[HN Gopher] All the existential risk, none of the economic impact
___________________________________________________________________
All the existential risk, none of the economic impact
Author : paulpauper
Score : 79 points
Date : 2024-07-22 16:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theintrinsicperspective.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theintrinsicperspective.com)
| daft_pink wrote:
| I think that the AI companies will not reap all the benefit of AI
| like the car companies with exception of a few winners didn't
| reap the rewards of vehicles. I think that average human beings
| will receive the benefit of AI as I am spending $20 per month,
| but reaping huge rewards from writing the emails and documents
| that I write with them.
| refactor_master wrote:
| > (...) reaping huge rewards from writing the emails and
| documents that I write with them
|
| But _are_ most people reaping huge rewards though? The article
| seems to suggest otherwise.
|
| I'm not saying it's useless, but we forget that humanity has
| survived with Grammarly, or Word, or dictionaries before that.
|
| I will agree that ChatGPT strikes gold at a marginally higher
| rate than Google, but hardly orders of magnitude more. Both
| automation and documentation have existed and continue to do so
| in many forms.
| julienreszka wrote:
| They want to buy the dip that's all. Anybody who actually uses
| the models with a good workflow ( specs=> unit tests=> function
| that passes ) sees the benefits
| prisenco wrote:
| Can you point to a published step-by-step workflow that you
| consider good?
| nevinera wrote:
| I used the models with a good workflow, but found them less
| than helpful. But I think that if I worked in a less expressive
| language I'd be very enthusiastic.
| hnthrow289570 wrote:
| This makes sense to me at the moment because these AI products
| are enhancements, not entire replacements.
|
| But even if they were replacements, companies do not suddenly
| drop all of their current processes and rewrite them from scratch
| using new shiny tools. And most companies are too slow to do that
| within the 2 years that ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion have been out
| anyway.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Also, things like LLMs are radically different than the assign,
| compare, iterate logic of current digital systems. LLMs are
| based on probabilities with no guarantee from one input/output
| combination to the next. It's pretty hard to model a process
| with an AI when there's no guarantee it will follow the
| process. Businesses are going to really struggle to adopt LLMs
| across their whole business like everyone is promising.
| incomingpain wrote:
| Every new tech breakthrough has the 'it's going to destroy us,
| think of all the stable boy jobs that will be lost.'
|
| Ultimately everything working out just fine. AI is not going to
| doom us.
|
| AI's gardening skills are so bad, even the weeds can't grow.
|
| Doomsayers can now downvote me.
| klyrs wrote:
| > AI's gardening skills are so bad, even the weeds can't grow.
|
| Yeah, the future is farming and mining, because AI is trained
| on all the fun jobs. "Stable boy," my ass.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Past performance is not guarantee future results. For example,
| hopefully this argument wouldn't fly with an education person,
| "we've been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for like 200 years
| now, ultimately everything is working out just fine."
|
| It would be foolish to ignore the potential economic impacts of
| Gen AI. And just because we don't see the effects in the data
| right now, doesn't mean it won't happen.
| moandcompany wrote:
| AI learned that electrolytes are what plants crave. Enough
| people on the internet said so.
| acuozzo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
| blueyes wrote:
| Another Luddite take from someone who clearly doesn't engage the
| technology directly either as a builder or a seller.
|
| It takes years to decades for new technologies to achieve their
| full effect. Factories based on steam had to be rebuilt around
| eletricity. That took decades. It will take time to rebuild large
| operations around AI.
| jerf wrote:
| I would also agree that the impact of AI, even in the best case
| scenario, will play out over years because it will take time to
| integrate even perfect AI into our processes. A world running
| on COBOL is not going to spin on a dime and run on AI, and I
| don't mean that sarcastically at all. That the world still runs
| on COBOL is an important data point in how quickly we can move
| things.
|
| In fact I consider this rather obvious and borderline self-
| evident to a careful thinker.
|
| However, the AI stocks are priced as if they are going to reap
| all the benefits, if not today, then perhaps even about a month
| or two ago. They are priced as if the current incumbents are
| the inevitable inheritors of all the promises, because the AI
| world is going to move so quickly to reap all this supposed
| value that there isn't even _time_ for other companies to move
| in and displace nVidia. They are priced as if that productivity
| curve has already started to shoot up and it 's just the
| beginning.
