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You are right, but the average person is less happy than in 1970.
Source?
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There are great places to discuss AI safety out there, but every time they get mentioned on Hacker News they are subject to sneering middlebrow dismissals. That's sort of the OP's point: this is not a great place to discuss or even meta-discuss the subject.
"There are great places to discuss AI safety out there" Like where?
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That's not the question, the question is the ratio between those-who-want-to-serve and those-who-want-to-be-served.
This is so short sighted, the industrial revolution occured 200 years ago. If people wanted completely automated restaurants, mcdonalds would have no employees, the technology for auto-burgers exists, has existed for long, and you frequently consume it. People want people handling their food, at least in the part they can see. And for the parts they can't see, like bottling their beers, the automation has already hap…
Are Americans really so scared of Marx to admit that AI fundamentally proves his point? Dario here says "yeah likely the economic system won't work anymore" but he doesn't dare say what comes next: It's obvious some kind of socialist system is inevitable, at least for basic goods and housing. How can you deny that to a person in a post-AGI world where almost no one can produce economic value that beats the ever cheap…
You can see that computers doing the work will lead to a different society without bringing Marx into it.
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This is so short sighted, the industrial revolution occured 200 years ago. If people wanted completely automated restaurants, mcdonalds would have no employees, the technology for auto-burgers exists, has existed for long, and you frequently consume it. People want people handling their food, at least in the part they can see. And for the parts they can't see, like bottling their beers, the automation has already hap…
Is it short sighted? If more people want to enjoy leisure and work on hobbies instead of serving others, the ratio will get much worse.
One of the sad things about tech is that nobody really looks at history. The same kinds of essays were written about trains, planes and nuclear power. Before lindbergh went off the deepend, he was convinced that "airmen" were gentlemen and could sort out the world's ills. The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature. AI will be used to make things cheaper. That is, lots of j…
We are entering a dystopia and people are still writing these wonderful essays about how AI will help us. Microtargeted psychometrics (Cambridge Analytica, AggregateIQ) have already made politics in the West an unending barrage of information warfare. Now we'll have millions of autonomous agents. At some point soon in the future, our entire feed will be AI content or upvoted by AI or AI manipulating the algorithm. It…
IMO it’s already pretty dystopian to demand people prostrate themselves to flip my burger which I can do myself; we’re living in the memory of the last 70 years rather than let those two adults pick what to do for that day.
If you’d all like to go DIY more rather than rely on overseas sweatshop workers that would help. Despite HN being smarties by education you’re all still just one meat suit out of billions; none of us have defined new axioms of math or linked relativity and quantum mechanics.
None of the philosophy is ever “real”; just lame office workers stroking their human egos in each others faces until we die.
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Wage increases have been lagging productivity increases for about 60 years.[1] For the past 35 years or so, automation seems to have driven wage inequality, and AI is headed down the same path.[2,3] [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [2] https://news.mit.edu/2020/study-inks-automation-inequality-0... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/19/1049378/ai-inequ...
Note that the famous EPI graph in your first source appears to be controversial with mainstream economists: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/12kk79k/what_... (However, there seems to be other sources that say the same thing, despite criticism of EPI's graph. So I'm not sure. It seems to be consensus that it has been stagnating or not keeping up with productivity for low skilled workers, though? But I ca…
The story is better on the consumer goods side (vs. housing, health care, higher education...) Consumers would probably be in much worse shape without cheap goods from the likes of Walmart, Ikea, Amazon, etc.
> inequality isn't necessarily bad if all needs are met.
The interesting progress of automation is that it's moving up in terms of job salary, while a smaller number of new jobs is created at the top and at the bottom.
One of the sad things about tech is that nobody really looks at history. The same kinds of essays were written about trains, planes and nuclear power. Before lindbergh went off the deepend, he was convinced that "airmen" were gentlemen and could sort out the world's ills. The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature. AI will be used to make things cheaper. That is, lots of j…
Life expectancy at birth is up from like 22 years to 80 or so because most kids used to die in unpleasant ways.
The percentage of people dying through warfare and violence rather than peacefully is way down, much more than 10x.
We have far more information, comfort, ability to travel and similar.
And most of it comes down to tech. But human nature, however good thing get is to find something that's shit and focus on how awful it is.
I mean I understand - Terminator 2 with killer robots is much more entertaining that something about everyone having a nice time, but it's not the likely reality.
I found the OP to be an earnest, well-written, thought-provoking essay. Thank you sharing it on HN, and thank you also to Dario Amodei for writing it. The essay does have one big blind spot, which becomes obvious with a simple exercise: If you copy the OP's contents into you word processing app and replace the words "AI" with "AI controlled by corporations and governments" everywhere in the document, many of the OP's…