Completely disagree. When we’re talking about something like air, missile, or artillery strikes, the operator of the weapon system may literally never even see the target, on a screen or otherwise. They may simply be entering targeting information provided to them by an operations center. These decisions are social and group decisions, with distributed responsibility, which is why it’s so important to have institutions like the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence which historically has identified and helped implement the policies which prevent these kinds of disasters, but which unfortunately the current administration decided to shut down without a replacement.
Sometimes, the difference between a successful strike on a lawful combatant and disaster is one analyst pointing out that the building the enemy is hiding in is next to a square that’s used for a market on Tuesdays and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Tuesday. That’s not something the person “pulling the trigger,” can always be expected to know, which is why every ops center needs to be designed to elevate those voices, when the time comes
Surely, if we are decommodifying basic needs, our first priority should be food, not housing, right? How has nationalization of agriculture worked in the past?
If, during your upbringing, you were inculcated in pro-shrimp propaganda and earned substantial rewards for helping shrimp find food or defend themselves against predators, you’d probably be fairly inclined to help them out as an autonomous adult. Hell, we have human beings today that didn’t experience that and are still committing their lives to shrimp welfare
I wouldn’t trust this argument by analogy enough to risk the fate of the world on it, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me that a super intelligence would be totally disinclined to care about the interests of lesser intelligences
I would say that rationalists have some commitment to their religion being factually accurate (or at least grounded in empirical observation), which is more than can be said of most others
>The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.
Except for something like housing, the supply of which has been artificially constrained by policy since before the internet arrived on the scene, I can’t think of anything which is harder to produce or distribute since the advent of the internet. Particularly on distribution, I have far more access to goods and services than my parents did.
Agreed that this hasn’t changed the structure of society in any meaningful way. We’re still social animals with all the same strengths and weaknesses as before.
>Whose livelihood is destroying the engineer that design better protein folding software?
Hasn’t homology modeling essentially been abandoned by researchers at this point? Maybe their livelihood wasn’t completely ruined but if you had specialized in that technology, you were probably materially harmed by the introduction of AlphaFold. That harm doesn’t outweigh the obvious benefits, but I would be very surprised if the harm doesn’t exist.
>Even the humble startup shipping yet another calendar tool isn’t harming anyone or being the direct cause of layoffs of other workers.
If they’re undercutting and outcompeting an existing calendar tool, they very well could be contributing to layoffs at their competitors.
For anyone doubting this, take a look at Zahi Hawass’s (former Minister of Tourism and Antiquities) response to the ScanPyramids project. From wikipedia,
> On November 2, 2017, the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told the New York Times: "They found nothing...This paper offers nothing to Egyptology. Zero." Later, once the North Face Corridor was inspected with an Endoscope, Hawass conversely commented that ScanPyramids's work had provided a "major discovery" that would "enter houses and homes of people all over the world for the first time".
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