Comment by atleastoptimal
4 days ago
I think beyond the specific elements of any domain AI eclipses humans in, overall, the notion of the thing that grants you status, prestige, and a living wage being commodified would spark in anyone a profound sense of dread.
Beyond just making you redundant in your job, the whole architecture of your existence, the thousands of hours of struggle, the sacrifice of putting off social games or personal enjoyment are now rendered moot in hindsight. You are made one step closer to complete worthlessness, which will surely continue as AI becomes a more satisfying personal companion, a more worthwhile friend, lover, etc.
How is one to feel safe in the progress of the future when the only hints of the wonderful post-scarcity utopia we can quantify so far is the removal of all human leverage via their labor? All it tells us is we will be bargaining with superintelligence with nothing to stand on, only a trust that the 5000 lab executives and researchers solved the most important research problem of all time on the first try.
And remember, these AI models were trained on your work, your culmination of effort and sacrifice, without any consent, credit, or compensation, then sold back to you for a subscription fee.
It's only fair if 99% of revenue flows back to humanity. The models are worthless without its training data.
Universal Basic Income, ah no sorry, Universal High Income...
I would like to say "let's see how that goes". But I'm afraid I don't quite trust that "things will just go well". At least not nearly as fast as A(G)I development is happening. I feel fortunate that I don't worry about this too much personally, but I fear for our economy, laid off (office) workers, their families, in a few months and years. What am I to do? How can we fix this? Am I exaggerating?
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Many organizations are giving away capable models for free.
So.. they’re being trained on all of the information that some used to make their living with by writing books, presenting seminars, etc. on a topic.. without paying for it, and then giving it all away for free?
Idk if that’s much better
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For now. Once people are hooked, and/or once some of that investment capital starts to be expected to generate some dividends (see https://isaiprofitable.com/), free use will be very limited.
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That’s what standing on the shoulders of giants refers to. This is how science has always worked. The generated papers have attributions and citations just like if a human wrote them.
>That’s what standing on the shoulders of giants refers to. This is how science has always worked.
Yes, but automating and commercializing a process makes it inherently different. Just because everyone has always been welcome to drink from the village well, that countless generations have worked tirelessly to dig, maintain, and improve, doesn't mean that there's no basis for complaint when Nestle sticks a pump down it and starts draining the aquifer to bottle and sell.
The lack of an existing law (or custom) against new behavior doesn't actually render it necessarily non-grotesque.
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The giants are quite often credited by name, or have their work cited.
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Pretty sure AI is more akin to standing on the shoulders of giants and peeing into the wind
Take a philosophy class or read more books. Your response is devoid of humanity and philosophical introspection.
> That’s what standing on the shoulders of giants refers to. This is how science has always worked
OpenAI's Navier-Stokes finding is closer to Crick and Watson in respect of Franklin's research than conventional science.
> You are made one step closer to complete worthlessness, which will surely continue as AI becomes a more satisfying personal companion, a more worthwhile friend, lover, etc.
I recently thought about this and fear that AI may further drive us humans apart.
Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.
I would recommend the work of Sherry Turkle, specifically her new book "Artifical Intimacy" - she is quite opinionated on this, in the sense that the role that AI play as a conversation partner is so frictionless, so controlled, that we get none of the rough edges of human interaction that form us into a functional social being. No real quick solution outside of deep, fearful caution when using these things - and we're not going to see that from John Q Public
> the role that AI play as a conversation partner is so frictionless, so controlled, that we get none of the rough edges of human interaction that form us into a functional social being.
I wonder if there's a tangent with social media here, at least some of it, where in my experience "a perfect life lived by influencers" is portrayed to us.
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Human meaning arises in conversation between humans. In them reaching a shared understanding of the world and their perspective upon it.
When you talk with machines, you "outsource" that central human society-building element.
But machines never socialize back in any meaningful way. You gradually lose yourself.
Machines could socialize back in a (more) meaningful way. But to do so, they would have to not lose context (or at least keep some).
I have not totally abandoned the hope that a machine could be someone. LLMs aren't that, though.
