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Raising Children on the Eve of AI

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Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#171

Post by duccinator »

ben_w wrote: post #106
keiferski wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws of physics and the material cost of creating robots still exist. Real life isn’t a sci fi movie.

If robots actually replaced all human labour and left nothing for humans to be employed at, then the robots necessarily can do their own resource extraction. The current cost of a Boston Dynamics Spot is around a year's income, give or take whose income you're measuring against. If it were able to do any human task at the same rate as a human — and yes, I know it isn't, this is just a anchoring point for the discussi…

One of your assumptions is that we will start from 1 robot per year. I believe this is not true. I assume robots will be similar to high end cars in regards to the complexity of manufacturing. Once a company develops a prototype with AGI(mechanically the robots are almost there already, just the control systems and software that's lacking, which is supposed to be solved by AGI) it will rain VC money. The first million will be built by humans. The initial robots will take over the manufacturing only later. Setting up manufacturing that will be able to produce a million units in 2-3 years is possible. Let's say 5 years for a more plausible situation for a million robots to be built. These million will then scale exponentially. Also there is no reason to believe it will be 2^n, it can also be 3^n or 1.1^n or any arbitrary number.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#172

Post by the8472 »

safety1st wrote: post #146
the8472 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Can you explain what underpins this position? Is it about timelines, likelihoods, not taking preparative actions in general or what?

Sure, I don't think the likelihood is high. I think it's unlikely we'll develop an AI any time soon which can consistently solve critical thinking problems that even a junior developer can solve. LLMs exhibit very little of that problem solving behavior. They synthesize information from existing information and often what they produce is nonsensical. When people have argued that there is some kind of reasoning going…

I think that's a too-narrow focus on LLMs. Of course they're not good at problem-solving because that's not what they're optimized for. That they can approximate any problem-solving at all is already impressive. Consider that there are also models that are actually trained to act as agents in an environment via reinforcement learning. Something they do for robotics and game-like simulations. It's not a bigger version of today's models we should consider but broader ones that integrate more capabilities and training regimes.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#173

Post by erur »

arpa wrote: post #104
thanatos519 wrote: post #52

I'm much less concerned about the impact of AI than about climate change and ecological destruction. A radical shift in the distribution of work and wealth is long overdue. I'm sure our children will be better off for AI if it can help us get through the coming war, famine, plague, and "natural" disasters.

AI is tipping the scales not to the favour of the proletariat. "The means of production" is in the hands of the powerful few, and I foresee a very bloody revolution.

This funny old narrative of a revolution in that direction sounds pretty misplaced if we're talking about a future where you won't need humans to get stuff done...

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#174

Post by niemandhier »

Life changed less than you think: The cobbler down the streets still makes shoes, the butcher next door still cures meat, the carpenter in the neighbourhood still builds chairs.

It’s just that the cobblers brother works in a bio-factories clean room, and the carpenters wife is a sysadmin.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#175

Post by microtonal »

Nevermark wrote: post #143
microtonal wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Our daughter is ten and when it comes to AI and stuff, I am not worried about our kids. It's us who will suffer most from it. Remember when you were young and had to explain your parents over and over again how the…

> but explaining the new world, which is going to be completely foreign to you It might be different this time, if we are looking at accelerating higher order change. Human's have a speed limit. AI progress doesn't, and its rate of improvement is going to surpass the rate any human child can learn. Crossing major thresholds tends to break previous patterns. (Not trying to be downer. Just trying to understand what may…

It might be different this time, if we are looking at accelerating higher order change.

I choose to be worried about things that are clearly in motion already (the world descending into war, climate catastrophe, or the potential of the US becoming an autocracy) than a big maybe.

I have been using code assistants for a while now (including those based on GPT-4) and the trivial syntax, semantic, and algorithmic mistakes make it clear that there is not yet much reasoning happening. Sure, it can write a lot of boilerplate code, but once you go into domain-specific algorithmic code or even somewhat less-used languages (like Rust), it spectacularly fails all the time.

