Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

writings.stephenwolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 174 posts

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#61

Post by myrmidon »

A big short-term risk that I see is that AI is going to cripple wealth redistribution mechanisms that we currently rely on.

Most willing persons have access to income by providing labor right now. If the value of that labor diminishes because AI can do most of it for cheaper/free, that is a big problem because wealth/class barriers become insurmountable and the american dream basically dies completely.

Automation in the past suffered much less from this because only a subset of jobs was affected by it, and it still relied on human labor to build, maintain and operate the machines, unlike AI.

I'm curious if AI is gonna spawn comparable "workers rights" movements like in the past, but I would expect inequality to increase a lot until some solution is found.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#62

Post by ASalazarMX »

BirAdam wrote: post #23

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down p…

If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival.

Think of it as if in a few generations, everyone had the motivations of a rich junior, for better or worse.

IMO, this is a natural consequence of the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. We started to automate physical labor, then we started to automate mental labor. We're still very far form it, but we're going to automate whole humans (or better) eventually.

Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, feel free to ignore this.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#63

Post by mips_avatar »

advael wrote: post #53
mips_avatar wrote: post #20

Outside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job. The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Mic…

To "decenter [one's] self worth from [one's] job" would presumably require the fact that one's "access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job", no? This is a policy problem that needs to be solved by collective action, not a mindset problem that can be solved by personal growth

No you have to decenter yourself from your pay to achieve it. People accept things like cutting of medicaid because they see their job success as a moral success. There's a lot you can do to start being the good in the world that doesn't require Washington's permission.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#64

Post by mips_avatar »

shevy-java wrote: post #34
mips_avatar wrote: post #20

Outside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job. The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Mic…

I think you do have a point here, but I should like to point out that, since you mentioned Vienna, barely anyone here sees AI being tightly integrated into anything. Sure, smartphone users may use it; and exams at universities may say "don't use AI", so people use it - but for most everyday stuff it is really barely noticeable here. This is why I also disagree with "they will have a good life with AI", because it ass…

Yeah but even if you believe the hype, if you're in a functioning country you don't think that your ability to house your family wrests on AI being worse at excel than you.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#65

Post by mips_avatar »

_ea1k wrote: post #57
mips_avatar wrote: post #20

Outside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job. The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Mic…

A big part of it is insurance. Family coverage can easily cost $15-20k per year in the US. Avoiding the need to pay for this out of pocket drives a lot of people into less than optimal job dependence.

That and housing, and inflation during covid. Like there's this idea that you don't really deserve anything in the United States.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#66

Post by oops »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #38
BirAdam wrote: post #23

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down p…

Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers. Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.

I imagine personal trainers and childcare workers would see a drop in demand and perhaps also an increase in supply if a bunch of people suddenly lost their jobs to AI.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#67

Post by myrmidon »

adrianN wrote: post #54
ar_lan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is honestly a fantastic question. AGI has no emotions, no drive, anything. Maybe, just maybe, it would want to: * Conserve power as much as possible, to "stay alive". * Optimize for power retention Why would it be further interested in generating capital or governing others, though?

Why would it care to stay alive? The discussion is pretty pointless as we have no knowledge about alien intelligence and there can be no arguments based on hard facts.

Any form of AI unconcerned about its own continued survival would be just be selected against.

Evolutionary principles/selection pressure applies just the same to artificial life, and it seems pretty reasonable to assume that drive/selfpreservation would at least be somewhat comparable.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#68

Post by kadushka »

AlexandrB wrote: post #27
falcor84 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a circular argument here - even if we human always assign intrinsic value to ourselves and our kin, I don't see a clear argument that human capabilities will have external value to the economy at large.

"The economy" is humans spending money on stuff and services. So if humands always assign intrinsic value to ourselves and our kin...

This will break down when >30% of people are unemployed

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#69

Post by ewuhic »

mips_avatar wrote: post #58
ewuhic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a very rosy picture of non-Pax-Americana.

Well I also visited Ethiopia this year and I got to hear first hand about the genocide in Tigray, I'm very aware of the horrifying atrocities that happen when social order and human rights break down.

[flagged]

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#70

Post by mips_avatar »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #55
mips_avatar wrote: post #20

Outside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job. The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Mic…

> It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job. It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that appear ripe for the picking. AI is not going to immediately replace food service work, manual labor, farming, hospitality, etc. But it might replace quite high-paid software jobs, finance jobs, legal jobs, etc. One, if AI is good…

The tech jobs were cushy because the tech companies bribed ambitious people to keep them from starting their own companies. Like it wasn't about hiring them because you needed them it was to keep them from competing against you. Like this was always a deal with the devil, but the idea that Microsoft has more of a right to the monopoly it has over OS operating systems than their employees have access to their healthcare is wrong. Like I think a lot of people are waking up to the idea that the promises their companies made to them were like the promises the devil made in that theirs fine print and they sold the company more than they realized.

Additionally all the startups offering to automate whitecollar work are going to run into a problem when they realize the jobs never needed to be done.

Post reply on HN