|
| If the curve isn't even budging, then the AI world is going to
| need to be seriously, _seriously_ repriced. If AI is going to
| change the world, but in five years rather than five months,
| and gradually rather than all at once, then the time value of
| money implies that the value to be captured in today-dollars is
| much, much smaller. In five years, nVidia 's AI may be getting
| stomped by a startup that hasn't even been founded yet; I'd
| give it low odds, but meaningfully non-zero odds.
|
| Whether I'm an "AI skeptic", I don't know. But I absolutely am
| an AI _bubble_ skeptic. I haven 't seen any evidence that the
| value creation is emerging at anything like the rate the bubble
| pricing implies. It'll probably arrive, but a lot more
| gradually than the market is currently believing.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > However, the AI stocks are priced as if they are going to
| reap all the benefits, if not today, then perhaps even about
| a month or two ago.
|
| Yeah, there's actually a huge amount of metaphorical
| territory--if sparsely populated--between "optimistic about
| AI in a general sense" versus "believing all of today's
| market/startup hype".
|
| However it feels like the window has been dragged so far to
| the hype-side that anything less than breathless stock-buying
| while waving a _The Singularity Is Near_ sign will get you a
| "pessimist" or even "Luddite" label.
| mordae wrote:
| Right now, there is nothing to build around, though.
|
| When you have an engine that consistently provides torque
| better and cheaper than humans or animals, you can literally
| build a factory around it. ML tools are currently something you
| occasionally try in case it gets you on track faster, but you
| need to have a fallback to rely on. There is nothing consistent
| about it.
|
| At least yet.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| >There is nothing consistent about it.
|
| Apparently you haven't worked with many humans...
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| >Apparently you haven't worked with many humans...
|
| this goes the other way too, AI that trains on data from
| humans, well you're going to get the same sort of
| reliability haha
|
| We get the best results from neural networks on closed
| systems with an infinite supply of training data (think how
| successful alpha zero was at chess, it simply trained by
| playing games if I'm not mistaken.)
|
| Neural networks are an incredible tool. AI as a chatbot
| trained on human input is going to probably just simulate a
| lower quality human being that hallucinates more than
| normal lol
| humansareok1 wrote:
| Of course but having an expectation of 100% reliability
| from AI when Humans aren't even close to that seems
| misguided.
| gumby wrote:
| I didn't read it as a luddite take so much as a long winded
| description of what you say: there's a lot more latency in
| technology adoption (or even understanding by those who are
| developing it) than most people recognize.
| te_chris wrote:
| That's his point! And doing that invites the x-risk while also
| making things worse due to the stochastic nature of the models.
|
| I work in AI and I think he's right to a degree.
| cbsmith wrote:
| The first comment I saw nailed it for me: in the 80's and 90's
| there was lots of investment in computers as the PC revolution
| took off, and the productivity gains were minimal. As with all
| new technologies, it takes a while for there to be macroeconomic
| scale changes to industry, and those changes aren't going to come
| without the up front investment. This article (and frankly, much
| of society) is looking at the ROI on the wrong time scale.
| levocardia wrote:
| Ditto for electrification of factories. It took a decade or
| more for productivity gains to improve.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I think that's mostly people have a poor mindset.
|
| They think I have this workflow of A->B->C->D and how do I
| improve "B" using technology. Instead you should have
| something else of A->E->D where E wasn't possible or maybe
| just not practical.
|
| You don't want to use technology so that you can type keys
| faster; eliminate the typing of keys process.
|
| A lot of the current GenAI is around making images and
| summarizing text. Those largely aren't real business
| objectives. If you make a powerpoint 70% faster does that
| really close a sale 70% faster? I highly doubt it.
| TylerE wrote:
| Powerpoints? No. But if it gets good/easy/reliable/cheap
| enough I can see a lot of applications. Imagine storing
| incoming customer emails and being able to fish out all
| emails complaining about, say, slow shipping, even if they
| don't use that exact phrase.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > fish out all emails complaining about, say, slow
| shipping, even if they don't use that exact phrase.