[Edit to reply to Loquebantur, because I'm rate limited ATM:] You seem to have read this post as saying that I want that because I find human relationships inadequate. I never said that, nor meant it. My point was a more technical one: Throwing away context at the end of each conversation means that you can't form a meaningful social connection with an LLM, because you're starting from zero each time. (It's kind of like "50 First Dates".)
I'm not pining for a social connection with a machine. But if a machine is ever truly capable of that, I hope I will interact with it as someone, not just as a machine.
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> Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.
This is why I see myself leaving dev within a year. Remote working is enough of a embuggererance for my mental health and I've be unhappy in work much of the time since 2020 largely due to that, AI will finish me off.
Career suicide and going of to wait tables, or be a hospital porter, or anything else with people even if I'm going to hate those people, with the massive pay cut that entails, will be better than actual suicide after a couple more years trying to stick at it.
There came a point a few months ago where I realised that I had to either accept becoming obscelete or change my while outlook on using AI and trying to catch up. I didn't choose the AI option.
It is frightening that it took only a few comments from the top of the page to the first mention of a suicide and also that it doesn't look out of place at all.
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> Remote working is enough of a embuggererance for my mental health
Where I work we have a 100% office policy. And while that sometimes feels hilarious, I am also somewhat glad about it because I like working and connecting with people physically.
However, as mentioned, I do notice that even though I am physically in the office most days, I spend an increasing amount of time alone on my computer and work with my agents. It’s satisfying in it’s own way, and I am definitely more productive. But it’s also worrisome. The pace of this development is picking up, and I don’t yet see where this is going exactly, or if I like where what I can see is going.
Related: We recently interviewed a candidate who worked remotely for the past 3-4 years. He said he'd be looking forward to work in the office again. I could honestly feel that he meant it, and I understand that. I guess some mix of both is the best.
Think carefully. I left high school teaching to become a dev. I would never go back. Yeah, social isolation sucks. But doing a job where your students/clients/patients think you're nothing but a waste of their time is soul-crushing on another level.
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It’s very Asimov-esque. The Spacers who adopted robots for everything eventually stopped interacting with each other except over video calls.
> Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.
I do too, but it means I have more time in my life to spend with people.
Seriously I don't get what everyone else is doing where they say things are getting worse somehow.
There's days I no longer need to sit at my computer: Claude Remote prompts my phone when it needs direction, the hardware stays busy and I can just go out with my family instead.
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It's more important now than ever to hold onto the fact that human beings have inherent value. This exists independent of their ability to generate wealth for an employer. I know HN loves a technical solution for every problem, and so do I, but this is a political problem requiring political solutions.
> human beings have inherent value
I wish, then I'd get a paycheck without having to do any work.
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No, you don't work w/ a fleet of agents, you use them to do your work.
This is a general issue that is being forced on us by AI companies; AI is not a human being, it is a tool that we can use to do things. We don't have them as coworkers or subordinates, they're objects specialized in language processing. Thinking otherwise leads people to all kinds of existential and psychological issues that in the end make no sense.
No. If these tools could do your work, people would feel existential dread anyway. It doesn’t matter at all if they are coworkers or tools (I really don’t see why would it ever matter).
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Personally I don’t care about that all that much. I don’t have any “sacred” inherent value for human beings. If they can make robots covered in real human skin, blood vessels and muscles (lab grown over the robot frame) with an LLM brain at some point in the future, I would definitely prefer that to a human lover.
It's more or less reverse to the mean. The period in which a people had both access to education and leverage through their labor and intellect is super short. For most of recorded history, the bulk of humanity lived as peasants, serfs, or slaves. They were mostly illiterate, bound to the land or to a master, and had little power to bargain over the terms of their (or their children) lives.
I'm too young to be financially secure given my impoverished background, not having parents in my life, being homeless as a teenager, etc. But too old and physically disabled to change course from tech. Nothing to do but keep walking through this tunnel and see where it ends up. It's scary!
I've had a couple of lucky breaks but I worry about my kids. About their ability to find meaning in life, their ability to find a way to stay afloat and about their ability to continue to form long term relationships with other humans who are turning inwards ever more.