IMO the current trajectory is that the current LLM revolution will result in tools that will be great for productivity, but will also need to be guided by wetware.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#176

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihoods with plasticized fingers.

I don’t think people realize just how far we have to go before a literal robot can replace a human for even common trade tasks.

ChatGPT can generate convincing text and images, but that doesn’t mean the next step is robots doing your construction jobs or plumbing.

> How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices.

The melodramatic Sam Altman takes are getting out of control. What does “How pretty his offices” even mean?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#177

Post by silverquiet »

inference-lord wrote: post #158
rich_sasha wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want... When these discussions go long, and you start to think the whole idea through, you really start to question the whole idea. Another thing I thing is strange is, if we had really very / sueper intelligent AI, why w…

The “whatever the fuck they want” part is what I’ve always wondered about. What would a non-biological (super?) intelligence, stripped of any physiological desires, even want? Would they experience anything like emotion? Would they care to preserve themselves, or would they find this meaningless existence boring and simply decide to exit 0?

All I can do is agree with the other commenters that it’s clear that no one knows where anything is headed.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#178

Post by Aurornis »

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.

What does passion have to do with anything in this context?

Nobody is talking about AI replacing people’s passion projects. The discussion was about jobs and economy.

The notion that people’s jobs are their passion isn’t true for the vast majority of the world.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#179

Post by alx_the_new_guy »

ben_w wrote: post #136
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.

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 y…

>Cars, even electric, don't last as long as our bodies.

Because they're not built to, presumably because manufacturers are greedy and want to sell you a new one, and buying a new one is encouraged by consumerist culture.

Let's say effective human lifespan for physical labor is ~40 years (20 to 60). On average, commercial aircraft last 20-30 years, meanwhile the US military plans to keep B-52s in service at least through 2050s, which will make them roughly 100 on average.

It's not that machines can't last a century with proper care and maintenance, it's that they're not designed to.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#180

Post by Aurornis »

dsign wrote: post #18
rbanffy wrote: post #3

One bit of warning: we tend to overestimate the short term impact of new tools while underestimating their long term ones. It’s likely our kids will have recognisable professions with better phones than not. AI will be there assisting us in increasingly sophisticated ways, acting as intelligent agents and maybe even impersonating us at simple interactions. Value and supply chains change slowly and those are the thing…

Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. That outcome will need a lot of foresight and democratic regulation, because market forces will want AIs to exploit people. But, let’s assume we find a political system that is smarter than the people wanting to use AIs for bad ends. So, the world would look very much like the world now, where you earn money proportionally to…

> Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious.

The parent comment didn’t say “nothing nefarious” at all. It just said we overestimate the short term impact.

This comment section is full of people acting like AI is going to make most jobs obsolete within a matter of years. One of the top comments as I write this is from someone writing melodramatically about Sam Altman taking jobs away from their tradesman relatives with “plasticized fingers” from the comfort of his “pretty offices”. This is the kind of histrionics you get when people identify a trend and extrapolate it to absurd conclusions on unrealistic timelines.

I can’t tell if these people actually believe that robots are coming to take our jobs (including physical ones) in a few years or if this is just pearl-clutching at the way the world is changing when they’d prefer that everything stayed the same.

> There probably will be a set of skills incredibly difficult to get that will earn you enough money to live a comfortable life. And that’s the problem. Even now, lots of people never attain those skills, and they end up working at a factory or at an Amazon fulfillment center. If we don’t fix things somehow, how much worse will it be in the age of AI?

You’re making the same mistake I see throughout this thread, which is assuming that AI can only be a subtractive force and nothing else will change about the world. An AI-centric world isn’t going to look exactly like today’s world but with fewer jobs. The price of those “comfortable life” things would go down and availability would go up if everything was automated away.

If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology.

It’s the same reason the world didn’t collapse when technology enabled people to do something other than work on farms.

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