|
| isn't that just vectorized or "semantic" searching
| though?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| honestly fuzzy search in semantic space would be a huge
| step for most companies to retrieve relevant docs
|
| windows is still exact string match but at least allows
| partial or reordered string match
|
| filtering an excel column is exact substring only
| ilaksh wrote:
| Funnily enough, I happen to be currently working on an
| agent application where the goal is to generate a
| PowerPoint faster. Right now it takes about a week. We
| should be able to do it in less than 5 minutes. We could do
| it faster, but I am actually reading and manipulating Excel
| and PowerPoint examples to make it easier to change the
| process or adapt the tool calls to other applications, just
| by editing the instructions and rough templates.
| cbsmith wrote:
| A lot of the 80's adoption of the PC meant that people did
| the same presentations but they looked better. ;-)
|
| In fairness, it's not just mindset. It takes a while to
| understand technology _and_ figuring out how it can be
| effectively harnessed. A- >E->D isn't achieved simply by
| realizing you can do that. There's a whole sequence of
| steps to change the shape of A,E & D to make that happen.
|
| But you're right, a lot of GenAI right now is not being
| used for things that are real game changers. This is the
| first step to establishing the foundation from which the
| real game changers will spring.
| talldayo wrote:
| > the longer AI takes to show up in any positive economic
| indicators, the more it becomes the case that AI has brought
| increasing existential risk in exchange for minimal upside.
|
| No? None of that is predecided. You are concluding that based on
| vague threats made by people who are "in the know" that can't
| even substantiate their own fear when confronted over it.
|
| Existential risk comes from when us, humanity, trusts our own
| lives in something that is faulty. The solution is to not use or
| design around fault-agnostic systems, not to fear scenarios where
| stupid people make mistakes. AI is not red mercury, it is not a
| magical force multiplier that terrorists use to make lunchbox
| nukes.
|
| I'm getting so tired of HN submissions like this that throw an
| alarmist opinion over the fence like this guy is secretly onto
| something. This is bunk.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It's a somewhat hilarious _non sequitur_ , equating uselessness
| with existential risk. Like, my cat is also failing to show up
| in national economic indicators.
| psd1 wrote:
| No it isn't; it's two separate premises, which the author
| uses to synthesise a conclusion. Both premises are required
| for the conclusion.
|
| Neither premise is settled, and if you disagree with either,
| you're welcome to discard the conclusion. But you can hardly
| expect a blogger to start from first principles in every
| post.
| abeppu wrote:
| I saw some blurb (I can't find it now) about the optimal time to
| launch an interstellar probe, and the punchline was that
| embarking too soon means you will be overtaken by a later vehicle
| which launched later but with better tech. When the rate of
| technological progress relative to the duration of a mission is
| above some threshold, it's rational to do more front-loaded
| research before actually committing to a particular plan to apply
| it.
|
| In the AI case, advancement has been so rapid that to a certain
| extent, it makes sense for large companies to delay some aspects
| of retooling, because better models that come out next month may
| have different characteristics or requirements. We haven't seen
| the big shifts in productivity because reorganizing around new
| tech is slow, and the tech itself is still changing so fast.
| TylerE wrote:
| Maybe, but all technology is built on what came before, so
| actually launching the thing and seeing what it does is a big
| part of enabling the next generation to be better.
| abeppu wrote:
| I'm not sure that we disagree, but perhaps we're
| understanding "launching" in the metaphor somewhat
| differently. I think the key point about the interstellar
| probe example is it's assumed that once it's launched, it's
| not going to improve on the very long flight to Alpha
| Centauri. Maybe this isn't actually fair -- if you design a
| solar sail, pushed by a giant laser that stays in our system,
| you could likely upgrade the laser while the probe is in
| flight, but your probe can't build itself a new larger sail,
| or develop itself a fusion drive.
|
| I think research _is_ rapidly building off the prior
| generation of techniques, but this improvement doesn 't show
| up in the economic impact the article author is complaining
| about. Actual productivity changes are going to come when
| large organizations integrate AI models to replace or improve
| key systems or human-performed functions. This is slow,
| expensive, and probably a minority of transformations like
| this are even started, let alone showing fruit, and I think
| it's rational for a lot of companies to defer starting this
| work until the tech improves further. There's also a possibly
| prolonged intermediate phase where some stuff is being done
| both by an AI-centered system and either a human or a legacy
| system while the organization measures how well the AI
| version does (and how stable/reliable any associated vendors
| are), and during this period, productivity may even take a
| measurable hit.
