Remarks on AI from NZ

It seems much more likely that humans don't have a particular impulse to have children because their instincts were designed for a world without birth control. Having children has become uneconomic, so people stopped. There isn't a natural instinct to raise alarms about that (which is what evolution would tend to do) because historically that just wouldn't have mattered. Both because people were poor and because sex used to imply children in a way it doesn't now.

The house thing is really a red herring. Sure we'd all like to own a house and being wealthy is better than being poor. But in a literal sense - not necessary and for almost all of our evolutionary history people have been reproducing without any wealth at all. The stats actually seem reasonably clear that it is exactly wealth that is blocking the children, despite the excuses that people come up with.

A real boon from chance that is unlikely to last, we're probably lucky to be living in this era before evolution starts kicking in and pushing us back towards overpopulation. Which will happen in a few generations.

If we look at the history of human progress, the emergence of tools has always made life more convenient, but it also brought new challenges. The printing press, the steam engine, and electricity have all greatly transformed society, but we adapted and thrived. Why can't AI be the same?

The real question isn’t whether AI will replace us, but whether we are ready to use it to do things we couldn’t do or even imagined. Imagine if we didn’t see AI as something that replaces us, but as a tool that allows us to focus on doing what truly matters, leaving the mundane tasks to machines. Isn’t that the ultimate form of progress?

Tell that to a good bunch of people I know who feel secure about their living situation well into their thirties and then of course that 3rd or 4th kid or even 2nd kid they might have felt comfortable having never happens.

What was the historical standard does not matter today in this context. One set of my great grandparents had 8 kids in an abode smaller than mine today. Yet I do not have a single one because where would I put it. A room where i have to strip the walls?

>before evolution starts kicking in and pushing us back towards overpopulation

societal evolution will work quicker than biological evolution ever will. Most of the families with lots of kids here in western europe are conservative muslims.

"Tool AI", yes, at least in theory. You always have to question what we lose, or want to lose. Wolves being domesticated likely meant they lost skills as dogs, one of them being math [1]. Do we want to lose our ability to understand math, or reason about complex tasks?

I think we are already losing the ability to "be bored". Sir Isaac Newton got so bored after retreating to the countryside during the great plague, that he invented optics, calculus, motion and gravity. Most modern people would just watch cat videos. I wonder what else technology has robbed us of.

> If we look at the history of human progress, the emergence of tools has always made life more convenient, but it also brought new challenges. The printing press, the steam engine, and electricity have all greatly transformed society, but we adapted and thrived. Why can't AI be the same?

As long as we are talking about "tool AI", then with the above caveats, maybe. But a more general AI (i.e. AGI) would be unlike anything else we have ever seen. Horses got replaced by cars because cars were better at being horses. What if a few AI generations away we have something better than a human at all tasks?

There was a common trope for a while that if AI took our jobs, we would all kick back and do art. It turns out that the likes of Stable Diffusion are good at that too. The tasks where humans succeed are rapidly diminishing.

A friend many years ago worked for a company doing data processing. It took about a week to learn the tasks, and they soon realised that the entire process could be automated entirely in Excel, taking a week-long task down to a few minutes of number crunching. Worse still, they realised they could automate the entire department out of existence.

> The real question isn’t whether AI will replace us, but whether we are ready to use it to do things we couldn’t do or even imagined. Imagine if we didn’t see AI as something that replaces us, but as a tool that allows us to focus on doing what truly matters, leaving the mundane tasks to machines. Isn’t that the ultimate form of progress?

It could be that AI ends up doing the cool things and we end up doing the mundane tasks. For example, Stable Diffusion could imagine a Vincent van Gogh version of the Mona Lisa quickly, but folding laundry to dry, dusting, etc, remain mundane tasks we humans still do.

Something else to consider is the power imbalance that will be caused. Already to even run these new LLMs you need a decently powered GPU, and nothing short of a super computer and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train. What if future AI remains permanently out of reach of all except those with millions of dollars to spend on compute? You could imagine a future where a majority under class remain forever unable to compete. It could lead to the largest wealth transfer ever seen.

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/dogs-not-great...