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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

pmarca.substack.com

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Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#281

Post by TimPC »

pharmakom wrote: post #243
TimPC wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting generally means having some sort of sufficiently broad applicability to be useful and sufficiently narrow applicability to have enough explanatory power. If you are too narrow you don’t get applied in many situations and if you are too broad you’re generally too watered down to prove anything significant about the situations in which you apply. Some exceptions which makes everything harder. 1+1=2 is a the…

You are defining useful relative to human understanding. My point is this may not matter in an AI future.

The underlying concept I’m getting at is that there is more than just human understanding here. Our understanding of mathematics is highly subjective but it seems to me theorems do have some sort of true value with some of them being more useful for doing mathematics and others being things you prove once and never use again.

A robot could prove infinite theorems about every number having a double successor, triple successor and so on. If it does so it’s not just human subjectivity saying it hasn’t done any meaningful mathematics.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#282

Post by ChatGTP »

staunton wrote: post #202
ChatGTP wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a side note, I honestly think models, photography people and markup artists will still exist. People will still make clothes, whether that's AI assisted or not, and people are going to want to take real photos of the clothes, with models wearing them. No not in all cases, but as long as there are people there will be some demand for this. Same goes for fashion shows, they will still exist too. People will contin…

> Handmade goods are another example of this The market ahare of handmade goods is going down. They are forming a parallel luxury sector with better quality in some items and equal or worse in others at significantly higher price. The analogy for music would be a lot of bands who don't write their own music and can't sing or play their instruments (assuming they even have instruments), relying on technology or other…

I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm not talking about luxury brands, I'm talking about the fact that regular people enjoy buying handmade niche products that are made by other people.

Anyway I know people who work in fashion, pretty much all luxury brands are good made by hand, you just don't know it because it's happening in slave labor, sweat shops and the like.

The analogy for music would be a lot of bands who don't write their own music and can't sing or play their instruments (assuming they even have instruments), relying on technology or other people for these things. In essence, an existing trend exacerbated.

I know you said it's exacerbated, but his has been the case for the last 100 years, Elvis had song writers, all the K-Pop and J-pop is already this, it's generated or music written by third-parties. We might end up with MOAR MUSIC!, but I don't know, who cares?

Anyway, generated music is besides the point, for something like AI music to be useful, needs a market. There is already a market for music generated by computers and AI. There has been for a long time. I'm talking about live music, young people going to see people play music, rap, do performance art etc. This is what young people like to do, they're social animals. It's also what makes old people often follow suit, because it's popular with younger people.

I was just walking through my neighborhood ten minutes ago and there was a guy DJing and a bunch of young people hanging out in a bar listening, that guy could easily be replaced already with a spotify playlist, but why isn't he? I'd argue there are better mixes and playlists already in existence, but "optimization" isn't necessarily what life is about, I think it's hard for computer people to understand this.

Before there was a music industry, there was people singing and dancing around campfires, that spirit is not going away so long as there are people. That's what music is really about, "the industry" on top of it is a bit of fun, but we can live with or without it.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#283

Post by akbarian »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #259
dmichulke wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means that the Industrial Revolution made a lot of human work obsolete, yet here we are almost without unemployment. Same for the invention of the wheel. So how was that possible? Turns out people didn't want to work less, they wanted more stuff. (Bigger houses, more houses, better food, health care, ...) The same will happen again with AI. Thanks to infinite human wants.

We're only "without unemployment" because most of the population is spectacularly underpaid. This makes it cheaper - so far - to use human labour than machine labour. And we don't use human labour very efficiently. A lot of activities are pointless make-work or zero productivity wealth transfer. Which is almost the point of AI. It's not just about partial mechanisation or automation, which is what happened during the…

"We're like the dinosaurs. A few of us are looking up at the new light in the sky and thinking "Well, that's interesting" without much of an idea of what's actually incoming"

That was the one of the most funniest and at the same time scariest thing I have ever read.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#284

Post by ChatGTP »

camillomiller wrote: post #269
ChatGTP wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this topic, maybe too much... Don't you think that a lot of what you're talking about depends on how people react to this technology and it's use? To ask another way, if everyone around you is in complete suffering and misery from "AI", we're all broke, hungry and miserable, maybe people will just not want to use AI and prefer to buy and trade services with other humans so that we maintain a nice quality of li…

This is a good point but I’m not sure we can really compare the size and reach of what corporations can do with this tool with smaller circular and local economies driven by ethics. It’s again a problem of scale :)

Do you honestly think corporations can just contain all AI research, know how etc? Keep those genies in those bottles forever?

I highly doubt it.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#285

Post by wholinator2 »

thomasahle wrote: post #159
valine wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematicians are more than just number crunchers. Perhaps the most important part of a mathematicians job is formally defining problems. Even if the next generation of ChatGPT can solve any math problem you give it satisfactory, you still need a mathematician to ask the question. Presumably this AI won’t be omnipotent either, and there will be some limit to its mathematical prowess. I suspect most human effort will…

Why does society have mathematicians right now? It's some mix of "the people find mathematics intellectually worthwhile" (public universities) and "we sometimes need to ask them to solve hard problems". If AI makes it less intellectually interesting, the first reason goes away. If engineers can just ask the AI to solve a hard problem instead of the mathematician, they don't need the mathematician as a middle man. So…

You know, this conversation had given me a short story idea. I wonder if anyone's written anything like this.