| gumby wrote:
| There was a funny (joke) academic paper circulating around 2000
| that showed if you were plannig to do a computation that would
| take about a year that in 6 months you could pay 1/3 less and
| still get the computation done faster.
|
| What made it so funny is not only that it was written so well
| but that things were moving so fast back then it felt
| plausible.
| rickydroll wrote:
| I think another analogy that applies to AI is going to orbit.
| It's "not hard" for a sufficiently large rocket to be able to
| hit orbital heights. It's pretty hard for the rocket to enter
| orbit at the same height. In the AI world, we are at the
| suborbital stage of technology. For me, the 99% use case is
| accessibility tools (speech recognition, grammar correction)
| and coding.
|
| Image generation is like poor-quality Photoshop. Which, by the
| way, is the best target image generative AI could shoot for. Do
| what Photoshop can do, only better and easier.
| avaldez_ wrote:
| >the optimal time to launch an interstellar probe, and the
| punchline was that embarking too soon means you will be
| overtaken by a later vehicle which launched later but with
| better tech.
|
| That's the wait calculation
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Interstellar_tr...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| "The latest estimates, using official figures, suggest that real
| output per employee in the median rich country is not growing at
| all."
|
| If I can use an AI assistant to complete a job in 3 hours that
| used to take 9 hours, that's a win for me, because now I have 6
| hours to spend on a personal open-source project, some family
| business, recreational (and healthy) exercise, or some community-
| beneficial volunteer activities. While this might not show up on
| the corporate balance sheet, it's going to make the overall
| society a lot healthier.
|
| The existential risk of AI to the current socioeconomic order
| might have more to do with AI systems making better economic
| decisions than the overcompensated executive-shareholder sector
| does, and at far lower cost to the corporation or institution
| that adopts it. This makes logical sense, since the skills
| involved in humans climbing to positions of power in
| organizations (manipulation of other people, hyping up one's
| capabilities, clinging desperately to power, etc.) don't
| translate into efficient well-run operations.
| ghaff wrote:
| It sort of depends on what you assume become table-stakes
| tools. Spreadsheets reduced some work, created more work (run a
| bunch of alternative models), and yes probably eliminated some
| work--for the people fluent in them. It's probably hard to
| argue that spreadsheets (which have become the most inarguably
| successful low-code tools) have markedly decreased the amount
| of work their users need to do in companies.
| purple-leafy wrote:
| Except that's not how it ever works. Any productivity gains
| will be consumed by your employer, and the expectations of your
| position will increase with the productivity gains.
|
| Ie: if your role is now 75% more productive on average, the new
| expectation of that role is a 75% increase in outputs.
|
| So it actually will get much worse for you, because you'll be
| doing much, much more for effectively the same pay :)
|
| There used to be a single role that did the data layer, a
| single role that did QA/Testing, a single role for UI/UX, a
| single role for client side, a single role for server side, and
| a devops team.
|
| Then when the world became good at this stuff, the expectation
| shifted to, in many cases, a single role juggling all of this
| work
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| The ultimate marshmallow test for humanity.
| exe34 wrote:
| if that's no economic impact, there won't be existential risk.
| theLiminator wrote:
| Yeah, it's flat out a bad take. If the AI is utterly incapable
| of doing anything useful, it would be utterly incapable of
| being an existential risk.
| exe34 wrote:
| i was thinking more if the current crop of AI are useless,
| they won't get enough money pumped into them to lead to
| runaway amplification. if there's genuine risk, then there
| will be rewards. if we're close to that kind of AI, then we
| can't afford for our enemies to find it first.
| hankman86 wrote:
| Is this necessarily correlated? I would think that the
| potential to cause disaster is rather linked to whether AI is
| given authority to enact autonomously decisions, i.e. given
| access to critical systems.
| exe34 wrote:
| if there's no benefit, AI's net cost is more than traditional
| systems. no benefits, no access.
| bglazer wrote:
| If AI has no economic impact, it almost by definition also has no
| ability to marshal the kind of resources necessary to destroy all
| of humanity. All the doom scenarios seem to rely on quasi-magical
| abilities springing from advanced intelligence, but ignore that
| these scenarios require the AI to have access to significant
| resources.
