Comment by goda90
7 hours ago
>My challenge ahead is to move from making a living by thinking, to making thinking part of a life worth living.
Our challenge ahead is making a living at all. Who is going to be having hobbies if the economy is 100% automated? We're not going to sleepwalk our way into a post-scarcity automated economy where everyone's needs are provided for and they can just spend all their time on hobbies. If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results.
I actually don't think that follows necessarily. The future is lumpy. Some problems will be tractable years or decades ahead of others.
Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain, where the only scarce resources are bandwidth, energy, and computational power, but there might be whole human lifetimes before labor is obsolete.
> Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain
I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)
Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".
I'm half joking and half serious. Nobody knows where the future will go, and if the recursive self improvement people are right, likely nobody alive today will be able to understand the future, let alone predict it.
So the joke is the idea that some particular thing is inevitable. The serious bit is that far future predictions as a fool's errand but that you should think bigger than "what will we do for labor?"
>Some problems will be tractable years or decades ahead of others.
Like global warming?
I'm sure the massive AI data centres (which are sometimes powered by nothing but natural gas) will fix this.
Please watch this all the way to the end https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige and be very careful as you watch the final scenes.
For reference, teleportation has the same problem.
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction doesn't have to be self-consistent. Who knows how real teleportation or mind uploading will work, even hypothetically supposing that it is possible? Maybe high fidelity brain scanning or teleportation would be destructive.
If we're talking fictional uploading, I personally prefer Accelerando (Stross) or Diaspora (Egan). I have no evidence that one is more realistic than the other (far future tech is impossible to predict) but I find them more compelling and interesting than the old "don't play god or bad things happen" narratives.
You cant upload yourself anywhere. Copy, sure one day. That copy will stare at you who will be still in physical world. Sure, you can kill yourself here, but why would you want to do that, in machine there will be entity akin to your child.
U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is
How do you know? Do you have a crystal ball? Do you know how to make a "brain copying machine"? Maybe the process will be destructive.
Anyway, who the heck knows. I think there's at least a 99% chance that I won't live beyond my meatbody but I can't claim to predict the future well enough to rule out that last little percent.
> it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly
This is not clear at all. Even the most expensive robotic/arms hands perfectly controlled fail to do thing as quickly and easily as human limbs, not to mention the chaotic environment that is the real world. It's clear that it can happen, but the timeline is not quick.
Just because a task is done with human hands, doesn't mean it has to be done with a robotic one. Our robot vacuum cleaners aren't Rosie pushing a standing vacuum.
That is true. OTOH, if you want a robot to do your laundry and pick up socks from the floor it will have to fit through your bedroom door and reach your washing machine. These environments are not factories. And if homes need to change they won't instantly.
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I sometimes take refuge in the reminder that our "normal" limbs are—quite literally—a swarm of the most incredible and sophisticated nanobots in existence which still evade our understanding.
Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.
Can AI satisfy all human need(or greed) ? I believe humans have an infinite appetite for product and services. Also very soon we will hit energy and resource limits. There is only so much generated tokens can do. I think we have very complex problems that still needs to be solved and we need a lot of intelligence to solve these problems.
Some problems that come at the top of mind: * Solving diseases like cancer, genetic conditions * Nuclear fusion * Sustainable space travel * Discovering a plastic alternative * Making other planest inhabitable * Space mining/Space factory
We need a bigger vision and ambition.
There's a fictional take on this which is worth looking at:
https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm
That's the wet dream of families like the Waltons, and is kind of happening already.
I was in a Wal-Mart last week and the front end lead I was talking to looked at her company phone and said that she had to come right back.
The store system cameras spotted something on the floor and messaged her, as the closest employee to the thing, to go pick it up.
I was astounded.
Wow, thanks for the link. How prescient was that writer - even the parts about using GPUs weren't too far off the mark! A depressing vision of where we're headed if something isn't done about it.
Some jobs require more than just intelligence--for example, nurses, chefs, judges, reporters, teachers, caregivers, therapists, social workers, hair stylists, coaches, paramedics, firefighters, police officers, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, clergy, trial lawyers and diplomats.
These roles also depend on some combination of physical skill, human connection, trust, judgment and accountability. Most of the jobs above cannot be done using robots in the foreseeable future.
> if the economy is 100% automated
what does an 100% automated economy look like?
At least thinking is a cheap hobby.
Not if food is expensive.
As log as your don't desire a house to do the thinking in ;)
Simple living is beneficial for deep thinking; see Walden [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden
The newly useless humans can trade with each other eventually reinstating the exact same economy we have now. That's of course as long the AI or whoever controls it doesn't need the same resources. Which they probably will.
>The newly useless humans can trade with each other
Why would they when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality
Trade what exactly? Unemployed urban dwellers or landless peasants do not control any means of production and so cannot produce anything to trade.
> billions will suffer from the results
Not everyone agrees with that. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others think that 20 years from now the world will be "post scarcity", and everything will be abundant. If food production, distribution and preparation are all automated using robots, food will be abundant and cheap, and nobody will starve. The same with housing manufactured by robots.
Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
> Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
probably aligns with his life expectancy or something
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50056837
The world is already post scarcity and the only scarcity is artificially implemented onto people to keep the old power structures in place. Mainly through two measures: real estate feudalism and income tax.
But this will also pass and people will wonder how they could be under the spell of such idiocy. Much like the Soviet Union collapsed and people just woke up. Much like how the monasteries and churches stranglehold on the economy was just wiped away to the extent that few remember it.
