[HN Gopher] Most AI value will come from broad automation, not f...
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       Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R&D
        
       Author : ydnyshhh
       Score  : 68 points
       Date   : 2025-03-22 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (epoch.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (epoch.ai)
        
       | techpineapple wrote:
       | Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess
       | one for the more common reason that it's displacing humanity with
       | technology, but the second reason is just you can't get excited
       | about a hype that is unlikely to manifest.
       | 
       | It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
        
         | api wrote:
         | Replacing human labor with technology is usually a wonderful
         | thing if the gains are generally realized. It means less time
         | spent in 'toil' and more time to pursue one's true interests
         | and desires.
         | 
         | The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any
         | guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the
         | benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer
         | and everyone else will stay the same or get poorer.
        
           | decGetAc wrote:
           | Agreed,only the super rich will get cars err electricity err
           | I mean refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean
           | mobile devices
           | 
           | To be fair I think there's a lot of truth in your statement
           | in the short term (and arguably in the long). But in the
           | 'long' term , it sure does look like revolutionary technology
           | makes everyday peoples life better (I didn't even go into
           | transportation or health care/life expectency)
        
             | exe34 wrote:
             | How will you pay for the cars err electricity err I mean
             | refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean
             | mobile devices when you have no income?
        
             | jajko wrote:
             | There will be soon new type of stuff only for rich - clean
             | air, safe healthy food, beautiful nature, stable climate
             | location, safe from warfare... we are not heading for a
             | rosy future.
             | 
             | Sure everybody can be addicted to some crappy social
             | service on their phones, but that's not a mark of progress
             | in 2025 nor definition of life fulfillment/happiness, some
             | would say in contrary. Obesity was also for a long time
             | mark of wealth (and in some 3rd world countries it still
             | is), and now its a sign of low social status and failure
             | for various reasons.
             | 
             | Btw life expectancy i starting to decline again in
             | developed countries, its just 3rd world that has so much
             | gap to cross that they still go up.
        
             | api wrote:
             | When I said recent history I meant the last roughly 20
             | years, when the trend has been for gains to go to a smaller
             | and smaller number of people.
             | 
             | Of course historically this does seem to be a cycle.
             | Usually it goes gilded age, revolution, broad-based growth,
             | emergence of a new elite, repeat cycle. Unfortunately the
             | revolution period is often very chaotic and destructive.
        
             | gruntbuggly wrote:
             | Sure, we have more consumer goods available to us, but I
             | don't know if that's a great measure of a better life. We
             | have supercomputers in our pockets but can't talk to our
             | neighbors, AI with a warming planet, etc. It's all
             | tradeoffs. A flourishing human life is independent of
             | technology.
        
             | Terr_ wrote:
             | Let's be careful not to conflate (A) general technological-
             | progress with (B) changes in economic organization and
             | wealth distribution.
             | 
             | The nice things from (A) don't necessarily require what co-
             | occurred with (B). There is nothing in the physics or
             | materials of a refrigerator which requires the assembler to
             | have been paid less than the CEO.
        
           | elzbardico wrote:
           | The rest (and most of us will see included on the rest
           | category) will get soylent, if we are lucky.
        
           | eikenberry wrote:
           | Recent history is a poor guide that will give you a highly
           | skewed view and won't really help you anticipate and plan for
           | the future. You need to look at real history to get
           | perspective. You don't even have to go back very far to see
           | an tiny group of richer-than-rich people that didn't retain
           | their power, an economic loop where this all happened before.
        
             | kingkongjaffa wrote:
             | > Recent history is a poor guide
             | 
             | Wrong, It's the most important prior.
             | 
             | Technology is vastly different now since your supposed
             | "last time", to the point where it's an entirely different
             | landscape for events to unfold.
             | 
             | Look at the state of mass apathy and lack of accountability
             | we have in society now. That tiny group has never been more
             | unaccountable.
        
           | signatoremo wrote:
           | Can you be specific? Which technology only benefit the
           | 0.0001%?
        
         | gruntbuggly wrote:
         | IMO that disillusionment is rooted in identifying the myth of
         | progress. But I tend towards Schopenhauer over Hegel
        
         | henry2023 wrote:
         | Only when looking at this through our common understanding of
         | how societies work.
         | 
         | Broad automation of tasks can be great for society if and only
         | if the product of that automation is not treated as some kind
         | of private property.
         | 
         | I'm not hyped on an automated future because I find it quite
         | unlikely but if it were to happen it has the potential to be
         | transforming beyond expectations.
        
