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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#161

Post by Den_VR »

twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

If there’s more work than resources, then is that low value work or is there a reason the business is unable to increase resources? AI as a race to the bottom may be productive but not sure it will be societally good.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#162

Post by florilegiumson »

If AI is really likely to cause a mass extinction event, then non-proliferation becomes critical as it was in the case with nuclear weapons. Otherwise, what does it really mean for AI to "replace people" outside of people needing to retool or socially awkward people having to learn to talk to people better? AI surely will change a lot, but I don't understand the steps needed to get to the highly existential threat that has become a cliché in every "Learn CLAUDE/MCP" ad I see. A period of serious unemployment, sure, but this article is talking about population collapse, as if we are all only being kept alive and fed to increase shareholder value for people several orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, and with more opposable thumbs. Do people think 1.2B people are going to die because of AI? What is the economy but people?

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#163

Post by visarga »

traverseda wrote: post #35
ible wrote: post #5

People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other. The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each oth…

I'd be more worried about the implicit power imbalance. It's not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what can humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.

> It's not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what can humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.

You can definitely use AI and automation to help yourself and your family/community rather than the oligarchs. You set the prompts. If AI is smart enough to do your old job, it is also smart enough to support you be independent.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#165

Post by somenameforme »

thedailymail wrote: post #152
somenameforme wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything…

In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane. "There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.…

A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life", while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life philosophy as very important, and 82% viewing being financially well off as very important.

It's rather unfortunate it only began in 1967, because I think we would see an even more extreme flip if we were able to just go back a decade or two more, and back towards Keynes' time. As productivity and wealth accumulation increased, society seems to have trended in the exact opposite direction he predicted. Or at least there's a contemporary paradox. Because I think many, if not most, younger people hold wealth accumulation with some degree of disdain yet also seek to do the exact same themselves.

In any case, in a society where wealth is seen as literally the most important aspect in life, it's not difficult to predict what follows.

[1] - https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph20...

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#166

Post by refactor_master »

thedailymail wrote: post #152
somenameforme wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything…

In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane. "There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.…

> We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years

Still haven’t gotten rid of work for work’s sake being a virtue, which explains everything else. Welfare? You don’t “deserve” it. Until we solve this problem, we’re not or less heading straight for feudalism.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#167

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow, linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier technology (or "horses" in this case), happens very quickly - it's the tipping point at which the old tech surpasses the new. For some reason I thought of Hemingway's old adage "How did you go bankrupt? - Slowly at first, then all at once."

I agree with all the limitations you've written about the current state of AI and LLMs. But the fact is that the tech behind AI and LLMs never really gets worse. I also agree that just scaling and more compute will probably be a dead end, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that progress will still happen even when/if those barriers are broadly realized.

Unless you really believe human brains have some sort of "secret special sauce" (and, FWIW, I think it's possible - the ability of consciousness/sentience to arise from "dumb matter" is something that I don't think scientists have adequately explained or even really theorized), the steady progress of AI should, eventually, surpass human capabilities, and when it does, it will happen "all at once".

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#168

Post by goatlover »

schmichael wrote: post #147
somenameforme wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything…

Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours. At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology. Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will rea…

Failure of politics and the media then. Majority of voters have been fooled into voting against their economic interests.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#169

Post by anon7000 »

schmichael wrote: post #147
somenameforme wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything…

Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours. At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology. Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will rea…

> Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours

I mean, that basically just sums up how capitalism works. Profit growth is literally (even legally!) the only thing a company can care about. Everything else, like product quality, pays service to that goal.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#170

Post by marcus_holmes »

visarga wrote: post #156
marcus_holmes wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm optimistic. Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by…

An ATM is a reliable machine with a bounded risk - the money inside - while an AI agent could steer your company into bankruptcy and have no liability for it. AI has no skin and depending on application, much higher upper bound for damage. A digit read wrong in a medical transcript, patient dies. > There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way. M…

> Every project and task needs a responsibility sink.

I don't disagree, though I'd put it more as "machines cannot take responsibility for decisions, so machines must not have authority to make decisions".

But we've all been in meetings where there are too many people in the room, and only one person's opinion really counts. Replacing those other people with an LLM capable of acting on the decision would be a net positive for everyone involved.

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