Comment by mahogany
2 days ago
The internet did not lead to a rapid diminishing of human economic value across the economy. Whether AI will kill us all is a distraction. Think more practically. Think about the future of economic value given a scenario where AI is capable of everything a human can do. Our entire society is built around economic value. Our individual survival and wellbeing is based on it. What happens when you are not needed by those who hold the resources?
I agree there will be economic disruption.
The industrial revolution produced economic disruption.
More recently I remember there were typing pools at my dad's work and there was serious concerns about what jobs women would do because personal computers meant they weren't needed.
Turns out in both cases people were blinded by biases around future work looking like current work.
Even in the industrial revolution there were vast swathes of work that were untouched by machines.
It is good to maintain some optimism that people will figure out what to do but there is a difference from rushing towards such a future and blindly assuming it will be good by default. Are there things you think we need to figure out to avoid a bad outcome?
> Interestingly I'd note that the two outcomes you listed (power concentration and loss of control) are dimensionally opposites!
One can imagine a world where both happen. For example, an arms race between two leading labs causes them to accumulate a majority of the world's compute and market share for intelligence, with the race dynamics at some point resulting in a catastrophic incident of a self-replicating botnet taking over a large part of the internet due to a rushed, reckless Hugging-Face style RL run.