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same here, and it often keeps me up at night. for a few years i really felt like i had finally managed to get on track towards escaping the poverty i was born into, now i'm not so sure anymore in the long term. the good thing is at least i know i somehow managed to claw my way upwards from rock bottom to a tech job once already, so whatever the future might throw at me i'll probably be able to somehow deal with that too.
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"The arc of the moral universe is long but it reverts to the mean" is somehow less inspiring.
>For most of recorded history, the bulk of humanity lived as peasants, serfs, or slaves. They were mostly illiterate, bound to the land or to a master, and had little power to bargain over the terms of their (or their children) lives.
I feel like we should be doing everything we can to not revert back to that way of life.
No man wants to do the things that need to be done, maybe it's the birth control in the water
Disagree. Scribes, doctors, bankers, and government clerks always existed, even if the education to do it was expensive and exclusive. For the first time in history, this labor, including its knowledge content might become automated and commoditized.
Yes, on the other hand these positions were usually not given to serfs. Positions were usually filled by a ruler, selecting from his subjects, largely determined by birth rights.
Bankers did not exist in 10,000 BC
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> the notion of the thing that grants you status, prestige, and a living wage being commodified would spark in anyone a profound sense of dread.
Not for those without status (which is most people on this planet). But yes, AI is set to wipe out most established hierarchies and their gatekeepers, and to equalize most fields. A profound sense of dread is something most ordinary people live with throughout life, and if AI can reduce systemic unfairness, I bet most people will actually find some degree of relief from that dread. The complacency of the formerly-statused being shocked along the way isn't much of an argument against that equalization.
> Beyond just making you redundant in your job, the whole architecture of your existence, the thousands of hours of struggle, the sacrifice of putting off social games or personal enjoyment are now rendered moot in hindsight.
This passage answers itself, doesn't it? You can sense those things you postponed fun for (work and the apparatus around its struggle) were never worth it. So why fight for us all to have to keep working just to live? Isn't a post-scarcity world the thing we should all be fighting for?
>This passage answers itself, doesn't it? You can sense those things you postponed fun for (work and the apparatus around its struggle) were never worth it.
This is what you don't get. _I_ already know it's not worth it. I've always known. It's everyone else! It's a wife who cares whether or not her husband has a good career. It's the police who care if you look like you're poor. It's the way every single person in society obsessively cares about the status of others.
What in the world makes you think I've had to build up status for my own sake? It's absolutely baffling that anyone could be confused about this.
It's baffling to people that don't care that much about what other people think.
>A profound sense of dread is something most ordinary people live with throughout life, and if AI can reduce systemic unfairness,
I'll keep that in mind. If I'm suffering more than you are, the solution is to bring you down to my level.
Not only is that not a real solution to unfairness (it's certainly not fair for the person who now has to suffer more than they were), it also ignores the far better option which would be to reduce your suffering so that it isn't disproportionate to everyone else's. You might be holding onto to some self-destructive fearful crab-bucket mentality if that's where your mind instantly takes you.
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Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.
A fallacious argument. There's no goal of inflicting suffering on other people; you can equally look at it as enabling people who were previously shut out of something to participate in it, or if not to participate in it directly to reap the benefits by having an agent exploit automation on their behalf.
>> the notion of the thing that grants you status, prestige, and a living wage being commodified would spark in anyone a profound sense of dread.
> Not for those without status (which is most people on this planet)
Look at how coal miners react to the idea of getting rid of coal as an energy source; whether or not you think they have prestige or status, there's certainly an amount of dread there that I'd expect to somewhat resemble the type we're talking about here.
AI will bring on the biggest gatekeepers of them all: the ones that own the compute.
I think the fix is to get started on post scarcity economics now. Sooner or later we're going to have to come up with practices that boost or limit endeavors based on how people feel about them, rather than based on how much money somebody has.
It doesn't have to be ((post scarcity) economics), it can be (post (scarcity economics)). Both systems can coexist for a while, one providing a bit of a safety net while the other falls apart.
There will still be scarcity, just of different things.
