Comment by slg
10 hours ago
>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.
What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness?
I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
> The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare.
Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.
Yet, that 80s CEO, practically a peasant by modern standards of pay, had the option to cross the Atlantic in a Mach 2 supersonic airliner. If that's not the most obvious demonstration of technological prowess, I don't know what is. In contrast, the F-35, believed to be the world's most advanced fighter jet today, has a top speed of Mach 1.6
Today's CEOs get a gold-plated sky bus.
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> Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s
CEO pay isn’t a good proxy for “captains of industry.” What you want to look at is the labor versus capital share of income. That’s been very stable since the 1960s: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/labor-share-net-income-within....
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Tech isn't special. The value of pretty much all productivity improvements since ~1979 have been captured either via the stock market (97% owned by the top 10% in wealth) or land rents.
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You could say that about any big tech product and yet we've all seen power and wealth become concentrated on an incredible scale since the 60s. The immense resources needed to train frontier models gives the few companies that can manage it more of a moat than most tech products. So empirically I expect that we'll see the current wealth hording keep going at at least the same rate.
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing.
Isn't that what happened? There was enough competition among computing companies that they weren't able to completely monopolize all the productivity improvements, but the financial benefits were mostly captured by the capital class in one way or another.[1]
TVs might be cheaper today and we all like watching Netflix, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
[1] - https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
>I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
Really? Even with all the new avenues of education and communication that they opened up? You think the positives and negatives balance out to close to zero?
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>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense.
Not only is that exactly what happened, they weren't satisfied with accumulating most of the wealth produced by it, they've also taken it upon themselves to take over democracy and media and act like a state within a state. You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)
People who used to have good jobs can now drive for Doordash and what the last wave of digitalization did over 30 years the AI gurus now promise to do in 10 again, and not just to the working class. The only reason to be optimistic is that they're snake oil salesmen.
> You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)
Having a college degree was a much more selective measure in 1970 (about 10% of the population) than today (almost 40%). Consider a large law firm. In 1970, the only 4-year degree holders would have been the attorneys. A lot of work would have been done by well-compensated paralegals with high school diplomas. Today, everyone down to the receptionist will have a degree and the non-degree holders would basically be the maintenance and cafeteria staff.
So using your math, the income of non-college workers at the law firm could be stagnant from 1970 to today, even if the income of each specific position had increased significantly.
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The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.
What regulations do you feel protected common folk from capitalism during the development of computing, and how have they weakened?
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> The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
No company in the 1990s ever achieved as much market power as IBM did in the 1960s-1980s. IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.
Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
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I mean. From a financial PoV that's exactly what happened
Did they, though? Intel, IBM, DEC and Honeywell were big names, but they're not FAANG.
Other than Nintendo, how many games companies today were around back then?
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I'm legit pretty excited about applying AI to accelerate biological and medical discovery.
It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.
How much of American society will get to share in the benefits of those new biological and medical discoveries when we don't have any health insurance because we lost our jobs to AI?
An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
At least one data point in favor of this view is the middling success of the AI rollout so far. Of course it’s eclipsed in the short run by the number of jobs cut to fund AI rollouts.
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most of the big players are advertising giants. How is advertising worth anything if people don't have money to buy goods and services?
Hell, you don't even need to have lost your job. Health insurance will just deny claims or call them as elective and not necessary type bullshit. Insurance is already using AI to deny claims, so yet again, how is it helping society and not the corps?
The problem is, at least in theory, that it entirely changes the calculus of how advancements take place. In the past, when the pace of advancement was stronger the primary factor was the cultivation of a culture that valued prestige and knowledge over monetary gains. It didn't really matter how much money you threw at a problem because the bulk of the people responsible for advancements weren't interested in obscene wealth. Obviously those people were well compensated but any number of entities could provide that compensation. It was about bringing prestige to your lab / school / town or even country.
If AI becomes a primary catalyst for advancement it further moves the needle in the monetary direction.
