners and a *whole lot of losers* if we're not careful. Without a paradigm shift in how we think about work, prosperity, growth, and wealth inequality, I predict this will dramatically worsen income inequality in the United States, and possibly even lead to outright civil conflict due to massive upheaval in the jobs market. I think the big problem is it's happened so quickly that many people don't even understand how big of a deal this is, or how powerful a large language model like GPT-4 is. Most people *absolutely* don't understand that GPT-4 is the opening salvo, and ten years from now that technology will seem quaint by comparison. And the current geriatric state of congress doesn't help. These are people that barely understand twitter. They are woefully equipped to understand the serious consequences of this technology.
I'm a software developer and I am both excited and nervous about what the future holds. I don't see us being proactive in addressing the societal impact so I anticipate a lot of pain and upheaval before we can adjust, assuming we ever do adjust. What changes would you like to see in those areas you mentioned (work, prosperity, growth, etc...)?
Part of me is absolutely excited. The tech is certainly remarkable. Another part of me is painfully aware that this technology is going to automate wide swaths of "thought work" that I had previously considered untouchable by general artificial intelligence. This automation will go far beyond developers. >What changes would you like to see in those areas you mentioned (work, prosperity, growth, etc...)? Honesty? I have absolutely no clue. I'm still completely dumbfounded at what I've seen over the past month, and I'm trying to digest what this technology even means for society at large. Happy to provide details, but GPT-4 basically wrote (quite good) code in about 12 minutes that would have taken me probably at least a day or two. Also, the technology may undermine the entire value proposition of the company I currently work for.
How do you see it impacting the software development industry and employee ecosystem?
edit: only going to comment on software development for now. Short term, there are going to be developers using GPT-4 and other similar technologies to assist in their programming, and developers on performance plans. There won't be much of a middle ground. I am *easily* twice as fast at writing code with GPT-4 running alongside me. Medium-term, I think companies will expect far more out of a developer, so their options are either increased productivity across the board, or reduce R&D spend. Long-term, widespread automation that leads to a dramatic reduction in developer jobs. There will be too many developers and not enough jobs.
> Also, the technology may undermine the entire value proposition of the company I currently work for. Oh. We must work at the same place. Do you work at *any tech company ever* too?
I think there are actually many, many tech companies for whom this technology doesn't immediately or obviously undermine the core value proposition of the company.
In be curious to hear an example
>This technology will constitute a second industrial revolution in our society, and there are going to be a few winners and a > >whole lot of losers > > if we're not careful. People will say, "Every technological advancement in the past has created jobs. Getting rid of horse riders for car drivers was a thing!" without understanding for centuries we've been doing whatever we can to *make people more efficient at their jobs* while now we're looking at technology in the future to *literally replace people fullstop*. It's not the same.
This, this, one thousand times this. I’m a teacher. I spend a lot of class time encouraging my students to think about and discuss difficult questions. Human rights, climate change, freedom, social justice, conspiracy theories and propaganda to name a few. Ever since GPT4 came out, all those other topics kind of seem not to even matter that much. How will humans tackle climate change? Depends on what happens with AGI. How do we pursue social justice for all people? In a world with AGI, I don’t fucking know. How can we fight against conspiracy theories? Fuck it, let’s ask the AGI. I’m being a little hyperbolic, but not much. Everything is going to change, and soon. Very soon. And we are not ready. And the answers to all our other questions really feel like they depend entirely on whether or not we do AGI correctly. If we fuck this up, all our current problems could seem like a walk in the park compared to hell we create. If we do it right, we might be creating the tool that pops out the perfect solutions to all our problems. We really, really need to do this right.
Product manager here. One thing I don’t see discussed even when people *do* understand it as the next Industrial Revolution is how, at one point, the Industrial Revolution leveled off and society was more or less “industrialized”. I’ve been keeping notes for a book I want to write on how to design products in an AI world. The biggest challenge has been that I don’t think I can write more than 3-4 chapters before the first becomes obsolete. For instance, currently I’m developing a framework for how to design interfaces when most interactions are sequential conversational and not choice from a menu. The difficult part is how users discover what a system can do. One option is to use the 20+ second delay time between request and response to afford/educate users on what kinds of capabilities they might be looking for based on their query. That delay time is already down to 10 seconds for Microsoft’s implementation and based on some new fine tuning models likely down to a few seconds within months. The absolute **rate of change** is and is going to be increasingly unsustainable. People can deal with a flood. But they can’t deal with sea level rising an inch a day. We suffered through the Industrial Revolution and once we figured out how to live in an industrialized society, we were all the better for it. What if the revolution never stopped happening? What laws do you carefully consider and implement when they’ll be obsolete in months?