           | Swizec wrote:
           | > Broad automation of tasks can be great for society if and
           | only if the product of that automation is not treated as some
           | kind of private property.
           | 
           | Star Trek or Bladerunner? That's a choice we can make.
        
             | elzbardico wrote:
             | No. Most of the time WE can't make this choice. It is
             | imposed on us by the elites.
        
               | onemoresoop wrote:
               | We still have a lot of power to decide what we want, the
               | problem is that this power is not well leveraged yet.
        
         | NAHWheatCracker wrote:
         | Yea. Watch a sci-fi film - nifty gadgets, robots taking care of
         | chores, and widespread spaceflight. Real life is some
         | unreliable chat bots.
         | 
         | Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced
         | down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an
         | excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet,
         | making it harder to find good content.
        
           | therein wrote:
           | I find it extra surprising that people are advocating for
           | transitioning to using AI while their proof of concept looks
           | like this:
           | 
           | do { resp = callAI(input); } while (!isOutputSane(resp) &&
           | attempts++ < MAX_RETRY)
        
             | jajko wrote:
             | Nobody sane and smart I know is advocating for AI _now_.
             | All keep saying  'one day', 'soon' etc. Our megacorp very
             | effectively blocked all of this and we don't have anything
             | internal yet, but we are in specific market.
             | 
             | And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people
             | trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me
             | bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start
             | building trust. Sure assistants are nice but thats about
             | it.
             | 
             | Its just too flawed now to be dependable and reliable, it
             | feels like typical 80/20 or 90/10 situation where
             | inexperienced juniors are all over their head how future is
             | now, and seniors just meh and go and do some work.
        
               | surgical_fire wrote:
               | > All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc.
               | 
               | The parallels with crypto are amazing.
               | 
               | > And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from
               | people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here.
               | Trust me bro...
               | 
               | Cue some dude chiming in on how they are 1000% more
               | productive now and wrote 100 apps in a weekend with
               | Claude, etc.
               | 
               | It is very tiresome indeed.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | Except this time is quite real for some jobs, maybe
               | programming will take a few more years, but for artistic
               | fields, it is already here.
               | 
               | Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of
               | hiring artists is quite common.
        
               | surgical_fire wrote:
               | > Except this time is quite real
               | 
               | Oh it was very real during crypto hype cycle too. The
               | crypto people were very annoying with it.
               | 
               | > Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of
               | hiring artists is quite common.
               | 
               | I would imagine it is fine for some concept art, based on
               | my experimentation with multiple models for Stable
               | Diffusion.
               | 
               | For generating actual assets that are consistent? I am
               | highly skeptical. Unless we are talking about bottom of
               | the barrel indie games.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | Consistent enough for it to be an issue.
               | 
               | And not only indies, when taking voice actors into
               | consideration.
               | 
               | https://www.ign.com/articles/horizon-actor-ashly-burch-
               | says-...
               | 
               | Or some well known studios,
               | 
               | https://www.ign.com/articles/activision-finally-admits-
               | it-us...
        
               | BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
               | I was very involved in the crypto scene, and really the
               | only real utility was monero for buying the funny
               | chemicals.
        
               | jgilias wrote:
               | Advocate or not, it's here to stay. And if you're not
               | adjusting to it, you're doing yourself a disservice.
               | 
               | Last week I did the amount of work that would've taken me
               | give or take a month. A significant part of it was
               | writing an API client for a system I needed to use.
               | Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this 'by hand' just
               | takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data
               | structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests.
               | With "the robot" once the framework was largely in place,
               | you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and
               | it's done in a minute. With tests and everything.
               | 
               | Now, you could argue that this is not "senior level
               | work". Sure, maybe. But the thing is, you need to use it
               | to learn how to use it effectively, and more importantly
               | to get the intuition about what it can help with best.
               | 
               | So this is my thesis now - if you're a senior who
               | neglects this new tool, you're going to be out of a job
               | soon-ish.
        
               | Scarblac wrote:
               | But a solution that takes an OpenAPI spec and generates
               | all of those things from templates would be much more
               | reliably correct than letting an AI do it, and has
               | already existed for years.
               | 
               | I think AI is a game changer but not for things that can
               | already be automated rigirously without AI.
        
