Al Jazeera on Universal Basic Income

Will universal basic income become mainstream?

Key insights


The key idea of the video is that universal basic income can alleviate poverty, improve well-being, and empower individuals by providing them with a basic income to cover their living needs.



7 months ago

The fact that David got choked up when he was talking about how everyone deserves to feel good is evidence that he is truly a good man. You probably see less than .1% of people that would share this sentiment. The world needs more people that share this sentiment.

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5 months ago

this guy needs more subscribers. he is the master in AI philosophy

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7 months ago

I wanted to express my appreciation for your work in AI cognitive architectures and NLP. Your insights and expertise have been incredibly valuable to me, and I have been sharing your channel with everyone I meet who is interested in these topics. Your work has helped me realize the power of my own expertise in Mind, Brain, and Education and has inspired me to pursue further research in this field.

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5 months ago

i'm blown away by the level of great, thought-provoking content you have treated us to in this video! I am following your ChatGPT novel writing series with great interest. Thank you.

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4 months ago

You provide so much more than just updates and tricks and how-to's about AI. I respect and appreciate what you bring. I think it's important that we all keep our eyes wide open in these rapidly changing times, and you're doing an excellent job in helping us with that. Keep it up.

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7 months ago

Thank you for putting so much research putting these videos together. You’re such a valuable resource to stay up to date with AI

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7 months ago

I got to push back a little bit on the emotional intelligence issue because GPT 3 seems to display a significant level of emotional intelligence already, not only presenting a clear understanding of how emotions were but also giving useful output in terms of emotional situations people sometimes get into. There is an example dr. Alan Thompson did where he was talking to instruct to GPT and he was telling a story about how his friend wanted him to come over and pay for a meal to eat and it was funny that GPT was able to understand the Dynamics why that would be an unreasonable proposition.

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2 months ago

I would imagine you don't know the impact you are making in my life, especially with this video. I've been watching and listening to your YouTube channel for a few weeks now, going back further and further in your videos to learn more and more from you. I feel like a student again tho I dropped out 15yrs ago and I love it. You've changed my opinions outlooks and revitalized my passion for learning and yearning to help others in learning and understanding everything that I know and in turn what they know, learning individual truths to understand humanity as a whole. Thank you for what you do and what you've done to get here

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5 months ago

One of the best videos I've seen about this subject so far. Clear, follows a very logical train of thought, and so well explained that I feel confident in sending this to my friends no matter where they are in the political spectrum. Thank you so much. Definitely subscribed

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5 months ago (edited)

Incredible video and great work. Could pick a few holes in it, (ie. regarding creation of content: people will always seek out honesty, humanness and relate-ability, even subconsciously; which AI can possibly mimic but not actually convey) but all in all, this message deserves more listeners. That will come tho, when mainstream awareness kicks in. PS - Note the choking up moment as a good example (sorry to diminish this moment) AI can possibly never strike a human cord like this because we can relate to its authenticity, differently, through empathy or compassion.

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5 months ago

I cant imagine how "they" were able to treat a genius like you not fairly at your job. Although I feel everything happens for good, your channel is one of the 2-3 channels I regularly check on youtube. Great work.

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3 months ago

Dude, this is great! I’m with you… we a new moral - economic framework to deal with all we’ve going through and we need more people with your mindset. Thanks for putting this out!

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7 months ago

just a few days before seeing this video i talked about this with my mother and used exactly this phrasing, that people should be considered to generatre value by the pure fact of existence. Funny to see that reflected here. I couldnt agree more we are producing so much wealth it is time see to it that all people can have a decent life without conditions

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6 months ago

Couldn't agree more! You've neatly synthesized my own feelings on all of this, and now I have a name for it! (and names are powerful)

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7 months ago

this is amazing content. Please keep up the great job

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7 months ago

Great video! Yes please, I would like a video on reinforced learning with human feedback :)

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7 months ago

Hello David, I'd be interested in seeing what areas will be impacted in the near to immediate future. In the weeks after ChatGPT made waves, there were videos made describing going to websites that doled out copywriting jobs, and then also pointed to websites such as Chat ai that would write the copy for those freelance copywriting jobs. I would imagine that the payout for those copywriting jobs would be dropping overnight. What jobs will be the first to be hit in the coming months, and then in the next year to two years? And what new categories of jobs (if one is to dream) might be springing up. And could this content be aimed at people who are either looking for work, or are thinking about changing career directions to something with more security.

