Comment by HEmanZ
5 hours ago
I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive.
The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
Yes. To sledgehammer it home, it's not desire for things that makes consumption happen. You need money. And if bots are doing the work, where's the money coming from?
The argument implies that there's some kind of balance point in there. But I'll bet it's not one where the general populace is living remotely well.
The window of uncertainty is absolutely massive. I could also equally see a world that looks mostly like ours today because it becomes illegal to use sufficiently intelligent AI (Mythos is already generating guardedness, and it’s not smart enough to replace capable humans). Eg if ai that is sufficiently intelligent to truly replace humans is as dangerous as an atom bomb (or chemical weapon, or even a machine gun) then it could just be illegal to use except for use by the governments of the world.
Or high intelligence, enough to replace all humans, becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of energy and data compared to humans that we maintain a kind of biological advantage on a large category of economically valuable tasks.
Or training sufficiently advanced ai to replace us requires judgements and training data that is essentially beyond us (eg if we can’t figure out what the right answer is, how can we train or judge an AI)
No one has any real idea what is going to happen. What we need tho is a collective promise, through our democracies and communities and governments, that we will make it right. Institutions and laws that make sure the benefits are distributed broadly, that we stay safe, that we have a better world because of it. If people get that I think everyone will be mostly excited by ai, not opposed.
People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh
> People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh
You're talking to a group who has seen a comment similar to yours every day of the week for two years.
That also means that they have already seen the rebuttals. So have you, too, maybe?
That’s what the growing hoards of permanently unemployable people will do, sit around and google jevons paradox and the lump of labor fallacy and ponder whether economists have ever been wrong in the past about such matters, and whether AGI is really all that different from the steam engine anyway. Tech sector is just tech, like it’s always been.
I think you have no idea what Jevons Paradox is if you think it is a retort to what I just said.