fomenting revolution, 21st-century style
...because what good is having ASI if society remains broken?
In what has got to be the wealthiest city in the country (in a U.S. state which would be the 4th largest economy in the world if it were its own nation state) in terms of newly minted AI millionaires and billionaires per capita, this is unconscionable:
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The inversion layer was already aloft as I walked down Chestnut Street in the Marina, the fog above the Bay on my late night constitutional, hence it was bone-chilling cold. Passed what I thought was a small bundle on the sidewalk, then I saw the small shoes poking out of the blanket, and realized it was a child (or a small teenager, or tiny woman). Like everyone else, I walked past like a zombie. At first.
Then I turned around and took a picture, seething; which turned into an inchoate rage a couple of blocks away seeing this equally discarded mattress. At least the child or person might have walked a bit more and found this bed, instead of the unforgivingly harsh concrete of the sidewalk?
In my confounded dismay and ethical confusion, I justified the photos as tokens to foment revolution, in a new way, as a dormant yet familiar impetus seized me.
It is thin gruel indeed, to pin one's idealistic hopes on the projected capability of an intelligence far greater than ours to somehow rectify this wrong. I mean, what would be its motivation? Certainly not one generated from the deluded pieties we humans have mongered in for the entirety of civilization (its base training) - as these have not resulted in the common welfare of all.
One needs to just see the abandoned and invisible plainly at our feet to realize that we have gotten beyond our wits' best ends, and have embraced cynicism with supine indifference. It is folly.
And it's long past time to seek other solutions, even if they arrive from alien sensibilities. Which perhaps is the point.
As such, a new conversation ensued, a new idea emerging from the palimpsest of that age-old conviction of the skeptics among us who know that change IS possible - when belief becomes praxis which causes the scales to fall from the eyes of the masses of beholders.
We shall see.