               | jgilias wrote:
               | There was no OpenAPI spec. And it wasn't all it made
               | faster to do.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | Eventually only the arquitect will be required, no need
               | for seniors, the offshoring team is the cloud instead of
               | some folks on the other side of the planet.
               | 
               | This is the future to prepare, not AI generating a couple
               | of files.
        
               | toogan wrote:
               | > Last week I did the amount of work that would've taken
               | me give or take a month. A significant part of it was
               | writing an API client for a system I needed to use.
               | Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this 'by hand' just
               | takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data
               | structures, wire things up for the new call, write tests.
               | With "the robot" once the framework was largely in place,
               | you just paste API docs for the endpoint you need, and
               | it's done in a minute. With tests and everything.
               | 
               | That just points to an inefficiency. Could be tackled in
               | other ways than involving an LLM to produce essentially
               | what's being done elsewhere every day over and over
               | again. A framework automating and hiding all this would
               | be just as effective. Perhaps even cleaner than all that
               | duplication that the LLM created for you.
               | 
               | In other words, that month of busywork that you just
               | saved is inherently unnecessary to do. But progress is
               | not linear in the number of lines of code that you
               | produce. If you think hard about a good architecture and
               | design, coming up with that after 2 weeks of hard
               | thinking, that could be 90% of the work. The remaining
               | 10% are writing all that down. That could take 3 more
               | months, and it taking more than 10% of the time points to
               | the existing inefficiency in tooling / framework / ...
               | But making that more efficient isn't necessarily achieved
               | the best by using an LLM and writing it all out. There
               | are still huge redundancies, which is what made the LLM
               | possible. Once you boil these down in some common
               | frameworks or tools, the LLM will also just produce the
               | same few lines that you'd need to produce to get those
               | 10% done in then just 10% of the total time.
        
             | Scarblac wrote:
             | It's actually `letSlightlyDifferentAIJudgeOutputSanity()`
             | rather than `isOutputSane()`, I think.
        
         | cratermoon wrote:
         | The word you're looking for is 'dystopian'
        
         | rqtwteye wrote:
         | Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits didn't go
         | mainly to the top. I am pretty sure in the not too far future
         | we will have enough technology that you can live off the land
         | somewhere with the help of some robots. Or have them do all
         | your housework. In principle, this is great, but our society is
         | not set up for a lot of people not working while the technology
         | is progressed by a relatively small number of highly qualified
         | people.
         | 
         | I am not sure where this is going but there will be some large
         | changes to society needed if technology keeps progressing at
         | current speed.
        
           | sterlind wrote:
           | I wanted fully-automated luxury communism, but I got fully-
           | automated neo-feudalism instead. It feels bad.
        
           | geysersam wrote:
           | > I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have
           | enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere
           | with the help of some robots.
           | 
           | I don't understand, what stops you from doing that today?
        
           | alwa wrote:
           | ...and we will call it... the plow! Nay, the tractor!
           | 
           | Limited range of inventory, though, and delivery times leave
           | something to be desired... and a tremendous amount of waste
           | per person, but what can you do.
        
         | adamnemecek wrote:
         | > unlikely to manifest
         | 
         | Over what time period? 5 years? 100 years?
        
           | techpineapple wrote:
           | I think a lot of cool shit will happen in the next hundred
           | years, but the "end of scarcity unlimited money/tech points
           | hack" is unlikely to happen in the next 100 years.
           | 
           | And this is the core of my argument, let's talk more about
           | the cool shit.
        
         | ajb wrote:
         | Yeah
         | 
         | The historic benefits of technology come from eliminating the
         | waste of human effort:
         | 
         | - Motors and engines removed the waste of using our muscles as
         | an energy source
         | 
         | - Computers removed the waste of people's time doing
         | calculations and admin manually
         | 
         | - Electronic Communications removed the waste of carrying
         | information in physical form
         | 
         | What's the most prevalent form of waste today? I think it's
         | dishonesty and corruption. And AI seems set to make more of it.
        
         | beau_g wrote:
         | I personally think it's polarized, and either the Pentti
         | Linkola/Ted K way of thinking that the industrial revolution
         | (or maybe even the agricultural revolution) were a detriment to
         | humanity is correct and there is no turning it around within
         | that framework, or all tech progress will reach an ultimately
         | good equilibrium, though will be unstable and have mistakes
         | along the way. I definitely lean towards the latter. What I do
         | not think at all is we should purposely delay tech progress
         | through the use of violence (which is what laws/regulations
         | effectively are) while doing some type of wait and think about
         | it exercise. I definitely don't think anything (good or bad)
         | that does not break the laws of physics is unlikely to
         | manifest, quite the opposite, most things we imagine now will
         | come to fruition in our lifetimes and many others we haven't
         | even imagined yet both good and bad.
        