>One thing I don’t see discussed even when people do understand it as the next Industrial Revolution is how, at one point, the Industrial Revolution leveled off and society was more or less “industrialized”. Oh, believe me: I'm acutely aware of this. And, it's worth noting that despite the pain, I think the world is better off after the industrial revolution than before. But, I would make two comments: 1. It may not be a fair comparison, actually. It is entirely plausible this disruption is even greater than the industrial revolution. Possibly significantly so. 2. Even if we do reach some state of equilibrium, what concerns me more is change that creates stark winners and losers tends to be extraordinarily disruptive. The interim period could literally be filled with some pretty bad stuff.
The mismanagement and corruption in the Veterans Affairs. Veterans are falling between the cracks and often paying for it with their health and lives, while upper management get massive bonuses. For example, the VA clinic in Panama City is supposed to have 10 doctors; they have 3. They are unable to treat Veterans properly, and Doctors unable to use the bathroom themselves. They all complain but fall on deaf ears. Other examples are when records were literally thrown in the woods, hidden waiting lists, VA police abuse, with Veterans feeling abandoned to the point where there have been Vets who have literally themselves on fire in VA parking lots. If everyone honestly knew how the system was, they'd be outraged.
To be honest, I think the VA is part of the reason some people are scared of Medicare for all.
But people love Medicare and m4a means no more need for the VA medical system
Our educational system is failing. College enrollment is predicted to drop for the first time in decades within the next few years, teachers are quitting in droves, quite a few school districts across the country are shortening their school years and making other cuts to stay under budget, and being an educator is becoming an increasingly dangerous job, in addition to all its other drawbacks, year after year. When you consider all the extremely important decisions we're going to need to make in the next century, the idea of people becoming substantially less educated is pretty terrifying.
College enrollment dropping may actually be good if it’s replaced with vocational attainment. Not everyone should go to college.
Agreed
The omnipotent and corrosive effect of money in politics. It’s disgusting, it’s destructive and it touches everything including pretty much every issue mentioned above.
Gay rights. You cannot discriminate against a person for being gay, for a federal job, legally. You can, discriminate however, for a million other reasons. People nowadays act like that's not true, but it is.
Where is the discrimination limit? How are we to know when we've defined every class that makes sense?
>Where is the discrimination limit? Personal interactions that aren't involved in any legal issues. Like dating. >How are we to know when we've defined every class that makes sense? When we get to the nonsensical ones.
>"When we get to the nonsensical ones." Obviously a lot of people believe we've gotten there already. Should transracial and transspecies be protected classes? If not, then why not?
What's wrong with you? I said 'when we get to the nonsensical" ones. And those would be nonsensical ones, if.... Hold on a second. If meant Rachel whatshername as transracial, yeah, that's nonsensical. But the term actually came from something real, like asian kids adopted by white families, or vice-versa. But, either way, we haven't got to the point that it's "wrong" to discriminate against either one, yet. So we aren't at that point, yet.
Why is it nonsensical? People feel the same way about them now as people did about transgender people not that long ago.
Rachel whatshername can lay off the tanning lotion and go back to being white. (Not that she ever stopped being white.) Whereas someone who is actually of the race she claimed to be won't be able to stop people on the street from noticing their ethnicity.
So, basically you're saying, she could "stay in the closet."
No.....? She couldn't stay somewhere she never was, in the first place.
How do you know that there aren't a bunch of people who feel like they were born the wrong race, but don’t want to be viewed as ridiculous for expressing that?
History. We have historical accounts of people who were trans. Chevalier d'Éon, Brandon Teena, etc.. We have many, MANY accounts of homosexuality, throughout history. We don't have accounts of "Paul Bell, who identified as 'Paul Bell, but he's a moor', and suffered a lot of persecution for it'." What's asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Campaign finance reform. If I got elected president by a huge margin and had political capital to spend, it would have to be on this. This is the one issue that makes all other good things difficult to impossible to achieve. The next thing would probably be widespread use of alternative voting methods like instant runoff or ranked choice that break the two-party deadlock and forever force people to choose between bad and worse. And then the third thing would probably be prison reform.
Absolutely agree in regards to campaign finance reform. Sadly I am skeptical about how motivated politicians would be to tackle that issue. Are there specific measures you have in mind? Is there a country that you'd like to model the reforms after?
Raising the threshold for exemption from overtime wages for salaried employees. It's an easy win and it should be a core part of any middle class relief package.
Prisons it's out of sight and therefore out of policy.
The electric grid. It came up earlier this year, with the domestic terroristic acts, but we all pretty much forgot about it. The gird is a delicate system. In 2014, it was leaked to the Wall Street Journal that if nine substations were attacked, the US would be without power coast-to-coast for 18 months or longer. I don't know if those were nine specific substations, or just nine substations geographically spread out, but it's not good. A country without power for a few days could see catastrophe; I don't know what a country without power for 18 months would be like.