Even if we vastly increase productivity beyond our current wildest dreams, the production system takes time to adjust to changes in demand, creating continuous points of scarcity.
But Georgist economics are way ahead of how to deal with this. Tax the ownership/control of things that can not be increased (e.g. land).
Sure, but that's no reason to continue using control over scarce things as a proxy for consent. It's not exactly working out.
We had to tolerate gold because it implied a game that was facilitated by the laws of physics, and we didn't have the resources to set up any other sort. But now we do, the rules can be whatever we want them to be.
Sure, let's try Georgism, but given the historical track record of that kind of reform, let's work on other things in parallel.
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agree. wealth inequality has only widened despite AI. things like healthcare insurance, tuition, rent and homes less affordable or more expensive than ever. Nothing has changed and probably ever will. Ai creates abundance in some things like knowledge but other tangible scarcities and individual differences of status remain.
The people at the top of the hierarchy are not very intelligent or engineer minded, so the more likely result of all of this simply to genocide the population. That's easier than trying to solve logistics.
It's mainly about status. No one cares that much about AI automating drug discovery or coding, but it's bad when it assists in math. Math results are attached to individuals , whereas for cancer drugs or other medical discoveries, it's more of a team effort by a lab. AI now has the effect of turning math into something that is more lab-like and less about the individual.
I would answer to this that the mathematicians (humans) are the ones who give any meaning to mathematical discoveries. If we don't have mathematicians anymore, the result is that AI can find whatever they want, but 99% of that will be useless waste. Outside of practical applications, the only reason most mathematical results have any interest is that lots of mathematicians spend time trying to find their solution. Once humans stop caring, mathematics done in an automated fashion will also stop having any value, other than its possible use in finding solutions to existing engineering problems.
> Once humans stop caring
As a former research mathematician, I've already stopped caring due to AI. I used to write expository articles on mathematics on the internet but I deleted those because of AI. Unless mathematics and indeed human endeavors can be made human again, I don't see much point in caring to generate commodities in a mechanical fashion.
We'll be free of cancer, and dead on the inside.
Counter point: AI is trained on output from humans. We all made AI, together. It belongs to all of us. We use it to benefit us, and we celebrate our wins together.
"It belongs to all of us"
For the low entry fee of ~$200 a month you too can escape the permanent underclass - which is more than some countries average citizen makes in an entire year.
Seems like a good deal
But it doesn't belong to all of us. It belongs to a bunch of rich egomaniacs who stole what all of us built.
Counterpoint: They request a subscription fee they refuse to reciprocate and will not take "No" for an answer.
Countrpoint: Their moat doesn't appear to be defensible, we can just replace them with somebody who will.
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When I was a kid I built my entire identity around being #1. I was the most talented kid in school, anything endangering that resulted in an instant identity crisis.
Then I went to college and I understood that there are people who, for one reason or another, are thinking in ways so advanced I'll never catch up. I'll never be the #1. I'm actually much closer to being average than I thought.
But this doesn't mean I should just give up, lie down in my bed and cry. Since then I've learned a lot of skills - most of them being crap at best, but that's not the point. What matters is my own subjective experience. The fact that despite objectively not being good, I see myself as a skilled person with rich life.
Once I was watching a YouTube video about elderly care and there was a phrase along "These people won't achieve anything more in their lives, my goal is to keep them occupied until they die" which is a bit morbid at first glance, but it actually makes so much sense as a life philosophy.
> Once I was watching a YouTube video about elderly care and there was a phrase along "These people won't achieve anything more in their lives, my goal is to keep them occupied until they die" which is a bit morbid at first glance, but it actually makes so much sense as a life philosophy.
So they'll keep us all busy with bingo games, shuffleboard, 80s TV re-runs, etc? I guess I don't see that as being much of a life philosophy.
Well, instead of someone keeping you busy, choose the thing you'll keep yourself busy with. Grow a few plants, for example. This has literally zero economic or artistic value or anything, but could be a fun thing to do.
The point is, the things you do don't need to serve some bigger goal. Your entire life doesn't need to serve some bigger goal. Just keep yourself occupied until you die.