|
| Then, suppose AI does somehow think itself into effecting human
| annihilation, what happens when all the humans are dead? At the
| current state of things, all electricity production on the planet
| goes dark in maybe two weeks. Nuke plants irradiate significant
| parts of the earth, chip fabs are bricked, metal production is
| toast. In short the AI necessarily dies too.
|
| The only way for this not to happen is AI controlled robots first
| gaining complete control of massive chunks of the economy. If AI
| is as useless as the article claims then that will effectively
| never happen. Thus, AI doom scenarios are always a murder suicide
| situation, and I'm not sure I believe anyone who says a
| superhumanly capable planner would pursue that plan. It even
| negates the "paperclip optimizer" as the AI's demise obviously
| puts a hard upper limit on the number of paperclips produced.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| > All the doom scenarios seem to rely on quasi-magical
| abilities springing from advanced intelligence
|
| The amount of people who dismiss doom risk with some version of
| "I'm not smart enough to imagine what something far smarter
| than me might be capable of" is staggering. "I can't imagine
| how nanobots might work therefore they must be impossible."
|
| >Then, suppose AI does somehow think itself into effecting
| human annihilation, what happens when all the humans are dead?
| At the current state of things, all electricity production on
| the planet goes dark in maybe two weeks. Nuke plants irradiate
| significant parts of the earth, chip fabs are bricked, metal
| production is toast. In short the AI necessarily dies too.
|
| Smart enough to eradicate humanity but not smart enough to plan
| ahead to keep itself running. Ok buddy.
|
| >The only way for this not to happen is AI controlled robots
| first gaining complete control of massive chunks of the
| economy. If AI is as useless as the article claims then that
| will effectively never happen.
|
| "AI hasn't taken over large parts of the economy, therefore it
| never will." I really just can't even...
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh when just last week we saw what happens when a single
| random vendor gains control over large chunks of the economy.
| Productivity in companies is weird it's like it seeps in
| slowly over years without much improvement then suddenly it's
| everywhere
| throwanem wrote:
| Mostly the people dismissing the x-risk concern do so on the
| grounds that what is being sold is not and cannot become
| smart in the way it's being sold by x-risk stans as being
| able to, which is true. If you want to argue the contrary
| case, starting from the actual point of disagreement is
| probably a better play, because the argument you've actually
| made here constitutes no answer.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| >what is being sold is not and cannot become smart in the
| way it's being sold by x-risk stans
|
| Do you have actual evidence for this astonishing take?
| Because I'm sure the entire field would be entranced by
| your genius here. It's actually completely UN-clear what
| the limits to LLMs are and it's completely ridiculous to
| say otherwise.
|
| >starting from the actual point of disagreement is probably
| a better play
|
| Fundamentally most e/accs or other anti-doom stans believe
| that AGI/ASI are actually impossible, that nothing can be
| smarter than humans and that human brains constitute
| special magic meat. Almost all of their other wrong beliefs
| stem from those.
| bglazer wrote:
| How would the AI keep itself running?
| humansareok1 wrote:
| "I'm not smart enough to imagine how something might work
| therefore it's impossible"
| yifanl wrote:
| Pascal's Wager is a terminating line of thought, adding a
| tech coat of paint doesn't make it any more worth
| discussing.
| bglazer wrote:
| This is magical thinking. Like, the laws of physics still
| apply. Computation depends on power generation, and both
| *require* physical objects that break and decay. Who
| fixes the broken stuff when all the humans are dead?
| tivert wrote:
| > All the doom scenarios seem to rely on quasi-magical
| abilities springing from advanced intelligence, but ignore that
| these scenarios require the AI to have access to significant
| resources.
|
| No. The doom scenario I'm most concerned with is basically the
| one from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna), which doesn't
| require any "quasi-magical" abilities. It's basically taking
| our current economic system and "fixing the glitch" (from the
| capitalist's perspective) that forces them to pay our salaries.
|
| That's (a slow) doom for the vast majority of the population,
| but not for humanity because the wealthy elite would survive.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Anything that removes the need to pay salaries would have
| massive impacts on productivity numbers. (I am not arguing
| that would necessarily be good[1], but it would show up in
| the economic stats, in line with bglazer's point).
