131–140 of 151 posts
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Yes, but this time the automation (AI) can immediately displace humans in the newly created, "more productive form of work" jobs too. Recursively.
Could you describe what you imagine an end state to look like? If you could, please be quite specific. How do people go about their days?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you describe what you imagine an end state to look like? If you could, please be quite specific. How do people go about their days?
"There is no good answer to that" is precisely my concern.
I thought everyone already knew this. IT, doctors, lawyers will be mostly gone. Probably most office worker jobs that I’m not thinking of. Best thing to do is become a nurse, that’ll be bulletproof until AGI makes progress on robotics.
How is AI going to replace doctors?
You go to 90% of doctors, you plug in your symptoms, they get to ask you questions based on your symptoms and vitals, possibly order tests and imaging and come up with a diagnosis based on those, using data from their university days and medical cases so far.
AI would be hundreds of times better than any doctor, since it'll base its diagnosis on thousands of years of collective medical cases and texts, instead of the couple of decades that individual doctors can muster up.
There's still the surgery part of it, where some doctors stick for a while, but surgery robots have been getting really good at that too, they'll likely be the first robots to put humans out of jobs.
Yes, of course. But it's also inevitable and overall good. If we stagnate then we are headed towards certain doom via climate change, nuclear war, an asteroid, a vulcano eruption leading to cooling and crop failure or a pandemic. If we are to survive and thrive long term we need to become true masters of our environment, and that means we need to be smarter, stronger and more productive. I think this is my main disco…
Yes, collective suicide means we no longer have any Climate Change issue. Calling this "a solution" stretches the definition of the word tho. > If we are to survive and thrive long term we need to become true masters of our environment, and that means we need to be smarter, stronger and more productive. Yes. I fundamentally agree with that vision. We want this for us. We/Us humans. If we build AGI we won’t thrive. We…
The world is chaotic. We have no way to predict that this is what it will end up like.
One possibility is that AGI remains a tool, without a mind or direction other than what we give it. We may manage to constrain it in that manner, and it is used to do "work" in the sense of solving mathematical problems, engineering problems, etc. We could end up with a reduced scarcity (if not post scarcity) scenario, where people do other things for meaning (come on, use your imagination here, plenty to imagine).
I could even imagine neural implants and regenerative technology. Meaning suddenly we're not so constrained by our physical limitations. What possibilities does that unlock?
I sometimes feel that the doomers lack imagination.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is AI going to replace doctors?
What's a doctor anyway? You go to 90% of doctors, you plug in your symptoms, they get to ask you questions based on your symptoms and vitals, possibly order tests and imaging and come up with a diagnosis based on those, using data from their university days and medical cases so far. AI would be hundreds of times better than any doctor, since it'll base its diagnosis on thousands of years of collective medical cases a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a doctor anyway? You go to 90% of doctors, you plug in your symptoms, they get to ask you questions based on your symptoms and vitals, possibly order tests and imaging and come up with a diagnosis based on those, using data from their university days and medical cases so far. AI would be hundreds of times better than any doctor, since it'll base its diagnosis on thousands of years of collective medical cases a…
Is AI going to physically check your breathing, check diabetics skin and feet, do surgery, robots are nowhere near good enough to do complex surgery.
I believe the goal is to advance humanity by automating out jobs.
I don't know if that is wishful thinking or if it will actually work (Nash equilibriums and politics make me suspect the former) but the idea that it was possible to do both at the same time was already a widespread meme in the spaces that culturally drive AI research of the sort we now see.
The idea that we can have both is also why optimistic people sometimes bring up (amongst other things) UBI in this context.
I'm really not sure what an individual can do to "prepare" for AGI; it's like trying to guess in 1884 if you should bet on Laissez-faire USA, the British Empire, or that manifesto you've heard of from Marx a few decades ago. And then deciding that, no matter what, the world will always need more buggy-whips and humans will never fly in heavier-than-air vehicles.
But how is an individual supposed to "prepare" for AGI? The outcome of further automation will be to move even more capital under the control of an even smaller number of hands. It's that increasing inequality which is the problem, not AGI.
Get a job that requires a human physical presence. Nurse, plumber, etc.
I assume we're currently seeing a lot of smoke and mirrors on the AI controlling those robots, but the mere physical form factor isn't enough any more.