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6 months ago

I think your intro about taking out adv is one of the most responsible, respectful and honest things I've heard lately. Apreciate that.

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6 months ago

Have you heard about Self-Determination Theory (SDT)? It describes self-determination, social acceptance and competence as three basic human needs, that also balance out nicely our goal seeking behavior between doing what we like, doing what others like and being good at what we do. Might also work for AI.

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7 months ago

Great video. Thank you for the effort put in.

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3 months ago (edited)

All of this makes total sense and I fully agree with everything you've said. Unfortunately, the egg-heads that govern us have zero understanding of these issues and are caught in a tight net of individualism, tribalism and corruption (not to mention religion), so I don't expect much from them. I mean, the world WITHOUT ai was already a hot mess that didn't work for a large percentage of the population.

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7 months ago

Not what I expected based on the video title. Enjoyed it. Looks like you have a new calling. Good luck as a content creator. I wonder though if the content creator career is not a fad. Maybe combining it with something traditional will be more stable. Guest speaker, book author, coach or teacher, in person if possible comes to mind. Anyway, I liked the Be Kind signoff.

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4 months ago (edited)

Really good background reading for this is “Poverty, by America” by Matthew Desmond. A big takeaway is that the poor vastly underutilize government handouts, whereas the middle class gets more in tax breaks than they pay in taxes, and never miss a chance to take advantage of a government handout. There’s a lot of propaganda at work that keeps us distracted by pitting us against each other.

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7 months ago

Incredible video my friend, I'm starting an YouTube channel in Brazil, the focus isn't about just AI, but frequently I will talk about it. Your video gave me chills, I started studying AI and realizing these problems we are having and will have, the thing that most hit me was about the work force that can be automated, I had my own statistics about, and it was below 50% (between 40% to 50%) this is really alarming, if we don't have jobs, how money will circulate in the economy? How can you buy something if you don't have enough even to eat? How companies will profit if there's less and less money circulating? Capitalism is going to shoot his own foot with AI, not that I'm a "primitivist" or something like that , AI is the future, but this kind of step for humanity is going to be problematic if we don't take care. Thanks for the video, for now on I will be watching your content.

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7 months ago

What a great video! Thanks David! But can you please fix the scratching cut offs in the audio for the next ones? It was pretty jarring sometimes.

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5 months ago

It's insane how much has changed since this video.

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4 hours ago

A fantastic video! Thanks for your hard work!

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7 months ago (edited)

Excellent video! Very well explained. My question is: How do you avoid too much centralized power when the government is effectively controlling the finances of over half the population and extensively taxing the other half to make it possible to do so? The balance between individual liberty and beurocratic tyranny becomes incredibly difficult to find..

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7 months ago

35:00 I agree with your perspective on earning just enough for a comfortable lifestyle and having a safety net for unexpected expenses. My wife and I have also adopted this mindset. However, currently, I am deviating from this principle as I am worried about the future, as I believe advanced technology like ChatGPT is already able to perform my job better than I can. Therefore, I am currently striving to earn as much money as possible in an effort to prepare for the future.

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7 months ago (edited)

very thought provoking, thank you!

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4 months ago

I say this jokingly, but it fits with what you mentioned about Nihilism. Remember the German Nihilists in the film The Big Lebowski? They claimed to believe in nothing, to care about nothing, but the single thing that motivates all their actions throughout the movie is a criminal get-rich-quick scheme that involves mutilating one of the conspirators. As you suggested, it seems that a childish self-indulgence can sit at the core of Nihilism, one that's often soothed by the instant gratification money can bring.

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7 months ago

Because after 2000, all the profit from the workers' productivity—wait for it—went to the CEOs and to the stock market, not to the workers via larger salaries. During the pandemic, folks were able to really see and digest this (and many other things, George Floyd, Metoo, WHF vs RTO, etc.), and many have left the workforce.

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4 months ago

Love the postnihilism, but I think I’m a postnihilistic cynic. Everyone is valuable, but in the aggregate we seem to have pulled off the amazing trick of being less than the sum of our parts. This is of course because the exploiters have been allowed to hit way above their weight. But you do give me hope. I too, especially as I get older, can get choked up over demonstrations of a potentially kinder and gentler world. It must mean something that doing a good deed makes us feel so good. This must be an indicator of evolutionary fitness value, which we ignore at our peril. Wonderful video David!

