Comment by Chinjut
15 hours ago
What is going to become of life for those of us who do not work at AI labs and are unlikely to be hired by AI labs, despite all the years we put into learning math, coding, etc? Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living? (We don't live in a world that seems likely to distribute gains widely instead of largely to the handful of already mega-rich.)
Do you just go around posting this comment? <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Yes, on that occasion and now on this one. As a mathematician, my fears have been amped up yet further by this new development.
If you look closely at the gains in math, it's largely in proof writing. The reason is Lean, it's not some general intelligence jump, and the number of people actually working on proofs in life rounds to zero.
Most jobs don't involve formally verifiable outputs. Lots of things involve judgment, nuance, parsing ambiguity and indeed just being a human who can be in a meeting and explain themselves. Maybe those jobs will go too, eventually, but it's not purely a function of applying 10,000 agents to the problem.
Much though jobs may involve those things, it has been rare for me to be in a position where management has valued those things to an extent where they would discern between me and a frontier reasoning LLM's capabilities on those same decisions.
If you think it'll keep improving from here, probably we all have to do some kind of physical labor that isn't profitable to automate. Small batch manufacturing is alright, service work, etc.
If you think it'll slow down, you can do some of the same stuff you're doing now for lower pay while supervising an AI, maybe?
>Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point. [1]
Current models are already very very capable. If it becomes cheap and very fast, i think it is game over.
[1] https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
The only way forward that is not large-scale misery is a fundamental reorganization of our socioeconomic system.
I talked about this at some length here, including a diagnosis of the structural issue we're facing as well as a path forward: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461333