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The only thing constant in life is change.
It would be nice if we weren't actively investing trillions in change for the worse (for most of humanity).
What a facile statement. Yes things change in life, but as society we try to avoid changes that rapidly render people and their lives worthless.
When did we last try to avoid such a thing? The way I remember history we celebrate this whenever it happens. Like how the electronic computer made the job of human computers obsolete.
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Every society, except the USA
Change is the only constant
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Incessant shit.
> You are made one step closer to complete worthlessness
And so the idea that your worth is the monetary amount of your labor compensation becomes even more toxic than before.
You are substituting one legitimate meaning of "worth" (moral value) with another legitimate meaning (economic value).
But then conflating the two to make your point, which if you care about making meaningful statements as apposed to word games, is not a legitimate move.
It would be nice if you were right, but the point is that it's not me who does the conflating.
Unfortunately, I think this is a human failing being exposed rather than anything else. We like to build conceptual models of how things work, but they are often tinged with should. Reality doesn't care how things should work. It only cares about how things do work. It's always jarring when the should turns out to be false.
Philosophers for millenia believed that human beings had meaning, purpose and set out to explore what that could be. It was a noble profession for a long time. Once we realized that there was no hidden spark, ergo no purpose, the study of and the prestige associated with philosophy took a nosedive. Yes it is still studied but it carries nowhere near the respect it once did. Mathematics seems to be suffering the same fate.
The next status wave will be fitness as glp1 drugs filter through to everyone and everyone wants to be fit.
Yes, and I think over time there will be a blatant inequality in who is commoditized and who isn’t.
If AI engineers didn’t create the data to produce the models, and they increasingly don’t write the code to produce the models either, then why are they treated as the agents of change rather than the subjects of change, like mathematicians are?
Nah. There is nothing beyond being made redundant in your job and labor leverage. That is all. It has got nothing to do with resentment over fucking machines. It’s all about people (the executives that you mention) fucking us over. The end. Completely human problem.
I know I’m being sold some bullshit when this is made into something inherently existential and psycho-identitarian. An egalitarian future of labor-worthlessness means that there is nothing above us to dictate anything at all—maybe not even nature itself, save for meteors and other cosmic events. I’m not afraid of being “worthless” in that world of complete freedom. Fuck no.
I am afraid of being hungry and homeless long before society reaches "an egalitarian future of labor-worthlessness" that's good for common people.
And that does not disagree with anything I wrote.
> I'm not afraid
So how do you plan to maintain food, clothing and shelter when you have no leverage?
Some have been scurrying to amass a nest egg and become self-sufficient. Of course, if demand destruction from the hollowing out of labor happens fast enough, who will consume and keep these stock prices up? With the tax base simultaneously crashing, gov't can't step in and prop things up. It could help during the transition while failing as a long-term strategy but what else can you do?
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The rest of that quote is about the timeline where everything turns out perfectly but everyone is quote and unquote useless. That is not the only timeline. The timeline where the AI Ghouls get their way and oppress everyone else is covered in the first paragraph. This is to illustrate that the only ill-effects to my mind are exactly that: the humans who are are trying to oppress other humans. I don’t care if the machines make me jobless in itself. I have no psychological qualms with that.
You are made one step closer to complete worthlessness
Nobody's worth is tied to source code output.
Great, I'll just eat good intentions, wear a smile, and live under happy thoughts. I'm 50, so I'm "cooked" as far as contemporary society is concerned.
Now now, there are plenty of jobs for you to do. You'll just ve significantly poorer with no hope of social mobility for the rest of your life.
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> Nobody's worth is tied to source code output.
If someone's expertise is worth nothing to those around them, they have a real practical problem.
In this context, the word "value" isn't referring to some moral model. It is referring to the asset value of skill.
85% of people hate their jobs and just want to spend time with their family and friends. Utilitarianly, AGI is a benefit for the vast majority of people. And people who get their pride from playing status games are about to learn what it feels like to be on the other side
Maybe I'm too doomer, but if a large portion of the population becomes economically worthless, how can this not have a destructive effect on society? It would be easier for anyone with power if you wouldn't exist. How would that not lead to corrosion of basic human rights (or worse) and the spawn of a new permanent underclass which you cannot escape from? It sounds very dystopian but if AI is left unchecked this will happen imo.
