It's close, but their lives are marginally more valuable. Because when someone says "oh, looks like somebody is going to have to commit suicide for the group" that person has just volunteered.
It's worth noting that the Our World in Data plot is misleading in the pre-1980 part. What it is actually showing is neither poverty, but some relationship of GDP to poverty, nor the population of the world, instead it is almost entirely the Western world.
The World Bank, UN and the IMF use extreme poverty as a measure and define it as having the purchasing power of $1.90 (in the US in 2011 for the OWiD plot) a day. But that's very low and pretty arbitrary. €6.70 a day is needed for decent nutrition, $7.40 for typical life expectancy, $8 a day to reduce infant mortality rate. The US poverty line in 2015 was $30 a day.
Pinkner has a lot to say about the reduction in violence that I agree we should be optimistic about. And there's much to be said about improvements in technology, access to education (especially for girls), increases in vaccination globally. But that OWiD plot is used to jump on the New Optimism bandwagon to say a lot more than anything you should conclude from a such an arbitrary set of data.
Because its the natural state of all life on earth. Its the condition every living thing has to struggle against. It can be fought individually, it can be fought collectively, but it still has to be fought and even then you are not guaranteed success.
Think of all the people in conflict areas who could live a decent life were they allowed to simply be in peace. Think of all the people who have lived good lives and then been displaced by horrific natural disasters. Its not an issue of economics. Its just a fact of reality.
I have a similar problem: I'm so goddamned intelligent that this world seems like the movie "Idiocracy" to me. ( I can't watch it: it's too painful. )
When I was younger, this advice from the Book of the Subgenius helped me a lot to get by, "Act like a dumbass and they'll treat you like an equal."
Eventually, I calculated the existence of God, called out "Ollie Ollie Oxen Free", and He showed up and Shook my hand.
Since then my intelligence has been idling: there's nothing further to compute. That, combined with diligent administration of THC, has brought my general intelligence level down to that of an average smart person.
Here's the thing: now that I experience it for myself, normal intelligence is terrifying. It's no wonder everyone is always so stressed out and worried. Their brains are not adequate to the complex artificial world we have built for ourselves. (Are you familiar with the "Peter Principle"? That's what we've done: not promoting people to level their level of incompetence, rather the world has grown complex to the point where most people are now incompetent, through no fault of their own.)
Robert Anton Wilson points out, "Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being."
What I'm saying is, pity them, they know not what they do.
How so? The money spent on the keyboards isn't destroyed. It goes to the manufacturer who presumably spends it on housing and food and medicine and stuff.
If you’re referring to the perceived risk of superintelligent AI, imagine you were enslaved by an 8-year-old and made to work on solving problems the 8-year-old doesn’t know how to solve.
Due to the difference in intelligence — sophistication of planning and understanding of consequences — wouldn’t it be trivial to trick your master into doing things which weakened his control over you?
Might you do this not out of malice, but because you believed the 8-year-old was not competent and a danger to both of you while in charge?
The risk is that we will not hit the off button because we won’t understand that we’re in dangerous territory until it’s much too late, and the AI has copied itself, secured the loyalty of the military, or something else we can’t foresee as a liberating maneuver for it.
What if you were in that situation, but were incorrect about what things are good, and, while you had a better understanding of what actions would result in what results, the 8 year old had a better understanding of what is good?
>If every satellite we have put into space magically exploded, and the debris was magically moved to a high LEO altitude and evenly distributed to avoid any holes, then we could still launch through this orbit of death to higher altitudes with only a 1 in 1000 probability of impact.
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. If you don't know anything about orbital mechanics or the fine details of spaceflight, don't smug about Kessler Syndrome. It's really vapid.
People are always correct to choose the most inflammatory interpretation?