[HN Gopher] Hyperbolic Growth
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Hyperbolic Growth
Author : kristiandupont
Score : 53 points
Date : 2022-09-17 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kristiandupont.medium.com)
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| Negitivefrags wrote:
| There is a famous quote from Douglas Adams:
|
| _Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and
| ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
| Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-
| five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably
| get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is
| against the natural order of things. Apply this list to movies,
| rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old
| you are._
|
| These feelings are just the cohort of which we are a part getting
| older.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| I guess that is comforting in a way :-)
| luis_cho wrote:
| There is a famous quote from Kenneth Boulding "Anyone who
| believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a
| physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist."
| carapace wrote:
| Mark Miller said something like, "Moore's law from the CPU's POV:
| humans are getting exponentially more expensive."
|
| The fundamental shape of the future is clear: either you have
| some sort of legal claim on or equity in the primary producers
| and/or "rent extractors" or you don't.
|
| As a programmer, the next iterations of e.g. GitHub Copilot
| _will_ eventually eat my career.
|
| Large corporations are effectively already AIs, and they have
| much more ability and capacity to leverage technology advances
| than the little people.
|
| I don't really know what to do about any of it, even assuming I
| could...
|
| I've thought about trying to start a kind of member-owned
| "general automation" corp that builds houses and neighborhoods
| and ecologically savvy farms, but the simple fact is, I'm not a
| people person.
|
| I've also thought about buying one of those cheap desert plots, a
| couple of acres for a few thousand dollars, and going out there
| with a "kernel" or "seed" of, y'know, solar panels and chickens
| and a little earth-mover, etc. I could pretend it was like I was
| colonizing an alien planet and make a kind of performance art
| piece out of it, I dunno.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >Creativity is a big part of what I feel defines me, and if that
| loses all value then it will surely affect me.
|
| Isn't that the whole problem with these tools? That they _can 't_
| capture creativity and context, and therefore only work as
| augments to competent users rather than replacing users entirely?
|
| >What will be a viable career in 20 years? Will the concept of a
| "career" even make sense by then? I have no idea, and I am
| uncomfortable with that.
|
| Which is why society should answer this ASAP. It's evident that
| putting the means of production in the hands of a few becomes a
| problem for the many, once the many are no longer necessary. This
| has been going on since pre-industrial. The premise has always
| been "we will make more jobs than we remove". What if that
| premise is no longer true? What if that premise wasn't true to
| begin with?
| seibelj wrote:
| Advanced auto-complete and sort-of right concept art is not going
| to disrupt the world nor the software industry. We have had
| algorithms trained on machine learning do IMO way more socially
| affecting things like decide what news and videos we watch, who
| gets approved for loans, what politicians say - but this gets way
| less press or thought.
|
| You will never replace software engineers just as you will never
| replace writers and artists no matter how "good" the machine
| generated stuff gets. There is no soul there and it only appears
| interesting at a superficial, "that's sort of neat" level that
| doesn't hold up. No one is buying master works of AI, they spend
| their weekend reading real books and blogs from real people.
|
| It's 2022 - where is my self driving car? Where is the tens of
| millions of job losses from AI predicted that necessitated UBI
| (see the entire presidential thesis of Andrew Yang)?
|
| It does get a lot of hype and raises a lot of VC money though!
| nmca wrote:
| https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-forecasting-one-year-in/
| kristiandupont wrote:
| May I ask if you have tried using Copilot? Because this sounds
| exactly like the kind of response I would have had half a year
| ago. It makes many mistakes and can by no means write code by
| itself. But that doesn't change the fact that it's orders of
| magnitude better at it than I thought possible.
| copenja wrote:
| I'm not the parent post and I have not tried autopilot, but I
| do have a question.
|
| Does autopilot make you orders of magnitude more productive?