It already has happened with technologies before AI. The internet itself in many ways has disrupted communities a lot with the net effect being the erosion of individuality and value placed on the uniqueness of people. AI is just the next stage in the cohesion of technology against the human spirit.
So it's already happening and is just strengthening now with AI.
For me the most obvious conclusion is, use your maths skills and get into open source AI.
Make AI as cheap and accessible to as many people as possible and we will likely be much better off.
The more people empowered by the tech the less like you will be “redundant” in the way you describe. You will own the important tools only the techno oligarchy own today…
Would you feel the same if you were a part owner of OpenAI? I bet you’d feel excited about the money you’re about to make ?
isn't math skills really just pattern analysis and creativity? how is this limited to just the math domain? why are mathematicians worried?
I don't really know but I can see two obvious outcomes.
1. Sam Altman et al owns all money, or power and all labor.
2. AI becomes cheap and ubiquitous, everyone "owns it" and we can see the contents of the sausage and modify it as required.
Mathematicians are uniquely placed to help avoid 1 because AI is based on math & algorithms.
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You know we (tech as an industry) have done this to a bunch of people already, right?
Thats what "disrupt" meant
> bargaining with superintelligence
This part is nonsense, still. There's no known AI -> AGI path, and superintelligence doesn't mean anything, and AGI is assumed to be (going to be) both malicious and a slave, both for no good reason.
It has already been happening for decades if not centuries. Instead of bargaining with superintelligence though, it's bargaining with moronic systems. I watched an airline gate employee struggle to allow a family onto a flight despite acknowledging that they were confirmed and had seats on the plane because the computer wouldn't beep when they waived their boarding passes. She called her supervisor. Her supervisor resolved it not by writing "it's okay they can get on" into an exceptions field, but by kicking them off the flight, putting them on standby, then accepting their standby request and reseating them (in different seats, not all together, for some reason). The humans involved all knew things were okay, but the system was too dumb to just allow them to go forward.
Superintelligence might even help.
“Worthlessness”
Consider this… in the grand scheme of things, we are on a tiny planet in the universe. What cosmic contribution could you make?
Most people won’t make anything even close to “a ding in the universe”, as Steve Jobs has been reported to say.
So they may as well enjoy their life. And your worth can be to your family, to your children, your parents who took care of you.
Learning a hobby. Practicing religion. Mindfulness and meditation. Doing sports and improving your own body.
Look around if you are a heterosexual man, for instance: many women are far more attracted to men that perform in the moment, than men who labor quietly to create a product. The former enables untold hours of honing social skills and calibration, and humor and performance skills. The latter is of more durable value to society, yet relatively few women are genuinely sexually attracted to a man doing the deep work. (By the way, it is also true the other way: most men are not attracted to women for doing deep work or being a rocket scientist.)
Animals don’t do “deep work” and most animals are attracted for far “shallower” reasons. If everyone has a UBI and AI does the “deep work” then that frees up humans to be like animals in a zoo or in the wild… doing all the displays to attract mates, having babies etc. That’s not nothing — in fact it is 99.999% of everything that happened in history and 100% of what happened in prehistory.
You’re just ceding that 0.0001% which represents technological progress. The actual dread comes from the fact that you and all of humanity will be as completely powerless to change things as cats or any random animal species is powerless now. The difference is you will perhaps understand your powerlessness more than they do. But in the good scenario, you’ll be like animals in a zoo. We are constructing this zoo for ourselves now.