Humanity produces an intelligent mathematical AI. It starts by solving already solved problems, then leaps to relatively simple unsolved problems, then leaps directly to solving any problem that can be defined to it, including problems that humanity has battled for centuries. It even will give fully consistent proofs and the small group of researchers we're following are astounded. The resident proof experts say that the proofs it's giving are strange and sometimes inelegant but always logically sound. They go about proving many different problems until eventually someone disagrees with the request, saying obviously this one isn't true, it's logically impossible, it won't be able to prove it. But then the machine does, and gives a perfectly valid and consistent proof that to the highest of humanities knowledge, appears correct. Then the mathematician requests it to prove the inverse to explore his fault logic, and again the ai spits out a fully consistent and valid proof, for the opposite condition. No one can find any fault in either proof. They go through asking it to prove all the opposite conditions as they had requested earlier and it always outputs intelligent and fully self consistent proofs. No one can find a flaw in anything it outputs, even when it outputs conflicting information. It's as if it's playing on some higher plane, able to just toy with the absolute maximum of human knowledge to make the results look like anything it wants. Our once thought rigorous foundation is easily thrown away by the machine. Everyone claps and looks scared. The end

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#286

Post by wyclif »

desas wrote: post #198
cm2187 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those communities were moving to London they would be doing fine. The unemployment rate in the UK is really low. It doesn't mean that a job will show up at your doorstep without having to do anything.

The communities are moving to London. Hundreds of thousands of (primarily young) people have been moving into London each year from other UK regions for decades. It's mainly balanced by migration out of London due to house prices and immigration from other countries. I grew up in a coalfield area. I have friends and family who made that move and further afield. It's a big ask for people to uproot their families from…

How do these young people from the home counties afford London real estate?

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#287

Post by Slartie »

herbst wrote: post #201
AverageDude wrote: post #43

Disagree. AI will cause mass unemployment because it’s way more efficient than a human, doesn’t get sick (relatively less than humans) and costs less. Simple economics. I’ll give you one example. The checkout counters in supermarkets, if the supermarkets would have hired young people on those positions not only we might have less young people going towards drugs and hooliganism but it would have also made them better…

Good example actually. In Switzerland nearly every store has automated checkouts and depending on the local demographic more and more people are using them. There is one human supervising like 4-16 automated checkouts, or 1 open real checkout that keeps an eye on the machines. That is at least 2-3 workers less for every single store in the country in just the last few years.

You should also mention that one classic checkout line with an average-skilled worker is, in practice, easily as fast with regard to the "items processed per minute" metric as 4-8 self-checkouts where average-talented customers perform self checkout.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#288

Post by Amezarak »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #107
LeonB wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the television first arrived any TV optimist would’ve said: “clearly TV is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down” … and that is exactly what happened. Since 1960 every kid in the world “clearly” gets the absolute best education imaginable thanks to the economy of scale afforded by TV broadcasting. It’s basic economics. Oh wait.

And yet the proliferation of screens capable of displaying information and graphics has been an absolute boon to education.

It is not clear to me that is the case. Has the proliferation of screens actually improved learning outcomes?

It appears to me that e.g., HS graduate standards have been gradually lowered over time, particularly the further back you go. Maybe this is independent of the screens.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#289

Post by wyclif »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #212

This article is pure conservative BS. The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's. I'm not even sure what pmarca is talking about here. It's like he's waving his arms, "look over here at my BS and don't look over there where AI is about to slam information workers." AI will absolutely change the way soft…

I should have become a blacksmith instead of a software engineer.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#290

Post by comfypotato »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #212

This article is pure conservative BS. The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's. I'm not even sure what pmarca is talking about here. It's like he's waving his arms, "look over here at my BS and don't look over there where AI is about to slam information workers." AI will absolutely change the way soft…

I read the article far enough to confirm that it’s too biased to be taken seriously; I’m commenting more from the general high-level discussion of AI and labor.

The advances you mention wiping out software divisions: if you apply that to robotics, half of the workers in the world will be out of work.

This kind of thing is very far off, yes? (Which, in my opinion, makes your comment a tad bit nonsense in and of itself.)

I personally enjoy trying to get ChatGPT+ to try to write code for me. It’s really bad. It’s like a junior dev who can piece together puzzles you spend more time creating than it would take to do yourself. There’s really a paradigm shift between now and functional software-writing AI.

You’re implying technology will exist where it doesn’t currently exist, not that current tech will be rearranged. I feel you’re predicting the future in a almost-as-ridiculous way. I personally stick to the (perhaps oversimplified) notion that software will be the last industry to be replaced by AI.

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