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Raising Children on the Eve of AI

juliawise.net

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Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#131

Post by Nevermark »

vasco wrote: post #116
rjsw wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the robots have a longer working life than the humans they replace then they don't have to be cheaper. Doing physical work breaks down your body relatively quickly.

Yeah but humans expect return on investment before they die.

Stock reflects future money flows today.

If you can sell stock, or leverage it for loans, then you get access to future profits as soon as there is a reasonable expectation they will eventually show up.

Amazon's growth model was based entirely on this effect for many years. No need for profits, company's value skyrocketed as anticipation compounded.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#132

Post by ben_w »

lewhoo wrote: post #113
moltar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could have said the same about the use of tractors. People used to farm by hand. All those people were replaced. Yet here we are doing just fine.

If your passion was to plow the field by hand then I agree. Otherwise it is definitely not an equivalent.

Farmer protests are in the news at the moment, and the people quoted by the journalists are talking about farming as a passion.

The more the farms automate, the fewer farmer workers there can be.

Logic isn't part of these protests either: the farmers are being told "you're making more food than we need, please make less" and yet the placards are (in the local language) "no farms = no food".

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#133

Post by maeil »

seabird wrote: post #65
inference-lord wrote: post #12

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize th…

Not to minimize your concerns, but as it stands, AI is replacing dick-all in the near term. Wondering what employment will exist in 3 years is a tad silly. This shit is confidently wrong without a tinge of doubt and the mitigation for that is babysitting to the point where nothing but the most trivial jobs can be entrusted to it. I wouldn't sweat it robbing you of your career when it can't even recite airline ticket…

I'm witnessing LLM-based workflows (that would not have been possible 2 years ago) being developed as we speak that will make thousands of jobs obselete. I have colleagues working on multiple such applications and they're very much on track and some of them will be completed soon. And this is just the start. It's very much real and happening.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#134

Post by Nevermark »

djokkataja wrote: post #118
alumic wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is depressing. I think that this might just be the whole picture. Look, I spent a long while studying evolutionary biology in school (detour into pre-med) and came away with a fairly bleak picture of our place in the universe. I use "worth" in precisely that context. Nature gives us a world in which "he who does not work, does not eat" is a rule of law. Human beings--especially modern ones--assign worth quite diff…

> Nature gives us a world in which "he who does not work, does not eat" is a rule of law. Which is why no child has ever survived until adulthood. And TBH I find this an appropriate metaphor because the promise of AGI is that every adult human will be infantile by comparison--but there are also potential technologies that could allow humans to ... "upgrade" themselves and become a mature ... whatever. Sadly brain-com…

> but there are also potential technologies that could allow humans to ... "upgrade" themselves

I hope so.

But transforming ourselves into GAI to keep up (while maintaining continuity of memories, etc.) is going to be a much more expensive proposition than simply making more GAI hardware from scratch.

So economically, where are humans going to earn that additional value, needed to account for the extra cost? When the premise of upgrading ourselves is our native biology isn't keeping up and so not actually needed?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#135

Post by textbookrental »

seabird wrote: post #65
inference-lord wrote: post #12

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize th…

Not to minimize your concerns, but as it stands, AI is replacing dick-all in the near term. Wondering what employment will exist in 3 years is a tad silly. This shit is confidently wrong without a tinge of doubt and the mitigation for that is babysitting to the point where nothing but the most trivial jobs can be entrusted to it. I wouldn't sweat it robbing you of your career when it can't even recite airline ticket…

I get this feeling that AI might be like full self driving in 2016. Elon said in months it would be solved. It seemed like it might be true, but it wasn't.

One thing I definitely know is that no middle manager is showing up to work on Monday saying they could replace their team with an LLM. Every person that manages a team will fight to keep their status.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#136

Post by ben_w »

rjsw wrote: post #107
keiferski wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will still take decades, if not a century. Manufacturing and developing millions of robots that walk around and do repairs (not to mention making them economically affordable) is not something that’s going to happen soon. What’s more likely is that robots replace human factory workers first.

If the robots have a longer working life than the humans they replace then they don't have to be cheaper. Doing physical work breaks down your body relatively quickly.

I think longevity is the one thing humans still beat machines for? Cars, even electric, don't last as long as our bodies.

Of course, there's a whole bunch of other differences, like the machines don't need to wait 18 years after construction for physical labour, they don't need to be trained for 21 years for mental labour, they don't sleep, and the "working lifespan" target is about 47 years rather than the full 84 years average human life expectancy at birth in developed nations.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#137

Post by RandomLensman »

rjsw wrote: post #108
RandomLensman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rich person not working is worthless? Historically, humans have not acted that way, nor have such persons had nothing to eat. Wealth can substitute for work.

Apex predators never have to "work" particularly hard.

I'd also say viruses don't work very hard (maybe phages a little bit) and they are quite successful.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#138

Post by Nevermark »

j4yav wrote: post #42
bbor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work is equivalent to worth. We are not biologically or sociologically prepared to differentiate the two. I’m gonna say there’s a very very selective “we” in use here. I’m sure you’re accurately reporting your surroundings, but many people outside America (and a few within it!) are very much already there. Plus, like, isn’t that kinda depressing? What are disabled people “worth”? If I choose to be an unpopular niche…

Artists seem like they are first up for replacement, no?

That is one way of looking at it. The other is that we are now all artists.

And GAI's are not our end, they are our future, our mind children - just another generation eclipsing and replacing their predecessors. Just eclipsing and replacing faster.

I say this with all humor, but some seriousness stoicism may be the healthiest way to process what is happening.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#139

Post by ben_w »

inference-lord wrote: post #41
keiferski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For autonomous robots to replace the millions of tradesmen and workers, it would require vastly more resources than are being put toward this now. I wouldn’t expect human labor to be replaced in this way for a century or two.

It's kicking the can down the road, will still be a problem in 200 years at the rate which our society is progressing, potentially even going backwards if the orange man wins in 2024.

The USA isn't important enough to reverse global progress in this area.

Slow down, sure, but not reverse.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#140

Post by rich_sasha »

alumic wrote: post #28
inference-lord wrote: post #12

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize th…

I drove around today listening to the most recent Lex Fridman podcast, in which the founder of Boston Dynamics was describing replacing human labor with machines that were capable of learning by seeing. I have family in the trades. I pursued tech and fell in love with the field. Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihood…

It's strange. It happened before, with the Industrial Revolution wiping out whole professions, and same for mechanised farming, as mentioned by a sibling comment. Ditto for printing press, cars etc, albeit on a smaller scale.

But then, jobs didn't disappear, but shifted to other professions. So to me, there are two questions:

- if AI wipes out professions like tech, what jobs will people do? AI jobs seem great for now, but surely there's only so long until they themselves are automated.

- if suddenly the whole economy is ran by robots, how is the wealth distributed? Will there be a huge grey underclass of non working humans and a tiny owner class? Some kind of egalitarian paradise? I suspect neither, but not sure what in-between.

It could be great. If I knew I will be fed for a lifetime, have a house, my kids well schooled, and not much more, I can live a great life. I'll take that over the daily grind any time.

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