| kristiandupont wrote:
| No, it does not.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| One issue with copilot is that debugging broken code is far
| harder than writing it in the first place. We've seen similar
| transitions before though. When good optimizing compilers
| started appearing you had plenty of programmers like Mel [1]
| that said 'there's no art in it, a compiler couldn't do the
| kind of optimizations I do'. And yeah, it's true, but
| compilers got good enough that 99% of people stopped caring
| and hardcore optimization became a niche skill few people
| have. What does the industry look like when all that most
| programmers know is debugging generated code and what kinds
| of tools need to exist to support that?
|
| [1] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
| vsareto wrote:
| >What will be a viable career in 20 years? Will the concept of a
| "career" even make sense by then?
|
| I think AIs have made some amazing incremental process, but I
| feel like the fears of being made obsolete are still premature.
| If you needed to pick though, learning the thing that's replacing
| you is a good start, so pick AI research or development. For that
| to be non-viable as a job or career, AIs would need to have the
| ability to build and improve themselves, and at that point, it's
| game over, man(tm).
|
| None of these AI things are going to replace politicians,
| governments, or economies, and so you still have a vast amount of
| soft skill careers available as well.
| api wrote:
| Every AI I have tested requires the user to become clever and
| proficient at getting it to generate good results.
|
| Programming with AI is going to just elevate the level of the
| programmer cognitively just like compilers and high level
| languages did. It will be an even higher level of abstraction
| at which developers can operate.
|
| These things are powerful tools but just tools. Same with the
| "art generators." So far I see nothing capable of autonomous
| reasoning at a level that would actually replace the tool
| wielding operator. Someone still has to hold the hammer.
| ben_w wrote:
| While I would agree that the fears are in many cases premature,
| 20 years is a long time in tech while being short enough to
| matter for careers.
|
| By 2042 we're likely to have single-atom transistors in
| consumer devices, while people mid-career now are likely to be
| retiring _or_ getting radical life extension to confuse all
| this even further, and newborns today will be just about to
| graduate from universities.
|
| Will we have AI as general-purpose and flexible as a human,
| even if only limited to an IQ of 85? Dunno, but even limited to
| that IQ an AGI would render about 15% of the population
| permanently unemployable, which would be enough to cause all
| sorts of social and political problems by itself.
|
| But I think the limit on AGI right now isn't compute resources,
| it's that we don't know the right algorithms to make the AI we
| have as data-efficient as humans (or even, AFAICT, dogs, cats,
| or mice).
| bumby wrote:
| > _Will we have AI as general-purpose and flexible as a
| human, even if only limited to an IQ of 85?_
|
| While I agree to a certain extent on this premise, there will
| still be some areas that AI won't replace because humans also
| have an emotional value component.
|
| Consider if you'd rather have a massage from a robut or
| person. Or, if you are infirm and would prefer a caretaker
| who is human or machine. It's not just a matter of processing
| data when humans are emotional creatures.
|
| If anything, AGI may free up humans to focus on human
| relational jobs which we're much more evolved to be good at
| and value.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Consider if you'd rather have a massage from a robut or
| person. Or, if you are infirm and would prefer a caretaker
| who is human or machine.
|
| Sure, I'm also implicitly assuming robotics will improve.
| At some point -- don't know when -- we can't tell the
| difference any more, and at that point, the humans
| indistinguishable from machines are likely to be made
| redundant by the machines.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm saying there's something innately different
| emotionally about interacting with a human.
|
| So if you know it's a machine, it will inherently change
| the subjective interaction. If you're saying that it wont
| matter because we will get to a point where humans and
| machines are indistinguishable, that's implying robots
| will be emotional and no longer just processing data in
| the way we currently think of AGI. Essentially it means
| they will be conscious with subjective experience of
| their own or just philosophical zombies. Both are
| essentially fictitious thought experiments at this point.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| That's what it seems like they're saying. At some point
| it's likely they will be indistinguishable from us on
| many levels, including emotions. There's a demand for it
| and a solution/peoduct will eventually be created to
| address that demand, once the means of doing so are
| technically and financially feasible/scalable.
