Comment by Razengan
7 hours ago
I get bonked for saying this again and again, because people get annoyed with an oversimplified analogy or the use of whateverfallacy,
but can someone please try to set aside their knee-jerk reactions for a while to give a good reason:
WHY do humans NEED to understand the basics of something?
× You don't know how to farm — That doesn't prevent you from having food or cooking good meals.
× You don't know how to mine raw materials — That doesn't prevent you from using computers/phones made with aluminum, copper, glass etc.
× You don't know how to fell trees and shape lumber — That doesn't prevent you from sitting in that comfy chair.
× You don't know assembly language or how to write operating systems — That doesn't prevent you from using Windows or macOS or Linux.
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EVERYDAY you use hundreds of things made from THOUSANDS of technologies you don't understand, because other people already MASTERED them.
so YOU can go on to go do GREATER things.
(but you CAN still go do farming, mining, logging, writing your own OS, if you ENJOY it — nothing's stopping you — you just won't be as good as the technology that has been specialized for that over centuries, and almost certainly you won't be bringing anything new to those fields, and it'll take time away from doing other things.)
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Maybe we shouldn't be wasting time on "oshit how do we uninvent or slow down this new technology because it makes things easier than what we grew up on"
and focus more on "what other greater things can we move on to?"
There's a whole freakin universe out there and we haven't even stepped off our home planet yet.
Firstly I'd point out that the difference here is that all of those things you mentioned are things you could learn and the distinction would be that at least currently the proofs provided by AI are inscrutable. Although this will probably change.
The second thing is to just ask what is there left to do. What are these "greater things" that people can dedicate time to, when clearly even classically cerebral activities like mathematics can be automated away. The industrial revolution already wrecked physical production of goods and made artisan workers obsolete outside of extremely niche scenarios -- that's why we call things artisanal, after all -- but there was still mental work. But now, mental work is also experiencing the same thing, and it's not clear what one should do as a human anymore.
And some people seem outright gleeful about these developments, which can be seen even in this thread. What happens when humanity becomes obsolete? And what happens when the machines that cause this obsolescence are controlled by a tiny amount of people, who suddenly don't need the rest of us? I can only hope that this turns out well for us and that with the development of these machines, humanity will get better, but the omnipresent existential dread is giving me doubts.
> What are these "greater things" that people can dedicate time to, when clearly even classically cerebral activities like mathematics can be automated away.
Their applications?
For example I'm not a mathematician but I love thinking about weird "useless" shit like how math might be like for aliens? Are numbers as fundamental as we assume? i.e. humans developed math for "arithmetic" first, then latched geometry etc on top of that. We took ages to admit zero and negative numbers.. what if an alien species develops math for "navigation" first, and starts out with complex numbers right away!?
> What happens when humanity becomes obsolete?
There's an infinity out there to explore.
> And what happens when the machines that cause this obsolescence are controlled by a tiny amount of people, who suddenly don't need the rest of us?
That's a social problem we needed to tackle more than 100 years before AI or even computers appeared.
Apparently the minutes hand was added to clock to keep time in factories, for the benefit of the factory owners, not the workers — something I learned from this 1991 show from the BBC with Terry Jones: "So This Is Progress" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Em96NVxO9Q
But I am good at one skill that I spent years studying/training for, and now that skill is not paying the bills.
At least, that's how I view most discussions on AI adoption. Technological advancements are great for humanity, but that doesn't mean it comes without costs. The luddites are a famous example that's very often mentioned in this forum.
And no, "reskilling" isn't an option for many people. If you are poor, if you have a family or have people dependent on you, you cannot put your life on pause to learn something new, especially if you have no guarantees it won't end up like last time.
> and now that skill is not paying the bills. ... you cannot put your life on pause to learn something new
Yes, but that's a social issue, external to technology but exacerbated by every new technology, AI or not:
UBI should be a thing: let people work on what they find fulfilling, instead of having to work to survive.
AI could help design a system for UBI that everyone agrees with, since it's so good at maths and shit now.
This problem HAS to be tackled. Removing/slowing AI will only kick it further down the road, not eliminate it.
If UBI was a thing and people felt safe that they would not be poor, then obviously AI (and all technological innovation for that matter) would be much more welcomed. I do not see such initiatives being taken however.
It seems to me that all we are doing is a wild goose chase; Progress above all, to hell with any environmental/social impacts, the end justifies the means.
> This problem HAS to be tackled. Removing/slowing AI will only kick it further down the road, not eliminate it.
True, but people are generally selfish. They will put their own prosperity above that of the future generations, and I cannot blame them.
2 replies →
People knowing things represents redundancy. It has long been a fear around technology that humans would lose the knowledge and if the technology fails or is somehow taken away, be helpless.
This is what underpins the fear, I think.
You don't know how to farm but mentally you rest easy knowing a lot of other people do know. You also know there are books you could read to learn, if you needed to. Most things are like this, you could bootstrap your way to casting metals and probably even electric lights with only books and raw materials. Computer chips don't have this property.
Personally this is why I'd like to see libraries survive, even though I actually mostly read on my e-reader. I guess I took Anathem to heart.