Nurses may have longer than plumbers because many of us will want the human connection, and servos behind rubber masks are currently deeply in uncanny valley — at least, they are for me, but I've noticed from the breadth of responses to GenAI that uncanny valley is in a different place for different people.
As for why people losing economic power is a bad thing, see CGP Grey's Rules for Rulers videos. AI is about to make a whole bunch of people superfluous, and superfluous people might as well be rhinos on a safari as the techno-war overlords cruise by in their jeeps. It means our societies will degrade into natural resource rich but skill poor countries: disenfranchised poor hordes kept in check by the zoo keepers. Are…
It may be more like SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-13
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, collective suicide means we no longer have any Climate Change issue. Calling this "a solution" stretches the definition of the word tho. > If we are to survive and thrive long term we need to become true masters of our environment, and that means we need to be smarter, stronger and more productive. Yes. I fundamentally agree with that vision. We want this for us. We/Us humans. If we build AGI we won’t thrive. We…
I think you've got a very strong view on what it will definitely look like, but I don't see any exploratory thinking on how we move to that point. The world is chaotic. We have no way to predict that this is what it will end up like. One possibility is that AGI remains a tool, without a mind or direction other than what we give it. We may manage to constrain it in that manner, and it is used to do "work" in the sense…
"Solve for the equilibrium" is the name of the game. "AGI remain a tool" is nice, until you notice that some people will use it lightly (solve some day-to-day problems I encounter when running my business, but I still do most of the work and decisions), some people will use it less lightly (I give you complete access to my mail box and my bank account — now run my business for me), and the first one will get absolutely crushed by the second in any market that is remotely close to free.
If you can ensure that "AGIs remains a tool", you just get to the same result, "AGI controls the future", with an additional step of nominally-in-charge humans rubber-stamping decisions made by AGIs.
> I sometimes feel that the doomers lack imagination.
It’s really the opposite.
I have asked a lot of people, "doomers" or not, "what is the positive vision of a future where there are AGIs around that dominate human in all cognitive tasks ?". All the answers feel superficially good and correct, until you actually use your imagination to poke and probe at it. It always fall apart. The only exception is those accepting : "humans not in control of the future is good actually, I don’t mind having infinite entertainment and zero responsibility". I have nothing to reply to that except : I personally abhor that picture.
Did you really think I have not enough imagination to generate by myself the hypothesis "what if AGIs stay tools ?". Of course I have. It’s just that I have used my imagination to dig deeper at that image. And the result is still not the pretty happy story it initially looks like.
Once you generate a dozen of such hypothesis, dig, and find the same outcome, you start to get the feeling that it is not exactly an accident.
It is not a lack of imagination. The problem is fundamentally extremely hard, possibly impossibly hard.
> The world is chaotic. We have no way to predict that this is what it will end up like.
I strongly disagree with that. Chaotic behavior on the micro-scale is not incompatible with predictability on the macro-scale. Almost all science is like that actually. Even tho you can’t predict when and in which individuals a particular mutation will arise, and the exact life path of those individuals, you can still have laws relating relative fitness and fixation rates, and the prediction that eventually, a beneficial mutation will fixate in a population.
Everything you know works like that. Electromagnetism does not require knowledge of individual photon/electron interactions to describe Maxwell equations. Thermodynamics do not require detail knowledge of molecular dynamics to relate quantities like pressure and temperature.
Today we summarize the native/settlers conflicts by "Eventually the Settlers displaced the Natives from their lands". And while it leaves some nuances out, it is not a bad summary. If you ask a human living this period, he will say what you say "world is chaotic, who can predict what the outcome will be ?". Actually the overall outcome was pretty obvious given the significant technological gap. Details may be surprising ; the big picture isn’t.
Edit : I focus too much on AGI on this message, not enough on humans. The problem is at the end mostly a human problem. Accepting diversity — true diversity, "I abhor your vision for a future, but I agree you should have a place to realize it with other like-minded people, as long as you don’t interfere with other people realizing their vision of the future" is the cure. If humans can accept genuine diversity, I believe there are pretty straightforward solutions that are robust to at least my level of poking and probing. I do not expect humans to be able to accept genuine diversity tho, and the more I reach out to other humans, the more I despair on this particular axis. It’s very easy to make a human say "Yes Diversity is Good" in the abstract. Then you start to paint some concrete pictures, and the mask fall off: "actually the diversity I like means accepting some people slightly, superficially different from me".