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7 months ago

I have a question, if I want to train an open-source pre trained model (like BLOOM) on a corpus of data, how do I do it?

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7 months ago

This was an excellent video. Thanks for sharing.

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7 months ago

Hey Dave, thanks for making the video. Do you know if we are able to take the fine-tuned model we create and embed it on the frontend of a site, to make a niche-specific name generator, for example, for users to use - or can that only be done with an OpenAI standard model, such as Davinci-003? (I remember you mentioned in one of your vids that individual models are not able to be shared - is my example what was meant by that?)

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1 month ago

As usual, fantastic content. You are one smart MF. The broad breadth of your knowledge base, the brevity of your idea articulation and the clarity of your premises and conclusions should be considered a gold standard in presentation. You also have good speaking cadence. 2 problems however. One, I have a bone to pick with your philosophy professor. Nietzche got Nihilism from Schopenhauer not the Russians lol. I don't think he ever read a single Russian writer in his entire life. Secondly, the old drivel about working during the pandemic for bourgeoisie greed was nonsense then and its nonsense now. 2 million deaths with the majority having significant comorbidities is not a lot in a nation of 333,000,000 people. I know people think you're a sociopath if you point that out but it's objective reality, not feelings. That many people die every few years from heart disease and car accidents and nobody printed more money than we did in both world wars combined adjusted for inflation for that. The people who wined like babies and wanted to stay home were middle class professionals who were very unlikely to die if they contracted Covid. In fact, thanks to John Hopkins University meta data we now know that staying did essentially nothing in the grand scheme of things as the vast majority of covid cases were transmitted by people to other people who lived in the same house regardless of the level of lock downs in each state. So now we have the worst inflation crisis our nation has ever seen and all that loneliness and depression you correctly pointed out...is now significantly worse than it was in 2019.... Not because of capitalism but because of a shutdown that was championed by people on the left and far left, often in the name of "fuck capitalism". How ironic...

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7 months ago

Thanks David! Unfortunately the video's audio contains breaks&clicks. I don't know the reasons, but I suspect is not the mic. Maybe the video recording sw (see your pc windows status)?

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3 months ago (edited)

Maybe in farming, things could be decentralised with the aid of new technologies, provided authorities allow micro producers to connect to markets.

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5 months ago (edited)

I don’t necessarily agree with absolutely everything you say, but I like your videos and they make me think. Thank you for making them. As an example, I’m not convinced that your principles for AI alignment are necessarily the best or perfect; they’re not a bad start but they seem imperfect to me. For example, specifying what you mean more accurately. So when you say increase prosperity, perhaps you should instead say, “increase both collective and individual prosperity for all people”. The reason to include individual is so that we don’t take actions that greatly sacrifice some individual to make everyone else a tiny bit more prosperous. Additionally, something should be said about preserving the things that humans value; so don’t increase prosperity at the cost of completely destroying the environment for example. Also something about achieving a balance between the disparate goals so that no single goal comes to dominate the others. Also maybe a “interpret these commands as we would want you to interpret them”. You don’t want a situation where the ASI decides that it gets the most reward by maximizing happiness while sacrificing everything else and so decides to destructively scan and upload all of our brains and then perform the virtual equivalent of placing electrodes into the pleasure centers of all of our brain. As an aside, is it just me or is there a lot of “popping” in the audio of this particular video? I don’t know if it’s just my phone or whatever or if it’s the video itself. I don’t remember the other videos of yours having that issue.

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7 months ago

7:51 actually it would be very good if you would do some kind of video on this topic. For example summarising those approaches and giving real life example of applying and comparing this to just brain in the jar approach

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2 months ago

Awesome Rec with David Harvey. Big fan of his work as well as the other Democracy at Work crew.

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7 months ago

Really good presentation watched it all the way, just be aware of sound clipping and sound defects. I was thinking it was my headphones, but it was the audio.

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7 months ago

As far as Roman grain doles are concnered, I am not sure if that was done so much out of charity or more because hungry people tend to overthrow their rulers.

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6 months ago

33:09 that why we need a mental shift on the way we approach and define jobs or working and the values we give to some type of job.

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7 months ago

The red mars / blue mars / green mars sci-fi novels had some interesting commentary where it looked at the progression of the feudal system through to capitalism and how, when the new system was introduced, it kept a little bit of the previous system but introduced some new parts. Just mentioning this re: the closing comments of this video that we need a new moral system.

