I don’t see the world this piece presents panning out. Either we make general intelligence (which then scales almost instantly to be way, way smarter than any human ever and then accidentally kills us [1]) or we don’t and humans still have a role to play in the workforce.
Moore's Law for Everything
431–440 of 554 posts
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#432> democracy can become antagonistic as people seek to vote money away from each other. ... > We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor I find it amazing that these "thinkers" don't see the irony. You are "afraid" that people are going to vote you away from your wealth via democracy; but then you feel privileged to decide how this wealth should be taxed. Since AIs are getting smarter than humans, m…
> Since AIs are smarter than humans, why bother teaching humans at all? Unless there is a point where a developed human brain could outsmart the AI, it seems to be a waste and emotionally guided. The obscurity for the definition of AI is precisely what drives this. The term AI is so vague among tech circles that I find the term basically laughable at this point. If we're talking about sentient AI, then none of these…
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#433Here is my perspective working in industrial automation field (think of these for 4 points as matrix): 1) Things that are easy to automate are already automated. 2) Many things that are difficult to automate but increase productivity a lot are already automated. 3) Many things that easy to automate and increase productivity only a little bit are already automated. 4) Things that are difficult to automate and increase…
OP’s thesis is that AI sets us on a new exponential curve that dramatically increases the ease of automation and the range of things worth automating. At the same time, your point about other exponential effects that offset the gains is thought-provoking. As other comments point out, the Moore’s Law in computing hardware has not translated to a Moore’s Law for software usability or productivity. It’s not guaranteed that a Moore’s Law in AI will translate into a Moore’s Law for everything.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#434I don't buy this whole idea of technological progress being exponential, let alone monotonic. The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain than the average piece of software from 2001. Consumer-grade CPUs haven't seen a drastic increase in performance for around a decade too. I'm still running an i7-2600k that was released in 2010. A current-tech Ryzen 7 has mayb…
Computer power is still growing exponentially without a doubt:
https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/
Software efficiency seems to be exponential in many places as well: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-...
That doesn't mean ALL technology progress is exponential, people like Altman or Kurzweil don't make that claim either. But as more things become more digitised they will benefit from Moore's law more and more and progress might become exponential there also due to their dependence on computing power.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#435This essay doesn't address any of the key problems often raised when talking about AI and UBI. Here is Australia we are already seeing one the effects of very cheap stuff. Skilled labor is significantly more expensive than buying things, so anything that has to have an Australian involved is ridiculously expensive. Calling the Plumber to fix a drain? That's a week of groceries or perhaps a new TV. At some point soon…
> Taxing land sounds fair enough, but I was under the impression we are already subsidizing a lot of farming anyhow I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Taxing land doesn't really have much connection to farming specifically. In fact, most high value land is urban areas and cities (NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, etc.), so farm land is mostly irrelevant when talking about a land value tax. > Any aren't we supposed to…
Oh, here in Australia I'm already paying nearly 4K a year for my block of land in the suburbs. Do you not have similar in the US?
I had assumed the OP was suggesting we tax the big primary producers who work the land for profit, not people who need somewhere to live.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#436As an engineer you want to solve problems with systems. The world is too complex for that. It is doomed to fail, which creates an endless cycles of fixing it up, which basically politics is.
Can it be improved? Sure, go into politics. Can it be solved, oh good no! We still have collective nightmares of the attempts.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very misleading metaphor. Horses were not workers. The were tools workers used. Farmers used horses to plow the fields. Transport workers used them to transport goods and people. As those workers got better tools to plow and transport, productivity increased, society got richer. There are also millions of old telegraphs, slide rules, and rotary phones "unemployed" across the world. The fate of these no long…
Guess what, 90% of humans are also tools that a small percentage of other humans use to accomplish their goals. Few people would argue that the job of “Amazon warehouse worker” is anything other than a tool for Jeff Bezos to become richer and more powerful. The person who has that job, from when they clock in to when they clock out, is functionally equivalent to a horse. Amazon software engineers are the same, they j…
People have choices. They can work for another company, they can start their own business, they can go live in the forest and live off the land. People can do whatever they want.
