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Americans’ credit card debt hits a record $1 trillion
(www.cnn.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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A single income used to afford a house, and family, a car or two, vacations, and retirement savings.
Then we needed families to have two incomes to have that lifestyle.
Then we held on to that system, but had that lifestyle, WITHOUT the building up of any savings, and without the vacations.
Then we needed two incomes just to be able to LEASE that watered-down lifestyle.
And then we needed two incomes and good credit to juggle that watered-down lifestyle, and deferring debt to some point down the road when we assumed we'd be high-income earners.
Now we are in stunningly dangerous territory. We've largely given up any luxuries, and we struggle to find the CREDIT to LEASE basic essentials like housing, food and medicine. Often we fail to do so.
Inflation has hit us incredibly hard, but when student loan payments start up in mere weeks from now, it's going to be CRIPPLING, not just to those with debt, but EVERY business that needs those people to buy their goods and services.
We've been robbed of our future by corporate greed and the psychopathic cruelty of the boomer-run government.
... And just in the past 6 months we've seen the invention of the first artificial general intelligence. Even if it never got any better than it is today, it would still decimate the workforce. But it is getting better. At a staggering rate. We are headed for a jobs crisis the likes of which has never been seen in all of human history.
Add to that the rise of fascism in a global scale.
Add to that the hundreds of millions of anticipated climate change refugees, and potentially catastrophic failures of the ecosystems which sustain various crops.
Add to that that all of human experience and evolution has left us WILDLY unprepared to understand let alone solve problems of this pace and magnitude.
It is difficult to see how we survive this.
Just to be fair, chatgpt isn't an artificial general intelligence.
GPT4 absolutely is the foundational block of the first AGI.
I've been working with it exhaustively since it was released. I've built frameworks around it to give it a memory and other supplements. I have ZERO doubt that this is the first AGI, or at least it's the engine that powers real AGI.
If you haven't read this paper, you should: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
That was researchers using gpt4 before it had guardrails put on its behavior, but also without any supplements to it's functionally.
Hard definition to fit because it all depends on what you define as 'general'. Its not great but tbh you can ask it a question about anything and it will give an answer, so I'd argue that's general enough
It's missing intelligence though.
ChatGPT uses machine learning to predict a sequence of words, but there's no thought or understanding of the words.
Another fairly soft definition, which to debate I gotta ask what is 'intelligence' to you? Defined as rigouroudly as you care to, cause you'll find its pretty damn hard to get anywhere fundamental.
My point with this is usually if something has no definition, its probably not that good to use as a definition for other things, like AI
Realistically the only way you could consider AI not intelligent is of you specifically require aspects of humanity within it, as such if aliens existed and didn't have anything analogous to "thought" would they then not be intelligent?
From google intelligence is
ChatGPT is not capable of active learning so no.
If aliens can then yes.
I'm not even talking about human intelligence, most animals have some level of intelligence that chatGPT doesnt have.
ChatGPT is just very good at appearing intelligent.
But of course the AI is trainable, hence how it got trained.
Actively learning doesn't come up in the definition, but it being able to respond to multiple comments with context shows it does actively learn and understand the topic at hand.
Its for sure much more sterilized than natural intelligence, but tbh the main reason it doesn't train on its input data is because it would turn to junk fairly quick with the mess of messages it must get.
I'm not sure I get your 'appearing intelligent' comment, either something does or doesn't actively learn under your definition, so where does the appearance come from? Unless you mean because people are undecided of conversation is active or not, which would put it on the fence (again under the active definition)
As opposed to humans who always think before they speak or tweet or email or show up to a protest with an AR-15.
Not that I support everything about her, but Elizabeth Warren literally wrote the book on our 2 income problem.
Society tracks "family income" and for a gigantic portion of history that was one income, then in the 60s-70s women started entering the workforce in larger numbers (in the US, not sure about globally) and we see family income "rising" so we think "great, we're growing! We're doing well!" Except that it only grew because of an additional income.
Now we're at the point you've mentioned where that isn't even enough anymore especially when the vast majority of jobs seem to offer around 50-60k unless you're a specific professional/tech bro.
I'm a perpetually single blue collar schmuck, I've completely given up on the idea of homeownership, and am very very quickly realizing my retirement plan has to be a shotgun to the head.
What a wonderful future we have to look forward to.
And I'll just add this so no one has to later: GlObAlLy We'Re BeTtEr ThAn EvEr! Because you know, that totally helps...
"It is difficult to see how we survive this."
We probably wont.
Rome always falls in the end. The law of entropy is absolute. Like so many empires before us, the sociopathic greed/glut/power lust by the "winners" will be our end. Our height was WWII, I see no shame in that. We did a good thing after centuries of committing enslavement and genocide, then we declined into the sunset for the next empire to write about in its history books.
When the system has become this exploitative, some sharp short/medium term pain is better than limping along for another generation or two when we'll have to collapse or revolt and do the work of rebuilding we already need to do anyway.
Reminder: being comfortable passing the buck of consequences to future generations is why we're here.
Very well written and accurate. I just want to add that the financial requirements to raise children have been out the window for some time as well. Not that they would want to exist in a world with climate change anyway.
@flossdaily @MicroWave
That's the thing tho ... most humans won't survive this. The super rich are buying up remote properties/islands at an incredible rate and want Mars asap.
Most of the rest of us will die of starvation, fires, heat, dehydration/poisoned water or the massive storms.
If I've learned anything from Musk and Zuckerberg, it's that the super rich really aren't all that competent. They know how to operate within the system as it is and leverage their existing advantage. I'm pretty sceptical that they can actually save themselves either. They'll need other people to do that for them, but the problem they face is, why wouldn't those people just take charge themselves? Once the system they operate in is gone, what do the wealthy really have to offer? No actual skills for the most part. It's all socially fabricated smoke and mirrors.
Mars is a pipe dream. Unless Earth goes full Venus, it will be vastly better then Mars for at least the next thousand years. Terraforming Mars would be a centuries long endeavor, and terraforming Earth would be vastly easier.
Technically we are already terraforming Earth. We know what emitting greenhouse gases does, then we still do it intentionally, then we get sad about, but are not surprised about, the results of our actions on the global climate. We are knowingly using technology that alters the global climate at this very moment, and this has already significantly and successfully altered the global climate.
That's terraforming, baby!
We are just terraforming the Earth to be more hostile towards human life, explicitly to make a tiny population of rich assholes who've been promising to whip their dicks out and rain down golden showers of prosperity for a century happier, because us peasants are apparently as fucking stupid and submissive as those rich assholes believe we are.
I would call what we're doing reverse terraforming. We're making Earth less Earth-like.