Then do it. Decline the UBI or give it away to someone else. Or use it to buy land you can farm and then decline any further payments. Nobody is going to force you to stop working hard if you want to.
i don't want to be the pet of ASI. i don't want to depend on UBI, no matter the checks' generosity
i want to work hard. i want to be recognized for my competence. i want to bend reality to my will, whether that's an inch or a mile
i am a capitalist, not a capital worshipper
13
In China you can go from Beijing to Shanghai in 4h18m by train. That's the same distance as Boston to Chicago, but that takes 21 hours by train. The richest country in human history should be able to do better than that.
Right now people are already relegated to a role of doing things that someone with more money than you thinks makes sense to reward in humans (unless you’re the guy with the money) so…
People should always be in control of the future.
OpenAI is against the notion that it would be acceptable for people to be relegated to a role of doing things that “AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans”.
People should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress.
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👍👍👍
57% of voters think AI will hurt society.
I think 57% of voters have never had a doctor say "stage 4 cancer" to their face. I have.
- AI is what has allowed me to design a personalized cancer vaccine from my own tumor's DNA.
- AI is what lets me understand everything about my health and show up to appointments prepared.
- AI catches the stuff that slips through, like drug interactions, lab trends and the questions nobody thought to ask.
And this is just basic shit my dumb ass is doing on my own. We've only just begun to see its true potential.
Be scared of AI all you want. Just know the price of slowing it down gets paid by sick people. May not be you or your loved ones today, but it will be in due time.
When you're in extreme agony from a terminal diagnosis with death lingering, I sure as shit bet you'll be wishing that AI had developed a treatment so you could spend just a bit more time with your friends and family.
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There weren't really a lot of things to do in 2020, so this doesn't establish how people would behave with UBI in ordinary conditions.
You can tell the UBI advocates are more honest than most utopians, because they used to argue that UBI would let the masses live lives of aristocratic self-cultivation and full human expression, then in 2020 we tried it and saw most people use UBI for doordash and doomscrolling, and then they *stopped making that argument* instead of just ignoring the refutation.
41
yep. ROI isn't there when you consider the value of your time.
there are no successful big lawyers
the profession's definition of success, working at gunpoint thro endless life moments for 2 or whatever million dollars, is failure
and those who actually prefer big law to the endless other ways to spend time have failed the hardest: in the development of taste
1
115
I'm glad nobody had the chance to evaluate my genome to decide whether I ought to exist based on my predisposition to play basketball, be sleepy during the day, or demand attention.
Making this a scarce luxury good is a choice, no reason it has to be this way
The average rent for a one bedroom in this neighborhood is $5,000 so that people can enjoy a walkable neighborhood with great restaurants, green space, transit and beautiful streets. The demand for neighborhoods like this is insane, it’s time we make it legal everywhere for everyone.
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69
They’re actually thinking of meeting people. It’s not really about the bars and restaurants as ends in themselves, they’re an excuse to meet people and spend time with them.
What you can’t do as easily in the country is *consume*. When people wonder, “what do people do out there in the country?” they’re thinking of bars and restaurants and coffeeshops and concerts. I’m not trying to be a crunchy hippie here, but it’s fundamentally a consumer-centered worldview.
1
88
I'm happy in my small apartment
This is cope. Just as likely that the people in this income bracket have four wheelers and motorcycles and boats and mini excavators and they’re living the dream. You should probably just assume that all they’re doing is watching TV, because you’d want to kill yourself in your small apartment if you knew what they were really up to.
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It lets you do more of some things and less of other things
I think a lot of people aren't aware that being in the middle of nowhere allows you to do more things, not less.
You can hunt. You can fish. You can light off a big bonfire in your yard. You can shoot beer cans off the fence. You can shoot clays. You can do donuts in your miata.
54
The problem with big law isn’t the people. I don’t remember anything in particular about the people. Of course I was there for like 2 months. But everyone seemed nice enough. The problem is really just the system and the incentives it creates. Work culture not healthy, not aligned with human flourishing.
I started big law, billed like crazy, made partner, and then left and was wished will by all the partners I interacted with, and we are all still friends and we literally still text each other and talk and email. Big Law isnt and doesn't have to be as bad as people say in this regard.
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1,765
I didn’t get this until I started working a job and then I understood why people are so desperate to be in academia that they will pile in even when everyone tells them they have horrific odds. If you are inclined to the life of a scholar, the rest of what’s out there is incredibly bleak
The whole point of developing AI is what most people spend most of their lives on isn't meaningful or difference-making.
Employers want automation when they do not care how or by whom the task gets done so long as it is done. This occurs when what they are paying for is output. The output exhausts the value of the task as far as the person paying for it is concerned.
When a human's involvement genuinely matters, people don't want automation. I don't want to read a philosophy book generated by AI because encountering another human's thoughts matters. But I'll happily accept a house built by an AI robot because the point is to get a house and it doesn't matter who or what built it.
So the fact that there is so much excitement about automation across a wide spectrum of the economy should tell you a lot about how much of this activity is really meaningful or difference-making in the first place. And the answer is not much.
I oppose AI primarily because I believe that people need meaningful, difference-making things to do, not a mere lifetime of recreation.
Under ASI, our endless leisure will be passed in diminished, tiresome company, since we will lack the experiences of struggle and striving that generate interesting personalities. What will there be to admire about one another, or even to say to one another?
Boredom and purposelessness, even amidst plenty, would be a recipe for great suffering.
81
consider how lucky he is to have a job where he cares about who or what solves the domain's problems in the first place, unlike most of us grinding out a living
Here’s one example of how gutting OpenAI’s release of hundreds of solved math problems was for mathematicians. A powerful piece from Cornell math professor @stevenstrogatz theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…
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