|
| [1] The big brain take behind "necessarily" is that: "no
| salaries, everything is free" seems cool, "no salaries, a few
| people hoard all the wealth" seems bad.
| tivert wrote:
| > Anything that removes the need to pay salaries would have
| massive impacts on productivity numbers. (I am not arguing
| that would necessarily be good[1], but it would show up in
| the economic stats, in line with bglazer's point).
|
| I agree with that. My point was that not all "doom
| scenarios" require the kind of "quasi-magical abilities"
| that he tried to use to dismiss them all.
|
| IMHO, the sci-fi "superintelligent AI sends terminators to
| kill all the people" doom scenarios are distractions
| (possibly _intentional_ distractions) from far more
| plausible doom scenarios.
|
| > [1] The big brain take behind "necessarily" is that: "no
| salaries, everything is free" seems cool, "no salaries, a
| few people hoard all the wealth" seems bad.
|
| If the former were plausable, we'd almost be there even
| without AI, so it's either a fantasy or the work we need to
| get there is _not_ technological. The latter is basically
| 2024 but moreso.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Or to put another way, AI can be dangerous even when It's
| being totally helpful... When it is enabling some of
| humanity to screw things up for everyone else out of
| greed or anger.
| nope1000 wrote:
| But no salaries -> no consumption -> no profit for companies.
| I don't see how that's effective capitalism.
| tivert wrote:
| > But no salaries -> no consumption -> no profit for
| companies.
|
| No, you just need a little more imagination. What would the
| economy look like if you didn't need employees to utilize
| resources or undertake projects? Some very mass-market
| consumer oriented companies would _eventually_ go bankrupt
| during the transition, but that doesn 't mean a doom
| scenario like I describe can't or won't happen.
|
| > I don't see how that's effective capitalism.
|
| And you know what? The end result of the transition might
| only vaguely resemble current-day capitalism, and may be
| more properly understood as a transition to a new economic
| system.
|
| However, I think it would probably be like our current
| economy, except with:
|
| * the B2C segment withered mainly to luxury goods of elites
| (yachts, supercars, elite-level fine dining) and sustaining
| a _much smaller_ elite-service-focused labor pool;
|
| * B2B being most of what's left of the market; and
|
| * non-market vanity projects taking up a substantial slice
| of the pie (e.g. Elon Musk using a robot army to build
| ziggurats to celebrate himself, because why not).
| tuatoru wrote:
| This misunderstands the economy. It's driven by household
| and government spending. All that B2B stuff happens
| because some company, somewhere at the end of the chain,
| sells to households or the government.
|
| Sure, there is also business investment. But that only
| happens _because_ someone expects to sell to households
| or the government. If all you are selling is luxury
| goods, which depend on direct high labor content for
| their value, then most of the B2B businesses disappear
| also.
|
| And yes, there are exports. But not at global scale. The
| globe is closed.
| tivert wrote:
| > This misunderstands the economy. It's driven by
| household and government spending. All that B2B stuff
| happens because some company, somewhere at the end of the
| chain, sells to households or the government.
|
| No, I didn't misunderstand it. Let me put it in your
| terms: the remaining elite become tiny but _massively_
| consuming households, and the distinctions between the
| businesses they control and their households will be
| blurred (e.g. Blue Origin being wholly owned by Bezos).
| All the economic actors that cannot provide value to
| these households will get slowly cut off and wither away,
| and these elites (collectively) will eventually cement
| total control over all the valuable resources they have
| some use for (production capacity, compute, energy, raw
| materials, etc).
|
| To go back to a question I asked upthread: what would the
| economy look like if you didn't need employees to utilize
| resources or undertake projects? What happens when most
| households aren't competitive at _anything_ economically,
| but there 's still a lot of stuff out there to be owned?
| My answer is those who own the right things (e.g. AI-run,
| totally automated, adaptable factories; energy resources)
| will be able to support themselves indefinitely with them
| and have massive personal surpluses they then use for
| vanity projects to keep themselves occupied.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| > That's (a slow) doom for the vast majority of the
| population, but not for humanity because the wealthy elite
| would survive.