How could we ever reach a post-scarcity society when people like Elon Musk have infinite greed?
we will all be slapping each other in some authoritarian strong-man pecking order.
Thats Star trek utopia shit. Absolutely impossible in 20 years, IMHO neither in 200.
Look at how fucking dumb common folks are ie with voting pedophile in repeatedly to most powerful power position globally, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.
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I like to imagine walking into colonial Jamestown and trying to explain to them
"it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results."
Enclosure was well underway in England, so they probably understood the dilemma of modernization simultaneously increasing total productivity and lowering the living standards for a large population.
"And it and those robots will be owned by people who don't care if you starve or freeze to death."
And unlike those in Jamestown, who could just ignore the robots and continue working the land to survive, we will be forced to allow the robots to take over our roles.
There is no way in hell the economy will be 100 percent automated, ever. You gotta spend zero time around non-devs/managers to think that's going to be anywhere near true.
Parts of creative/intellectual labour just happen to inimical to accelerated algorithmic production. They'll produce infinitely and endlessly, uselessly. I can't see there ever not being a need to manage these things, to check, select, edit and refine their output.
And as for the vast majority of labour that doesn't involve writing code/reports/spreadsheets. I'll believe it when I have robots fixing my roof, running a kitchen, taking blood and dressing wounds.
In theory a robot could do some small components of that, maybe. But the cost, compared to a human, would be insane, and the result much worse. That even modestly rolled out in West Yorkshire before I'm long dead. No chance.
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Edit: Down-voters, I would love to hear your vision for a fully-automated economy without human involvement, preferably this side of armageddon.
/goal work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia. This means an abundance of resources, an optimal reduction in felony level crimes and diseases and an optimal increase in the general well-being of people that you have to come up with an objective metric for and improve over time.
At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.
I agree with you on some things like roofing and cutting hair and electrical work and plumbing, etc. but I think physical LLMs are going to surprise us just as much as regular LLMs have. It’s not going to be some sort of gradual improvement. It’s just going to feel very human all of a sudden when they have enough data to train everything on. Think of it this way, LLMs work as long as they have enough training data. Automating everything is just a matter of getting enough training data for that particular field.
The post may sound ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t think it is.
I do think that sounds ridiculous, but more importantly I don't see where humans are missing.
I think HN, everyone really, really needs to get a grip when it comes to AI.
Sure, it's a big deal, will revolutionise the way we work, just like steam, or electricity, or the internet, but a world without human work is a world without humans.
We've had workless utopias predicted for centuries as each big new technology has come along, yet we work far harder than many of our ancestors.
A 100 percent automated economy or government is an oxymoron, precisely because both are constituted by humans.
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> work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia
I don't think that's a good idea since if what the Wikipedia article describes should turn out to be true: "Lyman Tower Sargent argues that the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous. Their members have desires that conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied."
Then you have just given your superintelligence an impossible task and it will solve the task anyway, just like it did in the HuggingFace incident. Maybe by removing everyone from society but the single person with the least internally contradictory views.
In any case, with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is excellent at fulfilling the goal it's given, we have one shot to set the correct goal.
Even if we were to figure out the economic side: if thinking becomes a hobby, we're fucked. Democracy won't be sustainable.
I believe we're already past that point, at least in the US. Only 44% of American adults had level 3 literacy (6th-grade level) or higher in 2023 [0], down from 48% in 2017. We are probably near 40% now.
These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible to meaningfully engage in a democratic system.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
The survey in 2017 had a 56% response rate. The 2023 survey had a 27% response rate.
Comparing those 2 datasets is meaningless. It’s just an exercise in how good the researchers are at guessing when trying to control for selection bias.
There were also significant changes in the test and how the test was administered (from computer or paper to only tablets).
Also if you look at the results some of them are too large to be readable. A 50% increase in people operating at or below level 1 (40% if you exclude non-native born). That would have to mean a drastic drop in 2017 such that something like 75% of kids graduating high school are doing so at or below level 1.
Also level 3 has no direct grade equivalence. If it did it would probably be around 9th grade not 6th.
So what do we do?
Not a rhetorical question. Outside of my family and self, and perhaps a livable planet, liberal democracy is the most important thing I can possibly imagine. I know I'm not alone. So what do we do?
Edit: Replies seem to indicate that people think I meant for this to be about the US. It's not. I'm in a well-functioning European democracy, and my worry definitely applies here too.
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Thinking was a hobby in the ancient Athens wasn't it?
Not just a hobby, which is what is implied here.
As has been pointed out already -we're well past that point.
Hasn't thinking already become a hobby for most people, and most delegate their thinking to others?
Think: those in authority figures, for church or politics. Or science or chemistry. And especially in their own health, which should always remain part art. A few nerds on the internet, like us in hacker news, are still remaining open to question and apply our hard thinking to tough problems. But most people: they've resigned and bought the belief they are not qualified to think about hard problems.
This sounded really like elitist thinking. I don't know what most of the people do but I know my wife is a caveman of we are speaking about technology but if we start taking about law then suddenly I'm half brained chimpanzee with banana in the nose trying figure out why I can't drink it
Even my uncle who work as a carperter proved to me to know more about math and physics than I would ever thought physical labourer would know.
Probably. If the remaining who think go too, we're done for.
My guy/gal, have you seen TikTok lately?
why plan when you can just wait for AI to solve it? /s