           | yarekt wrote:
           | Regulation is violence? sorry for putting my socialist hat
           | on, but free market is efficient, so efficient that without
           | regulation it'll optimise away human happiness and find a way
           | to turn tears into profits. Regulation is basically saying
           | that you can make money in ways that benefits the humanity
           | also, at least in theory. Lobbying and corrupt regulators
           | muddy the waters
        
             | beau_g wrote:
             | Of course, laws/regulations are enforced by the party in a
             | country that has a monopoly on violence, and use the threat
             | of violence to enforce (either imprisonment or a monetary
             | fine, monetary fines are a derivative of kidnapping as
             | money takes time to accumulate). Of course I'm not arguing
             | against these functions in general, they should be used in
             | ways that prevent an even worse act of violence (ex. a
             | corporation wasting the time and money of millions of
             | people by selling them a dangerous product). The
             | application layer is where I believe laws and regulations
             | are appropriate though, not preventing the development of
             | the technology (ex. trying to limit who, how, and when
             | someone/some company can do a large training run for an AI
             | video model, because AI video models will be leveraged by
             | scammers down the line).
        
               | toogan wrote:
               | Threat of violence is not violence.
               | 
               | A policeman standing on a public square threatening to
               | incarcerate anybody who is violent results in no violence
               | actually happening at that square. Take away that
               | regulation (in form of the policeman) and watch the
               | actual violence start.
        
         | diordiderot wrote:
         | Feels like early industrial revolution vibes. Some of the hype
         | turned real, just not how and a lot later than anyone expected.
         | Same thing happened in the post-atomic age. But the gaps
         | between revolutions are getting shorter.
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | I am as optimistic as a factory worker about to replaced by
         | robots.
         | 
         | Hence why I can't stand such techno-optmism, apparently most
         | folks live in an ideal world free of economics.
        
           | toogan wrote:
           | Has the last 70 years of productivity increases led to a
           | reduction in weekly work hours? No.
           | 
           | Some jobs will be automated away. Good thing. Braindead stuff
           | that a machine can do should be done by a machine. Doesn't
           | mean we'll all soon be just picking our noses. There will be
           | other work to be done, and if unregulated capitalism has its
           | say then it can easily lead to even more worker exploitation.
        
         | pseudocomposer wrote:
         | My last two roles have involved automating detection of cancers
         | and other disease in biopsies (eliminating pathologists' jobs
         | in hospitals), and now automating invoice payment and statement
         | settlement in the global freight sector (eliminating
         | accountants'/operators' jobs in these companies).
         | 
         | I'm honestly very excited about this type of work. The benefits
         | to society - better healthcare for less money, humans with
         | their beautiful, creative brains not spending 40 hours a week
         | looking at documents unnecessarily - are incredibly obvious.
         | The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to
         | overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place.
         | We're able to do this work in spite of that wasteful,
         | inefficient system, not because of it.
         | 
         | I think the only thing that will actually push people to
         | overthrow it is exactly the type of work I'm doing. Much like
         | the first industrial revolution begat our first efforts at
         | creating a more socialist, just, and democratic society (eg,
         | like Fiorello La Guardia for instance). The benefits to this
         | the first time were extremely tangible.
        
           | 857593936464 wrote:
           | > humans with their beautiful, creative brains not spending
           | 40 hours a week looking at documents unnecessarily
           | 
           | What should they be doing once all the meaningful jobs are
           | automated away?
           | 
           | > The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have
           | to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in
           | place.
           | 
           | > I think the only thing that will actually push people to
           | overthrow it is exactly the type of work I'm doing.
           | 
           | Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage
           | them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though:
           | the revolution will not be kind to you.
        
         | worldsayshi wrote:
         | We should also be displacing hierarchies. Why does it only
         | benefit the very few? Because they get to somehow keep their
         | moats. So how can we displace those moats?
        
           | geysersam wrote:
           | > So how can we displace those moats?
           | 
           | Abolish private property I guess?
        
         | ohgr wrote:
         | The depressing bit is it's a corporate dystopia where you are a
         | constant cash cow driven on hype and hope that never
         | materialises.
         | 
         | Like fuck me someone was trying to sell my company an AI todo
         | list the other day. What problem does it even solve?!?!?
         | 
         | Go out, buy a new iPhone. AI will come tomorrow and tell you
         | when your mother gets to the airport and add it to your
         | calendar and hire you a robotaxi to shovel your obsolete meat
         | corpse into the worker ant distribution hub to escort her back
         | to your techno-panopticon.
        