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6 months ago

Can you please make a video on using LLM's to answer questions on RDF/XML formatted knowledge graphs like the Arts and Architecture thesaurus?

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6 months ago

THANKS FOR THIS HIGHLY VALUABLE INFORMATION!!!!

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7 months ago

We should talk about demographics too.. human touch for care and family will be needed and should be rewarded in grain ;)

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3 months ago

Funny, I opened the comments solely to say this very thing. Now I'm doubly convinced that I'm on board with this man.

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2 months ago

As an officially categorized "senior citizen" I'm willing to spend a couple of thousand dollars for a robot nanny. The acid test is that it can clean my toilets, make my bed, clean my house and mow my lawn as effectively as I can.

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7 months ago

I had a talk in my family and we all agree that ai will have a significant role in our lives. But that depends on to which generation you belong. There are different implications. Our fear is that the wealth profits and efficiency gains will not be distributed to all human Kind fairly. There will be a big cohort of losers and a tiny tiny fraction of man kind who gets all. Do I or my kids want to live in that future? What can we do about that?

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7 months ago

Great video. As for your "we all deserve to feel good" idea, something to consider is that no successful wisdom tradition that has stood the test of time(religions, stoicism) has recommended us to chase feeling good, with the most trivial explanation for that rationale being how easy it is to spiral into hedonism. In other words, we need to be aware of how counterintuitive the enterprise of feeling good really is and approach it with deep humility and look for lessons all throughout history as we move forward.

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4 months ago

Short term it’s going to be really rough for a lot of people. Lots of political and cultural upheaval. Long term universal basic income or some derivative and all human labor is optional. Human immortality will be a thing.

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3 months ago

I want to go to school for comp sci. Seems like a risky investment at this point

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6 months ago

47:18 I relate totally to that one, that one of the reason I quite my previous job!

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7 months ago

Wow, great Video David. It went beyond AI and into its future implications and questioned it all again, "Why am I here"? A lot to think about and do.... but hurry up and do so!

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7 months ago (edited)

Hi David, great video! The book you mentioned - is it "Do Nothing" by Celeste Headlee or "Do Nothing" by Damian Mark Smyth or "Do Nothing" by Keith Murningham?

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7 months ago

Nietzsche was against nihilism, worth pointing out. His enemies called him a nihilist

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7 months ago

I just found this channel. Nice videos.

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6 months ago (edited)

39:24 we have even added it in the definition of the metrics for happiness, who radically changed the top tier of happiest country or cultures

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5 months ago

Just...thank you. And...yes, You are, I just felt it

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7 months ago

Never imagined watching a video about AI, economy and history would make me cry :D

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7 months ago

"We" are not the problem. "We" are not going to change society by admitting that "we" need to think positive and see the value in eachother. The rules of the game are set by the richest most powerful people, and the game that "we" are forced to play is working to ensure that they get the most and "we" get the least. There is no point discussing a change in cultural perspectives without discussing how to limit the wealth and power of those that are in control so that "we" have a chance at changing the game. Unfortunately, I believe that AI is going to change society far faster than "we" can break the stranglehold that the powerful few has on rigging the game, which just means that AI will be put to work feeding more power and wealth to those in control. If you want AI to help the people, then we need to focus at least some effort on creating a large scale comprehensive predictive model of society, so that we can test change scenarios and predict how society will evolve. Thinking about changing tax rates or introducing UBI ? - We need to be able to model how that will play out with enough fidelity that we can provide a roadmap for change that can be used to try to counter the deafening chorus of angry voices that will shout down even the slightest suggestion of changing the rules to help the people.

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4 months ago

I think this technological revolution is producing abundance, but it is all going to the rich. I.e. corporations all reporting record profits, vastly overpaid CEOs, the rich reporting huge increase in net worth, while workers haven’t really seen an inflation-adjusted increase in their income in decades. As usual, this is an issue of distribution of power, privilege and wealth. Perhaps instead of growth, we can focus on increase in quality and efficiency in our economy, and increasing equality in our society. If all else fails, eat the rich… they’re just chock full of vitamins. Ah, I think David is now going in this direction, at about 32:00. Good man!

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3 months ago (edited)

So i was impressed by chatgpt 4, but it still makes math and basic physics mistakes. Plus, i got it to go into a loop where it kept repeating an error. . It can't be trusted absolutely.