If they want to get money and work at a specific company, don't claim they are slaves. Amazon makes an offer: hey, if you work here you get X amount, and they accept.
You can claim an employee is a tool for the company, but you can also claim a company is a money generator for an employee. It's a work-money trade between 2 parties. Don't claim it's slavery.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess what, 90% of humans are also tools that a small percentage of other humans use to accomplish their goals. Few people would argue that the job of “Amazon warehouse worker” is anything other than a tool for Jeff Bezos to become richer and more powerful. The person who has that job, from when they clock in to when they clock out, is functionally equivalent to a horse. Amazon software engineers are the same, they j…
People have choices. They can work for another company, they can start their own business, they can go live in the forest and live off the land. People can do whatever they want. If they want to get money and work at a specific company, don't claim they are slaves. Amazon makes an offer: hey, if you work here you get X amount, and they accept. You can claim an employee is a tool for the company, but you can also clai…
More often than not its "take this abusive offer or starve to death". Not much of a choice there.
The way I see it, what you're describing is an outdated ideology, which does not apply in practice in most parts of the world, except for a few privileged places.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#439I don't buy this whole idea of technological progress being exponential, let alone monotonic. The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain than the average piece of software from 2001. Consumer-grade CPUs haven't seen a drastic increase in performance for around a decade too. I'm still running an i7-2600k that was released in 2010. A current-tech Ryzen 7 has mayb…
Computer power is still growing exponentially without a doubt: https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/ Software efficiency seems to be exponential in many places as well: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-... That doesn't mean ALL technology progress is exponential, people like Altman or Kurzweil don't make that claim either. But as more things become more digitised they will benefit fr…
> Software efficiency seems to be exponential in many places as well
No, in one place. That single example gets touted again and again, but it's just a single class of algorithms, and much of the cited performance gains are from a small set of well-known example problems. (I took Professor Groetschel's linear optimisation class at university).
In compilers, for example, progress is much more "majestic": Proebsting's law [1] was shown to be wildly optimistic even back in 2001 [2]: "The reality is somewhat grimmer than Proebsting initially supposed." More recently, it seems like progress has pretty much stalled for most applications, for example: "Using Stabilizer, we find that, across the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite, the effect of the -O3 optimization level versus -O2 is indistinguishable from noise." [3]
But while returns are diminishing, the costs of obtaining those diminishing returns have gone up tremendously ("exponentially"?) For example, Minix's time to compile itself (including the compiler) apparently went from 10 minutes to over 2 hours when they switched from their own compiler to clang.[4] For Plan9 the same switch caused times to go from 45 seconds to over 2 hours [5].
And with Swift we get even longer compile times, including the compiler giving up on one-liners after a minute, and the result is slower, too!
I could give many more examples, but generally Wirth's law holds: software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
[1] http://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=66C...
[3] https://emeryberger.com/research/stabilizer/
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess what, 90% of humans are also tools that a small percentage of other humans use to accomplish their goals. Few people would argue that the job of “Amazon warehouse worker” is anything other than a tool for Jeff Bezos to become richer and more powerful. The person who has that job, from when they clock in to when they clock out, is functionally equivalent to a horse. Amazon software engineers are the same, they j…
People have choices. They can work for another company, they can start their own business, they can go live in the forest and live off the land. People can do whatever they want. If they want to get money and work at a specific company, don't claim they are slaves. Amazon makes an offer: hey, if you work here you get X amount, and they accept. You can claim an employee is a tool for the company, but you can also clai…
Those choices will become illusions.
> Work for another company -> compete for decreasing number of jobs with increasing number of candidates.
> start their own business -> compete with everyone that is smarter than you and/or had a better starting position.
> go live in the forest and live off the land -> this is called poverty.