We will remain on this blue planet while the AIs will colonize the universe. In fact I wonder why aliens would ever come to Earth, when they’d just send their AIs or robots. Look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200502
Maybe I'm obtuse, but I just struggle to understand why we as humans, at this stage, knowing what we know, we think that there's value and honor in trying to build new things and try to move off our planet. I mean I get it, there's the exploration spirit, there's the pushing of the frontier. But our generation, in striving for such things, has somehow disconnected ourselves from where I believe the value actually lies. Taking care of loved ones, of our children, of pets. Teaching our children to love and to be gentle and to take care of others. Appreciating the beauty of the universe, because no machine will ever be able to do that. Creating art, and beautiful music, investing inside of these works our emotions rather than physical resources so that we can create feelings in other. A machine can never make real music or art because it doesn't come from feeling and experience.
I just don't know.
You are of course correct. The true value lies in relationships, art, love. This will never be threatened by AI etc. These are just tools, however disruptive. But the society we build might be misaligned from these true values. We need a revolution.
As Ernest Becker would ask, then what is your "immortality project"? Even worse, what's the immortality project for the vast majority of humanity? Do we just bring back religion to Middle Ages levels? Or do we hope everybody goes through some kind of never-before-in-history spiritual awakening?
"If everyone has a UBI" - isn't that quite a big "if"? And also - how soon would it come? Soon enough for families losing their income?
We won't be bargaining with superintelligence, we will be bargaining with the handful of oligarchs that are creating super intelligence to rob us of all bargaining power.
This is why they're talking about it in religious terms. It's their salvation from labor and its demands.
This isn't a passive process that's happening by itself. It is driven by specific people with specific goals.
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> How is one to feel safe in the progress of the future when the only hints of the wonderful post-scarcity utopia we can quantify so far is the removal of all human leverage via their labor?
I'm sure the Telegraph operators, human calculators, mine workers and all sorts of people have asked themselves this question. It's obvious that it feels strange to suddenly be part of the cohort asking but I assure you it's not new. And the answer hasn't changed much since.
> I'm sure the Telegraph operators, human calculators, mine workers and all sorts of people have asked themselves this question. It's obvious that it feels strange to suddenly be part of the cohort asking but I assure you it's not new. And the answer hasn't changed much since.
I don't buy this argument, much like I don't buy the similar "they said the same when calculators were introduced".
It negates that some changes are qualitatively and scale-wise different. Also, by gradually chipping away at things that humans do, you (we) keep shrinking and shrinking until there's nothing left, every step of the way some people claiming "well, the telegraph operators said the same". Keep in mind that, while it's hyperbole, some AI entrepreneurs are actually saying stuff like "maybe jobs will become a hobby". Unrealistic for now, maybe, but if they do become a hobby, what leverage will we have at all?
In other words, it's true the past is worth keeping in mind, but not to the exclusion of the possibility that this time it's different. Or that the trends of the past actually point to harm in the near future.
And like to anyone else who hints that “automation creates better jobs”, I have to add: but not for us. Maybe for the next or the generation after that.
Industrial and technological progress has birthed better conditions overall, but at a cost of locally worse ones. Mine workers that got displaced didn’t end up being machine operators - most of them landed on benefits or sporadic gig work. Only the next generation was able to be properly trained and educated to be able to benefit from the technological advancement en masse. And we might see that happening again.
so our children and future generations are not "us"?
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> the removal of all human leverage via their labor
I’m not convinced at all that SI will ever be able to produce the correct result with little input. The advancements in capability I’ve seen in models is that they understand my intention better, and follow industry best practices better, so their output is often acceptable. But I absolutely have to make my intentions known, as detailed as possible, or I will get the mediocre, standard solution that falls out of the weights.
I’ve been having trouble with models always steering towards certain solutions - they insert a queue here, a mutex there, a backoff over there. If I remove those, and let the model freely rebase the PR stack, then it will re-insert those mechanisms because it has been specifically trained to do exactly that. It’s essentially boilerplate, smoothly aligning my codebase to match their weights. Which is often good enough! They are training the models well. But individual problems require individual solutions.
My personal take on the human part in all this is: We get to decide, and the models obey. Our decisions are now super leveraged. So let’s make good decisions, and communicate them well. The layer of where decisions yield the most leverage, has been pushed upwards (I see it on the type and function signature level, others will see it even higher), but IMO it won’t be possible to push it up much further without losing truth to the decisions we need to make for a good product.