That redfines advancement to mean something different than what is beneficial to society to be what is monetarily best for the owners of said advancment.
When exactly in history was this utopian age?
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I don’t understand this logic, what would LLMs do here? Is thinking the bottleneck, or money to go and test all the ideas people have already thought of? Are we really missing the cure for cancer because we just haven’t thought about it enough and letting an LLM churn on all the data will figure it out? All the research is probably in its training set already, so why hasn’t it come up with the cure?
Yes, that's very nice. But that's very different models from LLMs and slop image generators. AI as a term has been butchered beyond recognition; when mentioning the current harm of AI investor hype and job automation, people are talking about generative models using LLMs or prompt based input, which have seen little to no use in "accelerate biological and medical discovery"
Sure, the transformer is great for making larger neural networks with better learning potential, which are improving protein folding models a fair bit. But do we need the combined budget of the Apollo program or interstate highway system (adjusted for inflation) per year, to develop better molecular simulation models? (no, the most advanced ones run on mundane hardware and trained just fine on pre 2020 infrastructure).
So while it's true that; "AI" ((primarily) Neural network based deep learning techniques) are wonderful tools to make society better; slop generators absorbing the entire energy budget of a few small nations to generate infinite propaganda, linked-in posts and shrimp Jesus is only tangentially helping in that goal while destabilization civilization in the process.
I don't think that is realistic. But, it can write your child's essay for them.
But someone has to be able to buy the results, right?
It feels like at some point we're going to need to re-evaluate the concept of intellectual property. I don't know how to bring about this conversation in a way that broader society will actually engage with it, but it really feels like software and digital assets are just too fundamentally different from the things we've been selling and buying for most of human history. Even if you think about a printed book, sure we've been defending peoples' rights to restrict reprinting of their ideas for a long time, but that came alongside broad support for institutions like libraries.
We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain.
It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming.
And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home.
We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.
I fear that at this rate the oligarchs will use medical breakthroughs to keep us alive and laboring against our and nature’s will like what industrial farming has done to chickens and other livestock
I worry that you're right, although they might change what "alive" means
https://www.science.org/content/article/not-alive-not-dead-d...
Superhuman abilities for the wealthy tech oligarchs, economic indentured servitude and slums for the rest of us.
Tens of millions of people in the US alone cannot obtain basic healthcare today, how would this outcome change for them because AI solved it? The only solid paths are regulation or prying the machine from the hands of those who hold it. GLP-1s are only widely available globally affordably because the patent expired, for example.
Indentured servitude implies they still need us for something once they have superhuman robots doing their bidding.
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Does accelerating biological and medical discovery require over a trillion dollars of capital to be misallocated while Americans do not have medicare for all or universal childcare?
Who is exactly going to benefit here because Americans have been given a rotten deal by neoliberalism for the last 40 years.
What are jobs for?
Should we have them?
Should they be mandatory?
What does it mean to have to work to eat, is this a good setup?
Does everyone have to work?
Should they?
Who do you think will be answering these questions in a future in which these AI companies visions become a reality? Because they already have a huge influence on society and that will only increase as the tech improves.
The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
> Who do you think will be answering these questions
Yes, this is the conversation we should probably be having! Thoughts?
Given that this is what is happening, given that we aren't going to stop physics, getting a handle on this indeed seems like one of the more important things we can do. If it will have any chance of working at all. If we don't get paperclipped.
But this is at least a much ... (forgive me) less wrong conversation to have compared to the one where everybody assumes we've already lost.
What do you think we should do? What powers do we still have where we is general humans who just want a pretty good life?
What do we do about the inherent centralization that big models seem to require, but how do we trade that off at the same time from everybody being able to synthesize the next Covid by asking their cell phone a question? What does it mean when most if not all white collar work actually can be automated?
Do we all end up playing VCs in our underwear swiping left/right on ideas our agents have to make money? Are we still competing in the market with the AIs?
