Comment by gWPVhyxPHqvk
7 hours ago
> I think that will open up a vacuum in society for people to build on top of what LLMs will do (and already are doing).
If an AI can replace me on the mental aspects of work, and robotics are on their way to replacing humanity on the physical aspects of work... then what's left? When there was agrarian societies, there were writers, priests, bankers, merchants, and laborers before and after - I really don't think things were that unclear even at the time. Now that we have machines that are close to exceeding humans in every way, what good are humans?
The question is how long before machines can exceed humans in every way and how long will it take before legal and cultural restrictions allow this to happen. It still could be a long time away and jobs will probably increase in the short/medium term as AI unlocks more what humans can do at a rate faster than AI can automate away.
But lets consider what that end state could look like when machines exceed humans in everyway, what good are humans?
One possibility which I don't particularly enjoy is humans will be good for status games, art, creativity, story telling, IRL experiences, everything that involves human to human interaction and connection with other humans. If AI can supply everything in abundance than like rare cards there is only so many humans in the planet at any particular time then human's value increases. I really do believe connections with other humans will have a premium. As a nerd who is borderline anti-social, non artistic, creative, etc this does not appeal at all to me and properly to many others who read HN as well. For the majority of other people with some adaption time I think they will be fine. They were fine adapting to hunters and gathers to agricultural society, they were fine adapting to agricultural society to industrial society, they were find adapting from industrial society to information society and they will will be fine adapting from information society to the social/creative economy. Some short term pain but overall most people will accept this reality quite readily. Those born into it will not even know what we talking about.
If a computer wins a chess game it doesn't enjoy winning nearly as much as a human would enjoy losing from another human. And that's just chess. Now extrapolate to everything else.
> Some short term pain but overall most people will accept this reality quite readily. Those born into it will not even know what we talking about.
How do you propose this brave new world of yours will work economically?
There is a huge amount of pending work in health research that is nowadays ignored because smart people have better paying jobs available.
Once many of those jobs get automated, I bet there will be many more people working in health research, which hopefully should lead to better health outcomes for society as a whole.
So when our lives will become so much emptier because we are leaving all intellectual and physical work to machines, at least on the way there we can reallocate all our greatest minds to improve healthcare, so we can turn 200 in our paradise where we don’t need to work or think?
This is hilariously true, and it's so strange that people don't think much about the fact that approximately zero people on planet earth are actually trying to cure diseases.
I never thought that 'Terminator' was very realistic in that it was the AI that triggered the apocalypse. I always thought it was far more realistic that those that possessed the keys to the AI and control of atomic weapons decided to solve the greenhouse problem in a different way. And to set their robots up to clean up the mess so they could reboot the planet with a few thousand lucky ones. The other option was to find a 'B Ark' and some planet to ship the rest of us off to but that takes a lot of effort.
That was of course a complete fantasy. Now let's see, who is in charge of the nukes these days...
> If an AI can replace me on the mental aspects of work, and robotics are on their way to replacing humanity on the physical aspects of work... then what's left?
At the risk of sounding new age, my answer to this is "emotional work".
What exactly that would mean in the equivalent of the post-agrarian society that LLMs might bring, I cannot know.
And who will pay you for this 'emotional work'?
I've struggled with this question as well, and this is why I reject the premise of the historical pattern of technology enabling us to "move up" to something else.
At the same time, I agree with the original comment as well. I don't think this necessarily leads to some doomsday scenario. Whatever happens it'll likely be better for us and imo we will merge with the AIs at some point, so it won't be a question of us vs them.
> we will merge with the AIs at some point
I actually see it more likely the opposite - a subset of humans will retreat into a (vastly smaller) human-first world, and AI will be of a separate world concerned with material/scientific/research concerns and appeases the masses who are still around.
We can already see this today in the form of upper class parents (like myself) who vastly restrict their kids screen time and ban social media. We may see AI-free societies that form, but supported by AI. The jobs and roles people play within that society may deal with services that really need to be done by a human, being a buffer from AI to the rest of this society, or just straight up fake.
I personally think this is close to a doomsday scenario - but it doesn't end with a big bang, but more of slow quiet death.
I figure both will happen. Some people will want to live naturally, some to merge. I sometimes think with the data centers in space discussion that it'll end up with AIs in space and the Earth as something like a nature reserve.
I think many people will be quite content not merging with AI and having AI do everything for them. Perhaps only a small subset of people will want to merge with AI. They may not be allowed to though, if majority of people fine not merging then they may ban those who want to merge.
The subset of people who will want to merge will be people who will not be content with having no control over their future. No ability to create new inventions, new discoveries, new ways of working. They will not be content with just having everything provided to them, playing the social games that will remain and think their environment is a prison.
What if merging with them doesn't make them better at anything, but worse? Would that be a concern?
Only if you have a zero-sum game mindset. I suppose it does make sense that AI-native intelligences are just smarter than hybrid AI-human entities (biologically enhanced or uploads) but that doesn't mean there needs to be conflict between the two. The universe is huge. :)
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I figure human merging would make things more interesting so you'd want to keep it a bit like how we try to preserve biodiversity now.
“Everything else”. Societies get to decide exactly how much is, can, or will be automated, what decisions must be left to humans and what role we will play.
My position is there is "nothing else" other than entertainment and elder/childcare. And even large portions of those can be automated. There is also zero chance that "society" is going to get to decide, either - we've already failed that test with social media and carbon dioxide.