Comment by wlesieutre
4 months ago
So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?
Saying “we can do the same work with less resource use” doesn’t mean resource consumption is reduced. You’ve just gone from humans using resources to humans using the same resources and doing less work, plus AI using more resources.
Resource consumption often goes up. It's a time vs energy tradeoff and it's not free.
Your question is a variant of what do we do with all those humans now that they don't have to walk miles to the well every day because we invented aqueducts? The point is that they didn't want to walk to the well but they had to (and in some places they still have to) and very few people want to work, even now and even us, but they have to.
We will see what happens this time when we won't have to walk to that well.
> So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?
Soon enough, we won't be able to avoid this question.
You put them to work doing more things than were possible in a month before.
The thing is, there are many interplaying dynamics here that are impossible to unravel. This is why I called it "napkin math", because figuring out the full ramifications of this change is a pretty large economic problem that nobody has figured out!
For instance, I think operating at this level of productivity is unsustainable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896066)
There are many more dynamics at play of course, but I think an equilibrium will be found purely because everyone is incentivized to find a solution (UBI?) that keeps both the elites and the plebes living long and prospering. I expect some turmoil, but luckily, the severe resource crunch of GPUs gives us time to figure things out.
What I gather from your analysis and gleeful exclamation marks is that I should start rioting now rather than wait.
Hah, interesting, I intended my exclamation marks come across as surprise or emphasis rather than glee!
If it helps better interpret my posts, these days my frame of mind is "We're living in very interesting times" in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
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Turn them into biogas to create more energy for DCs.