Moore's Law for Everything • Hacker News Board

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#471

Post by bearjaws » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:28 AM UTC

dandare wrote: post #440

koonsolo wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to mention in the USA:

Leave your job -> Lose health insurance and anything you paid towards your deductible

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#472

Post by mrwoggle » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:34 AM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #437

spoonjim wrote: post #414

Earlier 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…

Come on, this is a very narrow view of things. There are a lot of people that can't just quit their job and start their own business, because well, they don't have any savings or access to credit. The work-money trade could be very very unequal.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#473

Post by ben_w » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:35 AM UTC

hooande wrote: post #360

xyzelement wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his logic holds. The point is that we found new jobs for horses because there were areas where machines were inferior to them. Once machines could do everything that a horse could do (probably some mixture of load carrying and agility / endurance) we had no more work for them. To bring the same logic to humans, in history machines freed up humans to do better work than before. Let's say what humans excel at i…

The number of jobs that horses can do is a rounding error compared to the number of jobs that humans can do. If we're living in an imaginary future where machines can be trained to 90% of jobs, sure. But google a list of "most common jobs" and see how many a computer could do fully. Even if you think a miracle ai revolution is on the horizon, humans and horses are not comparable in terms of diversity of labor

> Even if you think a miracle ai revolution is on the horizon, humans and horses are not comparable in terms of diversity of labor

As someone who does expect an AI revolution, I think you’re being overly literal with an analogy.

For arguments’ sake, a toy model of AGI: copy a human brain onto a substrate that costs less to run than a real human costs to feed [0]. For every intellectual task this human could have performed, it is now cheaper to have the AI do it. As this AI could be based on any human by the nature of the hypothetical, any human intellectual task is now done cheaper by the corresponding AGI.

Current robot bodies (for the hypothetical uploaded minds) are currently a bit meh, but (a) not so much as to make the idea ridiculous, and (b) we’ve already got BCIs demonstrated in animals, so an AGI puppeting a fast growing cheap animal is also entirely within the realm of the plausible if you don’t want robots and don’t care much about animal rights (though not much worse in that regard than current meat production, IMO).

As an aside: tasks is a better metric than jobs, as almost all jobs have many tasks some of which are easier to automate than others.

[0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51746/when...

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#474

Post by sudosysgen » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:38 AM UTC

nickpp wrote: post #446

sudosysgen wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See, I don't know if that's true. The main counter evidence to your hypothesis were the defections of scientists and engineers to the USSR, the amount of brilliant people that regretted the fall of the USSR, and so on.

For example, one of my brilliant math teachers was from a Soviet state, and had the opportunity to leave all along - he only did so as the USSR fell and he did not see any prospect in the East anymore.

Patriotism is a strong emotion. But beyond that, many brilliant people in communist countries really did enjoy a very elevated social status - if you see what children aspired too, being a scientist or engineer was really up there. And as far as job security and research freedom, for example, there was often quite a bit of it. On the other hand, you had drastically less freedom, but it doesn't seem the ones who chose to stay valued it as much as we would.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#475

Post by mrkramer » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:39 AM UTC

AndrewBissell wrote: post #395

mrkramer wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the end goal of human society is full automation and immortality. In the process of coming to that there will be all kind of problems, challenges, dramas and chaos. But once we are there it's kinda all gone and done.

> Once we are there it's kinda all gone and done. The ends justify the means? Forgive me if I don't agree that some small sliver of sociopathic elites getting to live forever as nanite clouds or whatever excuses genocide euphemistically referred to as "dramas and chaos."

For example wars, colonization, and inquisition were dramas and chaos but after them and sometimes with the help of them came progress and innovation.

Medieval Church had monopoly on education and knowledge but still believed earth was flat and prosecuted brutally anyone who opposed them.

French Revolution was bloody and messy but it brought democracy and decentralized education which afterwards led to tremendous progress and innovation.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#476

Post by _wqdq » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:49 AM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #442

jodrellblank wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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 unemployme…

Or, perhaps you’re just wrong? You can’t even be bothered to answer the simple question of when socialism has been attempted.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#477

Post by wffurr » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:51 AM UTC

nearbuy wrote: post #371

wffurr wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're basically agreeing with the comment you replied to. They're saying people who are financially secure (possibly like a software engineer) are less incentivized to work hard. Someone who really needs the money is more incentivized. If you got the same pay whether or not you showed up to work each day, you'd be less incentivized to show up.

"incentivizing" is such an anodyne word for this cruelty.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#478

Post by wffurr » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:52 AM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #441

wffurr wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you think I missed your point, perhaps you should consider rephrasing it to make it more obvious.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#479

Post by prawn » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:55 AM UTC

daxfohl wrote: post #328

Unfortunately I don't see price of healthcare coming down, just more doctors out of work. AI in healthcare will be highly regulated, probably monopolized, and tons of artificial barriers to entry created by corporate lobbyists. The AI quality won't make much of a difference: the winners will be the stodgy bureaucratic companies with political influence and just enough "AI" to be useful. WebMD will probably go offline…

I'm not sure that entertainment will keep getting cheaper. Where I live, sports and concerts seem to be getting more expensive for the top bracket in each case (pro sports and major international musical artists). We're subscribed to four TV/film streaming services and a music streaming service, that when combined start to add up and aren't getting cheaper. If you own the most recognised franchises and stars, people will pay.

YouTubers would be a counterpoint to that, I guess?

I think prepared food should at least get cheaper as it's dependent on commercial kitchens and staff, two things that will see a lot of change.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#480

Post by mrkramer » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 12:11 PM UTC

drdeca wrote: post #349

mrkramer wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unemployed humans who are given cash absolutely create demand. That's artificial demand which creates inflation.

I will admit up front that my understanding of what causes inflation is, extremely limited, but it is not clear to me why. Isn't one story of how some currencies get their start, that some monarch or someone wants their troops fed, and so they require (on threat of force) that their subjects pay a tax in coins that the monarch has printed, and distributes to their troops? If they did this continuously over time, say…

Money supply and money circulation depend on market activity, you can't keep amount of money constant because there is no perfect competition in which demand and supply are equal.

There is nothing wrong with subsidizing citizens and/or companies but there should be limit because you can end up with inflation where you for example over subsidy citizens and therefore excess of money and demand drives prices of goods and services up.

Reflecting on your example Roman Empire for instance had huge military expenses and they started diluting coins in order to mint more coins but they ended up in inflationary spiral in which coins eventually lost value and their economy collapsed.

Here is chart showing debasement of roman coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement#/media/File:Finenes...