|
| People throughout history have replaced the "elite" once the
| cost to do so became less than the cost (or benefit) to
| continue on in the status quo. The perceived "doom" would not
| last very long (in the greater span or sense of time) as it
| would all be reorganized, yet again. In that case, I am not
| so sure it's a "doom scenario" but instead something like the
| natural way of things, or history continuing on. And, maybe
| even a needed evolution of the species in that case.
|
| Things would have to be "quasi-magical" to play out (for the
| rest of human eternity) in the way a lot of the AI doom
| musings point to.
| tivert wrote:
| > People throughout history have replaced the "elite" once
| the cost to do so became less than the cost (or benefit) to
| continue on in the status quo.
|
| Past performance is not a guarantee of future success. The
| elite throughout history relied on masses of common people
| to get anything done (do work, go to war, etc.). AI as-
| hyped has the potential to upend that long standing
| dynamic.
|
| The elite aren't going to be replaced if they and the
| resources they care to protect are ensconced in a 50 mile
| buffer patrolled by (among other things) drone-swarms that
| will shove grenades in the face of any unauthorized human
| that dares enter. That technology is pretty close to
| reality, as it's basically the Ukraine/Russia front lines
| with 5-10 more years of drone development.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| > Past performance is not a guarantee of future success.
|
| True.
|
| I am still of the belief humans will continue to human.
| If an uprising of billions vs millions lose, the "elite"
| would also no longer be "elite".
|
| While I have no data, other than observation, the
| "elite", imo, need the validation of their status more
| than those who have none and gave it to them in the first
| place. If they do something so brash as to rid the world
| of these unwashed masses, they have no one left to rise
| above. I don't see them all of a sudden becoming great
| members _of_ this new society; they wanted to own
| society, not be a citizen in it. How that wouldn 't lead
| to self-elimination at that point is hard to imagine -
| thus a needed evolution of the species (even if that's
| extinction and another hominid group later inheriting the
| leftover mess)
| y04nn wrote:
| I think one way for an intelligent AI can gain control over
| humans is not to exterminate them but to control them,
| influence them without them being aware of it, changing the
| recommandation algorithms, producing educational material,
| videos, podcasts, books that would be pro AI while saturating
| our monkey brain with mining-less entertaining content. We
| would become their servant without noticing.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| How would you know this is not the case already?
| latentsea wrote:
| It has been since 2016... Dun-dun-dahhh
| tuatoru wrote:
| Here is a counterexample: Universal cheap AI girlfriends and
| boyfriends.
|
| These would have a mildly depressing effect on the economy for
| a couple of generations, and then the population goes to zero.
| latentsea wrote:
| With birth rates already in decline, population is already
| going to zero.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| only Western Gringos, and Asians in countries like SK and
| China.
|
| much of the world is still crapping out kids just fine.
| subsistence farmers feel more confident doing that than
| programmers, it seems.
| sharemywin wrote:
| ROI. only takes 5 years to make a good crop picker. much
| longer to make a good programmer.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > The only way for this not to happen is AI controlled robots
| first gaining complete control of massive chunks of the
| economy.
|
| So they do that because they plan to annihilate all humans.
| They succeed in both.
|
| How does the AI deal with physics and the heat death of the
| universe?
| ppqqrr wrote:
| If a miraculous new technology that helps individuals grok any
| conceivable topic has "no economic impact," you should probably
| question how you measure of economic impact - perhaps even your
| very definition of the economy, the nature of human labor and
| collaboration. Fundamental changes at the base of the hierarchy
| will always escape the attention of high level managerial class,
| because the one thing they're never taught to do is to consider
| the possibility that their inherited power structure may become
| irrelevant.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > If a miraculous new technology that helps individuals grok
| any conceivable topic
|
| If you think that's happened, then you and I are living on very
| different Internets with different individuals. :P
| realharo wrote:
| Or maybe that already happened decades ago with the Internet
| and search engines.
| ppqqrr wrote:
| Arguably, but imho the difference between search engines
| and GPTs is akin to punch card coding vs modern IDE -
| theoretically the same activity, vastly different in
| practice.
| realharo wrote:
| For generating output, sure, but when it comes to _"
| helping individuals grok any conceivable topic"_ like the
| original comment said, you're still bottlenecked by how
| fast you can read and understand text, so it won't make
| as much difference there.