         | 4b11b4 wrote:
         | I've recently been stuck on the idea that speculation is akin
         | to computation... the moment we depart from the reality before
         | us.
        
         | SequoiaHope wrote:
         | Well: though we are not particularly likely to I do think that
         | replacing people with machines would be fantastic if we
         | actually just let people relax and work less, and so rather
         | than lament the state of things I tend to focus on the need to
         | promote the value of social systems which support human
         | thriving. On the second point, I guess I would say that most of
         | the marketing talk we see is unlikely to manifest but the
         | future will in fact bring fantastic and fanciful advances in
         | technology - it just won't be what the marketers are trying to
         | tell us.
        
         | dogcomplex wrote:
         | We've had a long history of technological improvements being
         | widespread distributed to the people. There's not a
         | particularly bleak reason to believe the latest AI automation
         | won't be too. Look around your desk or your house and just
         | count all the effort-saving devices that have made their way
         | down to you. Look at the price of TVs cratering. Tech that can
         | be recreated easily spreads far and wide. AI can too. It's
         | dropped 1000x in costs the last 2 years. This stuff will be
         | running on old tech everywhere - and speedier and cheaper new
         | chips, bots and other hardware are on their way.
         | 
         | Unless there's a new world war or draconian regulation, we're
         | good. It's pretty much locked in.
        
       | AndrewKemendo wrote:
       | This is exactly correct technically and perfectly on the existing
       | "paved path" of technology determinism.
       | 
       | My company is actively in the process of demonstrating the
       | "Learning machine" which is a Weiner style cybernetic system of
       | systems
       | 
       | It's unquestionable at this point that machines will displace all
       | human labor where labor efficiency is the key factor for
       | investment/use. Start with transfer learning from existing human
       | machine interfaces and then expand to onpolicy with human
       | feedback to SARSA.
       | 
       | The only remaining question is the persistent one "who benefits"
       | 
       | Almost nobody is working on what to do after
        
         | zurfer wrote:
         | I think plenty of people are working on that, some unaware :P
         | 
         | Games for status will continue.
         | 
         | Consuming experiences will continue (experiences that require
         | humans will be premium).
         | 
         | And in a good case, we will still have plenty of work to do to
         | decide what to do (going to space, making earth sustainable,
         | merging with machines, ...).
        
         | gom_jabbar wrote:
         | > Almost nobody is working on what to do after
         | 
         | One interesting possibility is that this is not something
         | humans need to work on at all - because, as Nick Land famously
         | put it, "Tomorrow can take care of itself." [0]
         | 
         | [0] https://retrochronic.com/#meltdown
        
           | BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
           | Why's he write like if I tried to mimick anti-oedipus
        
       | getnormality wrote:
       | This article lost all credibility with me here:
       | 
       | > ...this means that only 20% of labor productivity growth in the
       | US since 1988 has been driven by R&D spending! Capital deepening
       | accounts for around half of labor productivity growth in this
       | period...
       | 
       | This is like saying that Jeff Dean's net worth is attributable
       | not to his programming skills, but to the capital deepening of
       | his bank account. The authors are working with concepts at a
       | level of abstraction where they've lost contact with what they're
       | saying.
        
         | __loam wrote:
         | Bizarre way to describe capital deepening. Jeff's programming
         | skills probably got a lot more relevant because of things like
         | the proliferation of internet access and utility computing.
         | Seems like a pretty simple statement to me but maybe that's too
         | abstract for you.
        
         | tbrownaw wrote:
         | You know how office workers are more productive because of
         | computers? This didn't just happen because various companies
         | did R&D investments in building (better) computers, but also
         | because companies actually spent money buying computers for
         | their office workers and because those office workers spent
         | time learning how to use computers.
        
           | getnormality wrote:
           | If A caused B caused C, how does one determine the relative
           | contributions of A and B to C? It makes no sense.
        
       | mooreds wrote:
       | If you haven't read this classic about technology deployment from
       | 2015, it's worth a read.
       | 
       | https://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html
       | 
       | Feels like we're still in the exploration phase of GenAI, but ML
       | seems like it is in the deployment phase.
        
       | klooney wrote:
       | A lot of the people writing are in the US, which mostly does R&D
       | and services- broad automation of production is likely to be
       | invisible here.
        