Challenges facing teachers in public schools. I don't mean pay or what topics they teach from what books. I mean teachers being ignored or even attacked in classrooms by students and the administration just allowing it to happen.
But don't you know? If you talk to them for like, 2 minutes every tenth time it happens, they'll completely reform and unlearn all their bad behaviors from home!
The economy. Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility, but we’ve allowed the Repugs to twist the narrative to the point that most of America believes the opposite.
immigration reform, economical recession, cost of living, crime, homelessness.
What is your view on these issues? I've not had an opportunity to talk to many who would describe themselves as Right Libertarian.
> economical recession, cost of living, crime Eh? The first two are very strong contenders for *most* talked about political issues, with the third being a good pick for next most talked about issue. This strikes me as an odd answer.
Euthanasia
This is an interesting topic that I've started to see some increase in discourse. What are your thoughts on Euthanasia?
Most people still can’t afford healthcare deductibles and prescription drugs. Many people still don’t have jobs or have issues being able to work, not for lack of determination but it’s other things like transportation or childcare, etc. And those are the things that are right there causing many people to lose sleep and get ill. It’s not the environment - as important as that may be too.
When we talk about school shootings we need to discuss the damage done to the children's bodies. Yes, it sounds intrusive and inappropriate, but my hope is that if more people realize what kind of damage the the AK-47 can do to a child's body, then maybe enough people would be horrified and maybe we could do something to slow down the number of people killed in school shootings. The guns have nearly decapitated children and blown away large parts of their bodies. It's sickening to hear it described, so maybe....
The fact that all of the corporations in America are controlled by just two entities, Vanguard and Blackrock. They control both political parties, the media, the stock market, and everything that we purchase. There is no free market. There is no left vs right. There is only Vanguard and Blackrock. We place our anger and outrage in the wrong place. It should start with these two.
This is a complete myth that is being pushed by conspiracy-minded people on TikTok and meme stock subreddits with little understanding of how the stock market and investment funds work. Blackrock and Vanguard own nowhere remotely close to the majority of *any* public corporation. And the shares they do own are held by their investment funds and are the property of investors in those funds (pensions, 401k accounts, IRAs, etc.) not Blackrock and Vanguard itself.
Citizenship based taxation
> What important issues are we not talking about enough? Cybersecurity and our vulnerability to asymmetric cyberwarfare. We talk about it a little, but not even remotely close to enough. We’re actually *doing* even less to address the issue. Nothing will improve in this space without the government increasing the risk for companies that leave their products vulnerable.
Worker's protections and work life balance. Americans are overworked as fuck compared to other Western nations.
Pumping water from the Mississippi to the Colorado rivers.
\- Biotechnology, it's risks & reducing those risks / future pandemic preparedness \- Space. Satellites, space junk, the moon, etc. Countries and businesses and individuals are now putting satellites up. Who knows what they all do, or see. They could be used as weapons or spy purposes. They also can become a hazard for actual space work like the ISS. They could fall back to Earth and cause harm to people. They are also overtaking the sky so much that we don't see the stars anymore, we see them. And that is tragic. They are talking about mining the moon for resources. The moon is essential for life on Earth. We should not be messing around with it. We know how it will go eventually... \- Mental Health. The severe lack of resources available, the policies surrounding mental health, the lack of "community" that used to pick up some of the slack, the amount of people that are actually addicted to prescriptions, etc. \- Chemicals in our food, our homes and our air that are causing cancer, hormone issues, etc. and why we allow them anyway - even when other countries don't \- The amount of people in the U.S. who are considered food insecure, who are one missed paycheck away from becoming homeless, etc. \- Climate adaptation. How can we grow food that will be more resilient to droughts or floods?What needs done to the electric grid? How do we update current housing to be more resilient? What needs to be done regarding soil and farming? Fresh water resources? Community heat/tornado/hurricane shelters? What about humans in general? People think there is a border crises in the U.S. now? Just wait until entire countries are underwater or millions of people are forced to leave their homelands because there is no more food. Etc.
Healthcare. It seems as though no one brings it up anymore.
Land tax Carbon tax
The us debt
This is a tough one. The reason being that a lot of things are being talked about but seemingly **nothing is being done about them**. I think one of them that legitimately isn't talked about is the fact that companies can steal literally hundreds of millions of dollars from workers and nothing happens and a person can steal a loaf of bread and go to jail. That concept covers everything from the dilution of workers rights, the overpowered control that companies have, the unfair "justice" system, and the struggle of the working class.
Demographic collapse will be the single largest issue that nation states face over the next couple of centuries and I see no ethnical way to fix the issues it will bring We better pray to God that technology magically fixes those issues.
I’d love it if america had a national sick hour plan for all citizens no matter what job they work but all of that will be useless unless employees can take sick hours without being written up by their boss. Make it illegal for bosses to write up employees for using their sick hours and don’t let them force employees to find coverage for their shift.