351–360 of 694 posts
Humans have been successfully using violence for conflict-resolution for tens of thousands of years. We’ll be fine, it’s not our first rodeo.
You can’t really fight this stuff because of global competition.
> People hate AI so much that they are prone to attribute to it everything that’s going wrong in their lives, regardless of the truth. That’s why they mix real arguments, like data theft, with fake ones, like the water stuff. Employers do it, too. Most layoffs are not caused by AI, but it’s the perfect excuse to do something that’s otherwise socially reprehensible. Pertinent quote. A lot of AI discourse goes in circl…
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People currently assume AI will be an accelerant of inequality because all currently useful models (i.e. those potentially capable of mass labor disruption) are only able to run in multibillion dollar datacenters, with all returns accruing disproportionately to the oligarchs who own said datacenters. I'm not sure this moat is inevitably perpetual. It's likely computing technology evolves to the point of being able to…
> Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production. You are right that AI can be a fully democratized commodity. The problem is that the current wealth inequality is not the result of AI. Musk became a trillion seeking oligarch not because of AI. It is because the entire financial system is designed to extract wealth from everyone and concentrate at the top. Democratic AI is not in their interest.…
There's been ongoing class warfare happening for centuries, but only the rich side is firing the bullets. The rest of us are just standing in the front lines getting shot. AI is just another type of gun for their army.
History has shown that an alien invasion can only happen because of the internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. Colonial empires proved it only a few centuries back. The invading alien powers are fuelled by the inviting natives. AI (and computing technology in general) is an alien as it defies all wordly norms. It can have exact identical copies, can replicate, can exist everywhere, communicate across hu…
The entire argument lives and dies on one move: calling AI an “alien.” And it’s not even consistent. It starts with “alien” as in foreign invader, then quietly upgrades it to “space alien,” and from that point on everything just inherits whatever sci fi trait sounds dramatic. That’s not reasoning, that’s a word doing a costume change and dragging the argument along with it.
And honestly, the quality of comments on HN feels like it’s been tracking the broader decline in cognitive performance. The long running Flynn Effect has stalled or reversed in parts of the US. Some datasets show small but real drops in IQ related measures over the past decade. You read threads like this and it’s hard not to feel like you’re watching that play out in real time.
I feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thing needs to be decoupled.. "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.
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Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete. That is, humans would be economic dead weight, any job could be done better by AI/robots, and "comparative advantage" wouldn't apply because it's cheap enough to just make more robots. At this point, the average human would be completely useless to the billionaires (or to the AIs, if the billionaires fail to co…
I broadly agree with a 3-20 year timeline for a majority of office work. But some important qualifying statements I would add: - some jobs will stay with humans even when AI would be better at it. We already see a lot of this with even with pre-AI automatisation. Neither markets nor companies are perfectly efficient - at the point where AI is better than the average human, half of all humans are still better than AI.…
But all of that is assuming a world where research is being done by humans, or by some mix of humans and something like current LLMs. The bottlenecks would ultimately come down to human judgement and human oversight, and that's a significant limiting factor. Plus, you have to push matter around, which takes time, and you have to extract a lot of information out of limited experiences, which LLMs are bad at.
But if someone is reckless and clever enough to build AIs that can completely replace engineers, or that only need humans as hands, then I don't think we can count on robotics remaining intractable for more than a decade or so. In a wide variety of circumstances, it's possible to make do with worse actuators than the human hand, or with specialized actuators. We can already build incredibly precise motors and specialized sensors. The trouble comes with trying to pack enough of them together to replicate the full generality of the human hand. (I have actually helped build task-specific actuators that did quite well with a single motor and a single visual sensor, before.)
So to put my position more precisely: we cannot automate manual labor robotics without having previously automated creative intellectual labor. But conditional on automating creative research, then I expect worryingly rapid advances in robotics.
To be clear, I think that developing fully-general replacements for human intellectual and physical labor would potentially be the biggest disaster in all of human history.
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> Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money… Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.
Concrete examples please
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I think you underestimate just how much we value human achievement. Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast…
> "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact They are not "bullshit jobs" They will become so only after the day when AI "help" and "support" is actually better than talking to a human. Which is not happening anytime soon, possibly never. Call me when it happens
I feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thing needs to be decoupled.. "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.
I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However... Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use. (And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and compa…
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How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?
How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there? It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable. What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot. I'd like to see mo…