|
| Currently, yes, there's an innate difference, but it's
| only fictitious that there won't be a difference until
| it's not. It's plausible speculation. Writing it off as
| fictitious as of now feels like an "ostrich in the sand"
| means of molding around a static perception of reality.
|
| Things will change, we're not special, labor as we know
| it will be replaced, machines will at some point acquire
| the same abilities as us, and we'll have to strive to
| figure out as a whole if we need to change the means
| required to carry on and/or individually adapt/overcome
| such sea changes in labor/income.
|
| It will probably cause many issues within our societies,
| but many will also see opportunities. It's going to be a
| lot of grey, likely more so than now.
| bumby wrote:
| I agree that there's hubris in thinking we're somehow
| special. But pretending we will get there "someday" isn't
| much different than saying one day we'll time travel.
| Even if plausible, it's so far from where we're currently
| at it belongs more to philosophical thought experiments
| than serious technology inquiry
| ben_w wrote:
| I'd agree that they would either be conscious or
| p-zombies, but I think humans are sufficiently easy to
| fool that the latter may well happen. I offer panpsychism
| and celebrity fandoms/parasocial relationships as
| examples of people's emotional sense of connection being
| misleading.
|
| I don't think anyone has a sufficiently concrete
| definition of consciousness to even tell either how far
| we are from that now, nor how to get there from here.
|
| https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-
| turin...
| gnaritas99 wrote:
| Neither of those examples are a good illustration of your
| point as many and probably most will prefer the machine in
| both scenarios. I don't get a massage for an emotional
| experience with the masseuse; I'd prefer the likely much
| cheaper and higher quality and consistent machine massage.
| Ditto with a permanent caretaker as it'll allow you to feel
| far more independant; most of us don't want to feel like a
| burden on other people. However, you do have a valid point,
| just not good examples imho.
|
| AGI will make the vast majority unemployable, it'll be a
| disaster and those jobs won't simply be replaced by new
| ones: people who think this haven't thought through it very
| deeply at all.
| bumby wrote:
| Maybe. My original example that came to mind was a
| caretaker for someone terminally ill, I.e., hospice.
| Having volunteered in that area, people want human
| contact, even if it's not performing any pragmatic
| function. I tend to think automation would just make
| somebody feel more isolated. People yearn for connection,
| not automation.
|
| I believe the research shows there is a strong
| psychological component to massage that goes beyond the
| mechanical manipulation. I guess it would depend on
| whether somebody uses it for stress relieve or merely
| recovery.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Really I would think that politician would be one of the
| easiest roles to automate. It's a very simple algorithm that
| votes yes based on whoever gives it the most money.
| vsareto wrote:
| Getting them to hand over their jobs is the hard part :)
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Those jobs aren't being replaced by AI because the people in
| charge don't _want_ them to be replaced. It 's not the AI they
| should be worried about, but society shifting the paradigm and
| rendering half of all bureaucracy across the globe obsolete.
|
| Endless bikeshedding is deemed very important amongst its
| practitioners, and is pretty lucrative to boot. Even when we
| never measured the benefits.
| random314 wrote:
| Why the word hyperbolic. It doesn't seem to make sense.
| Exponential automation seems better.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Hyperbolic growth has a singularity in finite time. I.e. there
| is a "crucial" point where things truly go haywire. Not a very
| important distinction in a philosophical discussion like this,
| but that was the reasoning.
| mmargerum wrote:
| I reluctantly moved to an architecture position because developer
| salaries have stagnated and remote work normalization will put
| even more pressure on western developer wages.
|
| Coding isn't nearly as much fun anymore. Agile, CI/CD, Pull
| Requests, code reviews, constant software updates, locked down
| laptops put so many barriers in the way of my creative flow.