       | mirekrusin wrote:
       | So they are arguing which one will get more benefits first - r&d
       | or general automation? What is the point in arguing around it?
       | 
       | Disconnect between progress being done (ie. alphafold) and trying
       | to infer answer from some historic stats on r&d investment,
       | ratios, their past estimated impact etc. is... just weird.
       | 
       | It's also funny that the whole ai itself together with constant
       | breakthroughs is r&d.
        
         | godelski wrote:
         | I hate these people that try to argue we don't need R&D. It's
         | extremely short sighted and equivalent to pretending that the
         | ground you stand on is worthless. Without the ground, you
         | literally have nothing to stand on... Talk about pulling
         | yourself up by your bootstraps...
        
       | godelski wrote:
       | This is a bit silly. It is equivalent to saying "most food will
       | come from tractors, not land." There is some truth to this, but
       | you really can't have one without the other. The whole system is
       | interconnected.
       | 
       | The problem with all these jabs at R&D and science is not
       | recognizing that R&D and science produce the very foundations
       | that lead to the ability to do production in the first place. I'm
       | certainly not saying we should dump all our money into R&D, but I
       | do find it weird that others talk as if the ground you stand on
       | doesn't matter. You literally cannot stand without it. The truth
       | is that you need both. I suspect why we shy away from R&D is for
       | 2 big reasons.
       | 
       | First, it has a lot of failure. The hardest thing about doing
       | research is being able to stick with it when 90% of what you do
       | doesn't work. It's fucking hard. But of course it is. If it was
       | easy it would have already been done. So returns on the work can
       | take a lot of time and the visibility of the failure is
       | emotionally draining to those without enough resilience.
       | 
       | Second, we do not accurately capture nor ascribe the value nor of
       | research. People who create ground breaking scientific
       | revolutions that create the capacity for trillion dollar markets
       | never end up with 1% of the result of their work. You don't see
       | Tim Berners-Lee being a billionaire, nor Linus Torvald. You
       | didn't see it in Einstein and cases like Turing are quite common
       | through history. Certainly this is an alignment issue as we as a
       | society should be encouraging such pursuits as their benefits
       | vastly outweigh anything that has been done by Apple or Google.
       | Not to diminish their achievements, they have both done fantastic
       | and incredible things, but do they not sit on the foundations
       | created by Turing, Burners-Lee, Hopper, and others. Or look even
       | today, the work done by LeCun, Sutskever, Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li,
       | Hinton, and yes, even Schmidhuber has created more than a few
       | dozen multi-billion dollar enterprises. Yet as far as I am aware,
       | not a single one of them is a billionaire. I do not believe (I
       | could be TOTALLY wrong) their combined net worth is a billion.
       | Even if it was, that would be a far cry from what many of the
       | mogul we see today. Do we really think Zuckerberg has created
       | more _value_ than these people? Certainly this is entirely
       | dependent upon your definition of _value_ and I think most of use
       | could agree that it would be incredibly naive to believe this
       | exclusively means the money in their pockets. If you really do
       | believe that, I will say that you 're part of a problem. Money is
       | a proxy, sometimes we need to stop and think "a proxy for what?"
        
       | akomtu wrote:
       | If we discovered a civilization of moderately smart pandas living
       | on a remote planet and dropped the AI technology onto them, what
       | would happen to their civilization? And what's our motivation?
        
       | callamdelaney wrote:
       | Obviously?
       | 
       | The US pays $12,000,000,000,000~ in salaries per year the TAM of
       | automation is, assuming that 10% of work can be automated, $1.2
       | trillion dollars.
        
       | bashfulpup wrote:
       | Very typical SV argument that R&D is "complex" and everything
       | else is "simple".
       | 
       | Would it blow your mind if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI
       | that can do math/code better than 99% of humans but ordering a
       | hotdog on doordash would be cutting edge and barely doable?
       | 
       | I don't disagree that "common" tasks are more valuable. I only
       | argue that the argument these are easily automatable is a
       | viewpoint based on ignorance. RPA has been around for over a
       | decade and is not used in many tasks. AI is largely the same,
       | until we get massive unrestriced access to the data for it we
       | will not automate it.
        
         | User23 wrote:
         | The code that AI is good at currently is exactly common tasks.
         | 
         | Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card driver
         | for Nvidia hardware or anything else that requires actual
         | creative problem solving that isn't github boilerplate.
        
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