|
| Plus, from my experience, the more obscure topics, which
| are not easy to google, also tend to suffer the most from
| hallucinations when using LLMs. The topics which ChatGPT
| can explain perfectly usually have well-written
| explanations at the top of search results too.
| Terr_ wrote:
| My (snarky) point is that I do not think LLMs have
| dramatically enabled the average person to grok (to gain a
| deep and intuitive understanding of) new topics, because I
| haven't observed the corresponding sea-change in (mostly
| online) people that I would expect to go with that.
|
| To offer a competing hypothesis: LLMs are merely augmenting
| or replacing other routes that people may take to acquire
| _facile_ knowledge. In addition, the fundamental way those
| tools operate limits them to imparting facile knowledge.
| wmf wrote:
| The simplest explanation is just that people aren't using it
| yet.
| christkv wrote:
| I don't think we have seen the start of productivity gains. We
| are using it to write drafts for public competitions. It's turned
| something that would be weeks of pain into days. That means the
| people involved can spend less time on trite and focus on
| editorial. It's also let our small team take on more parallel
| bids with less frustration.
| titanomachy wrote:
| And presumably your competition is also now free to bid on more
| contracts, meaning each contract has many more bids, which
| means the client needs to use AI to read them all...
|
| prompt -> your AI blackbox -> client's AI blackbox -> client
| picks winner
|
| Maybe someday the client will let you submit your prompt
| directly to their AI blackbox so you can save computing
| resources.
| christkv wrote:
| If im lucky we will provide our chat bot tuned with
| information about our product and their bot can talk to ours
| and voila lol
| titanomachy wrote:
| Please submit your application in the form of an executable
| binary under 100GB containing an interactive agent which
| will convince us to give you money!
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| crowdstrike end of the world: https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comic/likely-apocalypse
| hankman86 wrote:
| Are there any independent statistics for how much AI based coding
| assistants like GitHub CoPilot improve an average software
| developer's productivity?
|
| I had hoped for something around 5%, which is not massive, but
| still a non-trivial number.
|
| Not sure how AI assistants in other "high value" professions far.
| Say in legal, healthcare, finance, civil engineering, business
| consulting to name a few. Does anyone have reliable figures?
| tim333 wrote:
| You've kind of got two different things:
|
| 1) Current AI, mostly LLMs, not much economic impact, no
| extinction risk.
|
| 2) Sci-fi like future ASI, big impact, some existential risk.
|
| Discussing the second is tricky as we don't quite know how it
| will go and will probably change all sorts of things. But re 'we
| are all going to die' type stuff, currently we will with
| certainty due to age, with sci-fi AI, not necessarily. So that
| kind of p(doom) is much lower with ASI.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| The problems with the current generation and rollout of "AI"
| which I am using synonymously in this post with large language
| models, because that's the context it seems to be mostly used in
| print media - are so numerous that I could not list them out all
| in one post and this has been debated to an absurd degree
| already, on this site and on other platforms.
|
| I really can't think of many, if any real positives. One example
| I like to use is in video game tutorial articles. I don't know if
| you've tried to use basically any search engine to find reliable
| video game information/walkthroughs lately, but the amount of
| blatant misinformation that has proliferated in this space makes
| searching the web for even the most basic information an exercise
| in complete futility.
|
| This is something "AI" should be _good_ at. Video game
| walkthroughs have been done to death, a game that 's been out for
| 2+ years has likely already had every single secret and path in
| it discovered 10,000 times over and posted all over reddit and
| other sites. Yet, after completing my 2nd elden ring run this
| weekend, my first since 2022, I was struck at how much blatantly
| wrong info I stumbled across, even on websites I had considered
| "authoritative." And it's always subtle enough to be impossibly
| annoying - stuff like "head south from this site" when in fact,
| it should have said "north" Very small errors that seem like the
| result of hallucinations that cause an inordinate amount of time
| spent figuring out what's wrong - much like my experience with
| coding "assistants."
|
| If it can't get something like this correct - which I'm aware
| isn't necessarily a purely "AI" problem - how do we expect it to
| do anything important? I really have not seen a solid case yet
| and would love to be convinced otherwise, but the more I learn
| the less I like what I see.
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