|
| I still code on my own equipment building apps for myself and I
| still love it but im done doing it professionally
| dasil003 wrote:
| Being made obsolete by technology is nothing new (see the
| Luddites). But regardless of how replaceable any individual is,
| we're still in a human society. Maximizing profits by laying off
| humans can work for a while, and systems can rebalance, but if
| prevailing dynamics collectively lead to a large percentage of
| the population being "unemployable", then the political situation
| will become very explosive. People need to feel some purpose in
| life. Once things destabilize to a certain point, the global
| productivity that allows for the enormous compute power behind
| modern tech and AI will come crashing down pretty fast. Sure,
| there are authoritarian scenarios to worry about, but I have a
| hard time convincing myself that tech enables authoritarian
| control beyond what was possible throughout history.
| sawyna wrote:
| One would think people would have more freedom and will explore
| life far more than today and get into philosophical stuff. But
| the reality is messy. Imagine a single individual who leads
| quite a busy life and yearns to have some free time to be more
| "free" and do things that matter. You know what happens when
| that person gets whole lot of free time? They are not sure
| about what to do and it takes a lot to start doing something
| new. If this happens on a large scale, I'm really not sure that
| it'll make the world a better place to live. Maybe I'm
| pessimistic, but people would have ample lot of time to do more
| useless political stuff like manipulate, influence others for
| their own gain.
|
| There's this anime called Log Horizon which kind of plays this
| scenario out. Everyone gets stuck in this metaverse sort of
| game where people generally come for fun. Once stuck, people
| start killing each other and doing random things because they
| don't know what to do. There's no purpose in their "life".
| fullshark wrote:
| Why? Tech enables a small group of people to have extreme
| power/leverage. In the case of military/control you don't even
| need the labor class to serve in the military in large numbers
| anymore for global supremacy.
| dasil003 wrote:
| For all the leverage the US has militarily, what control did
| it actually exert in Afghanistan? What about Russia in
| Ukraine? War and occupation is one thing, but I'm speaking
| more of the consent of the governed. Do you think the
| billionaire class can keep hoovering up all the economic
| gains as jobs are automated based solely on their self-
| interested narrative of capital ownership? What happens when
| unemployment hits 20%, 30%, 50%? Are they going to send
| drones against the populace?
|
| Even in China, the CCP's policies only work as long as they
| deliver a certain measure of prosperity to the people.
| Propaganda and police brutality can only take you so far
| before the people have had enough.
| peyton wrote:
| Yeah, I'm fairly certain things will be fine. Everyone's
| consuming curated propaganda on their phones every single
| day. The little people won't be doing much.
| warent wrote:
| It feels like part of this may be some needed mental shift from
| a scarcity mindset to a prosperity mindset.
|
| My mind always goes to the very optimistic, Utopian world in
| Star Trek, where humans have identified that we can afford for
| people to stop working for the purpose of survival (the bottom
| of Maslow's hierarchy of needs) and instead start working just
| for the personal challenge and growth.
|
| Not saying we're there yet, but with so many jobs rapidly
| becoming obsolete by machines, it seems to me to be the
| direction we're going. Rather than meaninglessness,
| joblessness, poverty, homelessness, I hope society can shift
| into this paradigm that automation could mean the exact
| opposite: empowerment to more freedom.
|
| This is probably a very scary perspective for many capitalists!
| The majority of people actually do want to work, they just
| don't want to work for the sake of work itself. A huge benefit
| of capital is that it means we don't really have to trust each
| other at a high level, because fundamentally our incentives all
| align around survival which money is a tool to survive.
|
| One day maybe we can make a world where there is more trust in
| each other; that just about everyone wants to do the best that
| we can with the exception of a small number of malignant
| personality disorders that is the minority.
|
| This new trust will enable some amazing doors to open up.
| monkeydust wrote:
| You should read Trekonimics if your into this way of
| thinking.
| warent wrote:
| interesting! thank you, I'll check it out
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