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7 months ago

Bravo! Excellent video

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7 months ago

I appreciate your videos and this analysis, but I think in the last slides you gave in to the temptation of providing an "easy explanation" with redistribution, which in my opinion doesn't explain why we all have this feeling that the great technological progress hasn't brought the era of abundance we would expect. I will try to provide another explanation: the exceptional growth of well-being has been captured mostly by a single progress: having a huge class of people, the elderly, who live without working (I want to clarify that in no way do I want to suggest that the elderly are "useless" or "harmful"). If in the charts you introduce the proportion of people who have stopped working, you can see that the hours of work per capita have actually dropped a lot, simply this happens in an asynchronous way, concentrating all the work before and zeroing it after. Technological progress has almost always turned into economic goods or services that are free for everyone, the reason why having Google and Facebook doesn't make us live so well is not because the profits of Google and Facebook are not distributed. The solution to this is not more redistribution (in Europe the tax is at 50% but the situation is not better), but more technological progress.

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1 month ago

There is no way to quantify carrying capacity at the same time, we have a system that needs constant consumption, the only kind of number one may get are those of how long can we burn through some resources instead of how much do we actually need.

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6 months ago (edited)

I agree with you but it won't work in the current environment. Why ? It require people who care about society, democracy, family and human values. All those "values" are currently under attack by neo-feudalists who meet each year in Davos or in one of those WEF conferences, so called 1% crowd. They want companies to replace governments and cut freedoms we enjoy only so they can survive and thrive like some giant parasites. If you look at society right now you will observe highest ever political polarization, not just in US but in the whole world. This is the result of decades of gov. corruption, crony capitalism (I am libertarian so don't call me socialist or whatever) and completely broken education system which is now overrun by ultra radical Marxists (just go to any university and see what rubbish they teach). There is no way out of it. We just need to accept what we have and try to sail through it while trying to self-improve. Is there any other option ? I think not. By the way, I am also part of Great Resignation. Well not fully, but I switched to part-time after realizing my free time is the most precious thing I have.

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6 months ago

18:32 but the economy growth is not equally redistributed partially because of corporate growth and other societal issues. That the part economist don’t necessarily take in consideration (intentionally or not) in they conclusion

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7 months ago

Wait, Roe vs wade is a step backwards but then you say "all like is intrinsically valuable" -- If all life is valuable, then the question comes down to when you believe life started.

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1 month ago

I watched the entire episode but I didn't get a simple straightforward answer for how an accountant would reinvent before the job gets abolished by AI..

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4 months ago

The truth of Nihilism is that everything is equally important on a cosmic scale, but that should have no bearing on how you value things for yourself. Also Freidrich's sister was a nazi who took all his work after his death and rewrote it to support the ideology of her personal obsession, Adolf Hitler. That was a thing that copyright law let people do at the time.

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2 months ago

Very interesting video. Thanks

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@SimplyElectronicsOfficial

7 months ago

The A.I revolution has the potential to significantly increase the abundance of resources and labor in the economy, as machines and A.I take on a greater role in production, increasing economic output/GDP by orders of magnitude. However, this also means that human labor may become less necessary, which is why the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is important. With A.I and machines doing much of the work, economic growth may not be as dependent on population growth. If this works out, Humans may be in for a real treat where the economy can function purely off of A.I economic output and we can live in a world where we can have anything and do anything we want without the need to work if we so choose. And I don't think it's too far off!

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4 months ago

I think any type or moral or philosophical shift will not occur in the US until a traumatizing event happens, such as 15-25% unemployment. That’s enough where the average person is effected or multiple people someone is close to. Imagine is half of the middle class was put out of work, they would go from happy capitalists to socialists in a very short period of time IF the situation was hopeless. Everyone has a breaking point and nothing will really change until the average person meets that breaking point and cannot make ends meet. Do you think that if this were to happen that the collective “good” in us would prevail? We’re heading into some uncertain times.

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5 months ago

One thousand likes. Great message.

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7 months ago

I'd like to watch the video rather than just listen to the audio on these but I also like it when my eyes aren't melting out of my skull. Maybe time to get some prescription sunglasses I just can't deal with pure white backgrounds for long periods ><

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7 months ago

22:09 Let's put a time reference here, just if anyone would like to watch this important part of the video ;)