201–210 of 237 posts
This feels incredibly detached from my reality. In my reality, there’s a brutal land war two countries over, and I’m agonizing whether I’m dooming my children by not teaching them battlefield first aid, trench digging and FPV drone piloting.
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I find it tough to describe something not really even living in some ways as "working".
Really? Huh. I do that all the time. My oven, my phone, even my travel pass would get that word (though I'd mean it in a different sense)…
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I think this is subjective. I get a sense of purpose from my job. I don't feel like 'just' a labourer, I feel like by working I'm contributing to society and helping others. I don't want infinite leisure, I want to feel useful. A good day's work is very satisfying. But at the point machines can do my job better than I can, it might be difficult to feel useful.
What happens to your purpose when you get fired, laid off, company goes out of business? I would be really surprised if there was anything more then a fringe minority that found a sense of purpose from their job.
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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…
Well, someone will have to plug cables and maintain solar panels or batteries or whatnot. Maybe the AI overlords will be ethereal neural networks in the cloud, but some kind of mechanical being (humans or robots) will need to do some groundwork.
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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.
More explicitly, I think this a great exposition of my overall point. Humans need to worry about being successful humans, not fitting some Darwinian universal shape that all life conforms to, as the capitalists so often claim. Thus why I don’t think automating cashiers, truck drivers, and computer scientists is incompatible with human flourishing in the long term.
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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 job…
I'm curious to know what people are going to be like when they've grown up in a world of things that are not comprehensible. Eg, I grew up easily understanding how films were made, but I wonder how a child's character will develop when growing up with "films" made by something called a neural net - will there be eg a sense of detachment from the world around them? Will there be an extended period of life during which…
The math behind diffusion models is entirely comprehensible. People will always ask why they need to learn calculus and when they will use it in the real world. Here’s another great answer.
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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".
> you're making more food than we need, please make less Dont know what country this is in but here in Germany farmers are mostly having an issue with prices being set too low by too big buyers, regardless of the demand.
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You don’t have to do all this hand waving about what you think is going to be happening in the near future. Just explain why AGI will be in our near. Frankly, I don’t see how from what we have now.
> You don’t have to do all this hand waving about what you think is going to be happening in the near future. Strange response… > Just explain why AGI will be in our near. Frankly, I don’t see how from what we have now. …but OK. The AI we have now, is already capable of learning from what we do. It's very stupid, in the sense that it takes a huge number of examples, but surveillance is trivially cheap so a huge numbe…
It’d be like me making a prediction that we will have begun to colonize another galaxy in 10 or 20 years time and then only talking about how there’ll be trade between Earth and the colonies and maybe even wars and revolutions. Meanwhile completely skipping over how our spacefaring technology will advanced to the point we can even travel those distances in a reasonable timeframe.
I’m not an expert on LLMs but there doesn’t seem to be very much about them that is even approaching AGI. They’re a useful tool and it’ll definitely disrupt certain sectors of the economy mostly white collar jobs, but we’re in the middle of a peak of inflated expectations. This has happened before with other technologies.
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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 ta…
No. Economies evolve with technology. Of that I'm sure. And I'm doing my darnest best to continue benefiting from those changes. But there are plenty of people who haven't fared so well.
> 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.
On the contrary; I'm saying that we won't benefit if we continue playing the same games we have been playing so far. But you are right that that's not an AI problem; it's a people problem that we can use AIs to make worse.