Moore's Law for Everything • Hacker News Board

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#441

Post by qeternity » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:05 AM UTC

wffurr wrote: post #298

qeternity wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?? It’s the exact opposite. Those people HAVE to work that hard precisely for the reason I mentioned: they won’t be paid otherwise. This is precisely the issue. If you paid people irrespective of how much they work, they won’t work. Your example is evidence of my statement, not refutation.

Do I really work harder as a software engineer than the garbagemen who bust their asses doing a dangerous smelly job? Or teachers wrangling a room full of kids? I don't think so. And yet I am paid 5-10X what they are.

You are still completely missing the point. Stop deciding you want to be angry about my comment before actually reading it.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#442

Post by qeternity » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #353

qeternity wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These arguments always ignore the fact that the only reason $X GDP is generated is because people are incentivized. Children don’t produce, so someone else is producing for them. If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work. We’ve tried socialism.

> " We’ve tried socialism. " I don't remember from school the bit where Mr Socialism said "let the workers sieze the means of production so they can shutdown the means of production, because they are lazy and stupid". "define:Socialism"[1] - "Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively". NB. that it involves production , and is…

> Have you never seen or heard of volunteers?

Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons.

> There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?

You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is. If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.

Guys please stop deciding you want to be upset about a comment and then trying to backsolve your rationale.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#443

Post by Simon321 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:10 AM UTC

csbartus wrote: post #143

csomar wrote: post #103

> 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…

> Realizing that is the first step to move forward in this new world. Right, we've become disposable. Up until the computer era we were part of the equation. We went to war, to vote, and we paid taxes - making ourselves useful for state and capital. Now, they don't need us anymore. We are a burden for the state (universal basic income) and capital plays its own game (high frequency trading). Samuel Butler was right i…

We can still vote, so they still need us. With the time freed up by AI we can become more informed voters.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#444

Post by jay_kyburz » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:14 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #378

I 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…

I don't know about the average software, but my primary tools, Unity 3D and Blender are both significantly more productive than what I was using in 2001. (Was in the same industry).

I think a lot of software is just "done" and we see a lot of churn for no real reason. Office software like email, word, and excel are just moving buttons around at this point.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#445

Post by whitepaint » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:16 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #413

cma wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare voice recognition in 2001 to 2021.

To be honest with you, if you look at the technology as a whole, I prefer what we had in 2001. Back then it was completely unusable (as opposed to now, where it's only borderline unusable), but at least it wasn't shoved down your throat by smartphone manufacturers and Google.

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Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#446

Post by nickpp » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #299

xrd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a thought experiment: let's say we take Sam's ideas alongside something like UBI, where everyone has a baseline of income provided by the society they live in. You succeed wildly, and get rich as an entrepreneur. Sadly, in a generation or two, your grandchildren will be back with the rest of the plebeians, despite grandpops launching YC, writing books on art and coding and creating an bunch of amazing companies.…

Is this actually realistic? In the Soviet Union, there was no such problem - brilliant people by and large were happy to become scientists and engineers, and scientists and engineers got into the planning agencies and into the government too, in droves. Same in pre 1989 China. I don't see why the USSR and Mao's China were able to retain (and sometimes even attract) these people, but the society you're describing woul…

The brilliant people that stayed in the USSR had no choice - they were kept there by force either directly (not allowed to leave) or indirectly (leave but your family will pay the price).

But they all wanted to leave. The more you knew how much better your life could be in the west, the more you hated staying.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#447

Post by jay_kyburz » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:20 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #244

joe_the_user wrote: post #78

In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. Aside from the other points, taking "AI" as it exists in it's present form (deep neural networks and related) as specifically the bringer of unlimited wealth certainly puffs up the various "AI companies" notably OpenAI (It should be noted that OpenAI's most famous product, GPT-3, can generate strings that sound…

One other thing I'd like to add. The scenario of AI mostly replacing people like doctors and lawyers involves bizarre paradoxes beyond whether deep learning "AI" works as advertised. Suppose you can train an "AI" to read legal papers or diagnose patients based on X-rays. That training is done from the data of real life lawyers and doctors actions. Suppose, best case scenario (very unrealistic imo btw), you have a com…

I assume the author is using AI to mean software in its broader sense, not just a machine learning algorithm.

Somebody will eventually write and algorithm that actually understands the laws as they are written, the case law that interpret them, and can read and write contracts. The algorithm might not have anything to do with ML.

I would like to think one day we'll actually understand how our bodies work and can diagnose problems as if we were debugging software rather than stabbing into the dark with drugs.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#448

Post by TaylorAlexander » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

tome wrote: post #422

SequoiaHope wrote: post #364

It’s very good to see someone as influential as Sam talking about this. The idea that automation can be used (intentionally!) to lower the cost of living to zero has been a key component of my personal writing and work for some years now. [1] There is a lot that I agree with here and some things I disagree with. For example capitalism can encourage value creation but it can also encourage rent seeking. Since I have b…

> Richard Wolff, who draws on Marxism to essentially advocate for an increase in worker owned cooperatives. Such an organization could still have whatever leadership structure they wanted, but they would get a vote on who was in charge and they’d make sure pay was fair for all What's stopping such organizations from being formed?

Technically? Nothing. But a culture that forgot the value of labor organizing and embraced the fantasy of rugged individualism needs a fresh education on labor rights. That’s what Wolff does with his organization Democracy at Work:

https://www.democracyatwork.info/

EDIT: There is more to it than this. There is a whole spectrum of laws common in other countries that could help. For example both unions and cooperatives could help. In Germany it is law that large corporations must have board seats for union representatives. A move like that would help grow labor power and ultimately benefit cooperatives. But there is a pretty significant effort ongoing to quash labor organizing efforts in the USA. Amazon, Walmart, and even Google fight against labor organizers and fire them the first chance they get. They have decided that their profit margins are more important than labor rights, and they’re investing a lot in anti organizing efforts.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#449

Post by fsflover » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #378

I 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…

> The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain

This is because there is a lot more software nowadays. Most of it is crap, but there is enough good software for everything.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#450

Post by sytelus » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:27 AM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #123

> We will discover new jobs–we always do after a technological revolution CGP grey put this well > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles (cars etc) will make horses unnecessary. The other horse reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier - remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Rememb…

Our goal shouldn’t be to have jobs but rather no one having to go to work at all. That’s the age of abundance that is possible through AI and robotics at some point. Our goal should be 100% unemployment for humans. We should be focusing on art, outdoors and other creative pursuits.

Future generations will be surprised we lived so that we can have “job”.