Is there a class war? Is there some other weird thing? I don't know but man ... I sure would like to have those conversations.
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> The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
Or they all figure out how to just bugger off to some Elysium-like stronghold, isolating themselves from and leaving the rest of society economically irrelevant.
At a guess, one of the unspoken reasons why there is so much interest in robot armi^H^H^H^H factory automation.
These are the right questions to ask. I think about stuff like this often, and just as often people I discuss this with think I'm off my rocker. I, on the other hand, think some can't see past what they have been programmed to see. It's sad really, our lives are finite and much is wasted on a less than optimal layout.
I'd answer: No, we should not have to work to eat, they should not be mandatory, and no not everyone has to work.
But those problems need solved first before completely upending the current system. The system does need changed, but that change must happen before mass unemployment, not after the fact.
The system won't change until there is massive chaos and destruction. Why would it otherwise? The people with the means to gently and voluntarily change things are living like gods. They have no incentive to help. In fact, a sick and unhealthy society keeps competitors weak. No, I'm afraid to say there will be no fixing things.
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> we should not have to work to eat
It takes time and effort and resources to produce the food you eat. If you aren't expending that time and effort and resources yourself, either to produce the food, or to produce something you can trade for it (or trade for money you use to buy it), who will?
If the answer is "other people", why should other people have to work to produce the food you eat while you don't?
If the answer is "machines", then it takes time and effort and resources to produce the machines, and we're right back to the same question.
There are no other answers.
There is no magical way to let people eat (much less have all the other things besides food, clothing and shelter that we all want to make our lives richer, such as the medium in which we're having this conversation) without work being done. Ignoring that fact of life is a recipe for disaster.
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How much do you trust the current US administration to guide us into a future where no one needs a job in order to get health care, food, shelter, etc?
Maybe figure out the answers to that before forcing everyone into an economy where they still need to work to make money, but any worthwhile jobs have been automated away.
The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?
Brother, I'm trying to. Any thoughts?
Also, what's a "worthwhile" job?
Have you read Player Piano?
Are brainjobs more important than musclejobs?
If we can automate musclejobs so people don't have to die in the heat and we can automate brainjobs so people don't have to lose their sanity in offices, wouldn't that be a better world?
Note: it probably won't be, because of what I like to call the "Enterprise High" effect, but here we are. Basically once the only thing people have to compete over is status, shit gets nasty quicklike, think PG's high school essay but for everything and forever. Everything goes into rivalrous goods like who's sleeping with who.
Star Trek as soap opera where all their needs are met and the only concern is purely social.
But this is probably better than a world where people don't actually have material needs met?
I legit don't actually know. Would love to figure it out though, what do you think!
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No, but what are the odds of the robust welfare state that would be required to actually enable some sort of post-work society taking shape here in America? I'd truly like to be optimistic but, politically we have been moving in the opposite direction ever since the end of the New Deal, and the oligarchs who control the technologies are not exactly benevolent.
No. But capitalism requires them. I'm down to end capitalism, but maybe we should figure that out before we destroy the thing that kinda-sorta made it work?
Most optimistic outcome: Hardware & software advances keep pace; Open weights & locally runnable models keep pace with frontier (at least the open weights part seems to hold), making AI advances widely available to anyone; Individual productivity skyrockets, having knock-on effects in most industries, slowly allowing less and less people to do the work required to maintain the basic needs of our civilization(s); UBI utopia achieved.
Do I think that's likely? No, but mostly because it would require parallel uprising of the global working class, which doesn't seem to materialize.
If they're right:
* Use AI to eliminate all white collar jobs.
* Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs.
* Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class.
The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine).
I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.
Well the most optimistic outcome is that our democratically elected representatives start acting in the interests of all they represent, not just those with a lot of money.
Ok, you didn’t need to laugh that hard.
One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models.
That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications.
The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.
Now you are fired by a computer not a completely disinterested person! Progress.