We regret to inform you that Ray Kurzweil is back on his bullshit

A friend of mine got the shit end of a “restructuring” at work the other day and immediately started applying for unemployment. Florida hasn’t increased that benefit in almost a decade (probably longer) so he’ll be getting the same paltry $275/wk that I got many many years ago when I was on unemployment for a bit. I hope he finds a new job soon because there’s absolutely no way to live on that.

The social safety net here is so poor that even the amount you get for unemployment is the same as it was decades ago, which doesn’t pace with inflation and can’t even cover rent anymore.

In .nl our far right gov has seen this and decided to uncouple unemployment and wages/inflation as well. So yeah lol.

The US doesn't have a functional healthcare system yet, and they're like a century behind on that at this point.

Yes, so many people fail to see the existential stakes here. They think that even a bandaid like ubi is inevitable, because they don't acknowledge the possibility that we could just die.

Like that if it's cheaper to let us gather in unregulated tent cities and croak from the new plagues that blossom there, then that's what'll happen.

Obviously it's not good for anyone in the long term, but corpos can't think long term.

You hear UBI thrown around a lot by the AI crowd, often before or after the word "obviously" and the phrase "the government will." The people who talk about such-and-such political solution being INEVITABLE due to (some non political thing over here) have almost never spent even a moment paying attention to actual policy conversations that touch on their proposal. They usually have not looked at the political context either.

It is, in the year 2024, a Herculean effort to get the U.S. Congress to pass a functioning BUDGET. Every. fucking. year. The institution nominally in charge of the country grinds to a halt as it debates "Hey, should society continue existing? I'm not sure" for a few weeks because some asshole decides to throw sand in the gears over what the culture war issue is trending that day. Modest improvements to existing infrastructure or policy areas are MONTHS and YEARS long battles to get passed. And in the lucky event something does get happen, no one ever looks deeply into either the sustainability of the policy nor the implementation of the policy. Making sure the-thing-we-passed-helps-the-people-we-intended-and-is-functioning is always a Next Year problem for Somebody Else.

The very idea that, like, our government could get it together long enough to create and fund a long-term permanent UBI program is laughable. Insulting. "Well, it's a very obvious problem that a government will have to solve" you say. "How could they not solve it?"

My dude. Not solving very obvious problems that it is their job to solve is our legislature's speciality. It's what it lives and breathes for. On the metaphorical resumé of Congress, "finding reasons to not do things" is the first bullet point under "Strengths."

And UBI is not some trivial post-office naming bill. It would be a hugely contentious issue, as you'd have to decide fun questions like who qualifies to receive the money, how much money do they get and, most fun of all, who is going to pay for this. And whatever clever answer you think you have for that third question, I guarantee you they will immediately launch an all-out assault on your very soul once they catch a whiff of you attempting to redistribute THEIR GOD-GIVEN RIGHT to hoard piles of cash large and small alike.

It's an annoying statement to hear repeated because it's such a STEM-head "on my napkin this is all very simple" reflex that totally ignores the reality of the human beings and the society they live in.

His keyboards kick ass tho 🤷‍♀️

How much worse it must be for the people in the lemmieverse (are we calling it that?) who don't have accounts on awful.sys directly. The neuralink is life extension (unless you are a monkey) that proves Ray is right person is still going at it.

Synths are to him what linguistics is to Chomsky

@AllNewTypeFace @cstross if a couch potato is someone who never leaves their couch, does this make Kurzwell a bullshit potato?

It hasn't worked 'well' for computers since like the pentium, what are you talking about?

The premise was pretty dumb too, as in, if you notice that a (very reductive) technological metric has been rising sort of exponentially, you should probably assume something along the lines of we're probably still at the low hanging fruit stage of R&D, it'll stabilize as it matures, instead of proudly proclaiming that surely it'll approach infinity and break reality.

There's nothing smart or insightful about seeing a line in a graph trending upwards and assuming it's gonna keep doing that no matter what. Not to mention that type of decontextualized wishful thinking is emblematic of the TREACLES mindset mentioned in the community's blurb that you should check out.

So yeah, he thought up the Singularity which is little more than a metaphysical excuse to ignore regulations and negative externalities because with tech rupture around the corner any catastrophic mess we make getting there won't matter. See also: the whole current AI debacle.

First, learn the difference between scorn or disdain and hate.

Second, read the comments in the thread already made about those "'sort of' correct" predictions.

ah yeah, 3 downvotes (and one of them’s mine) and zero replies of scorn directed towards you (well, one now)

how about you take your bullshit elsewhere

you could just have read downthread for actual details before posting, y'know. that waaaah edit isn't helping

Re his book, a glance at wikipedia (helpfully linked to the relevant section, im not one of those LMGTFY link twats) might help.

Fuck those assholes. I think Ray is blinded by his own success of pointing at graphs, number go up, but there was no reason to be mean to you. There's an underbelly of smelly smugglings in Lemmy.

you can unsubscribe. that's allowed.

Hey wanna get in on the ground floor of my new cryptocurrency offer? You seem like just the person we are looking for.

You know that Factorio is a fictional video game, right?

logarythmically… what?

I predict you are going to have a bad time here. And that is far before 2045.

(Edit: I hear you think, but predicting after a thing has already happened and keeps happening, that isn't really predicting now is it. And Varyk was enlightened).

@Varyk Kurzweil thought we’d all be quasi-cyborgs on 2 wheels by now.

He’s been as right as Alex Jones has been

@Varyk

Name ten.