I'm tired of these types of articles making it to the HN frontpage. None of these articles can say anything definitive; all they could do is speculate. We are trading away the old HN which was full of really interesting links that used to send me on rewarding rabbit holes for hours.
What will be left for us to work on?
231–240 of 291 posts
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And what reason do they have for killing everyone else? Who said they would kill everyone else? Since the rest of your strawmanned caricatured argument is a response to an argument never made, there's no point in addressing it.
Got it. You have no intention of defending what you actually said there.
> Got it. You have no intention of defending what you actually said there.
Who said anything about killing?
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are missing my point; if you have no value other than unthinking manual labour to offer the world, why would the world keep you alive? "Work" doesn't exist to keep people busy, it exists to keep them alive.
> why would the world keep you alive? I don't buy this. Tons of people in the West live on welfare and don't contribute shit to the economy, they are net takers. No one is plotting to kill them, in fact they're (arguably) getting more than they did 50 years ago and definitely more a 100 years ago. We live in democracies, not in a dystopian nightmare and I don't see why A.I is going to change that dynamic. People vote…
> No one is plotting to kill them,
No one said anything about killing.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#234You need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work? Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work". Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for th…
Since you keep being the top comment:
I agree with your philosophy, but that is not how Biology often works.
When enough green pastures are around animals usually reproduce till that is no longer the case and they need to move to other pastures. They continue doing this untill all green pastures are occupied. After this they start competing with one another to compete for the green pastures already occupied. Some animals will be so succesfull that they take larger green pastures, letting others starve. If by some miraclelous event (ai?) suddenly a lot of green pastures arise, animals will simply reproduce again till they occupied all green pastures again.
Looking at us? The agraric revolution, neither the Industrial revolution, nor this ai revolution have decreased how much we work on our 'jobs' (finding food indirectly). All it did was increasing the population so that all green pastures became occupied.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never written so much software
Are you the one who wrote it though or just the one who wrote prompts? Not that it matters in the end…
I dunno I type a whole bunch of shit into a computer and software comes out the other end. The experience of doing the work hasn’t changed much but I get better software more quickly.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#236It will end up being like the Star Trek TNG episode about Aldea (When the Bough Breaks) Nobody will know how anything works, so nobody can fix anything, and eventually it collapses
In some of Asimov's work humanity had forgotten how certain key technologies worked but they were automated and kept working and sustaining civilisations for hundreds of years before collapsing. I think about that sometimes when I realise I forgot about a Kubernetes cluster that just kept running for a year or two.
Likewise in Warhammer 40K (which probably borrows a lot from its sci-fi predecessors), science and invention is pretty much dead and there's a religious sect that keeps technology and factories running. AI (Abominal Intelligence) is also outlawed, so instead they put the remains of human brains into machines if they need some autonomy / decision making.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How is the "world"? I have no idea what that means. > Why does the "world" have that power? Okay, lets say "the environment". The universe does not care whether you live or die, so why are you so sure that someone will paternalistically care for you? On what are you basing this viewpoint on? > Machine owners don't have the power, for example. That's because the world doesn't care about them either. So why would the…
Sorry, "who" not "how". If we are just talking about the physical environment then totally fine - a rock doesn't care about me, for example. Humans tend to care about humans at least in some situations on average, though.
> Humans tend to care about humans at least in some situations on average, though.
Look, I actually agree: humans do care about humans, on average. The problem is that power tends to concentrate to those who don't care about humans.
When almost all jobs can be replaced by machines, the owners of those machines are unlikely to be much different from Sam Altman and Co. They aren't going to sit down and say "Well, look, we have all the wealth, and means of wealth. Let's give everyone food, shelter, clothing, because our machines can do it".
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s already the case that I’m no longer paid to type source code into a computer, but rather to control agents that do that. There’s still plenty of demand for human expertise and labor. It’s possible that this will change as well. What gives me hope that I won’t be completely useless in the future is Marx’s labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of human labor…
I just don't see that borne out in the real world though. My mother worked in an office in London as a shorthand typist in the 60s, along with thousands of other young women. At some point computers began to enter offices, bosses typed their own letters and then emails, and this category of job simply evaporated. Of course there was still SOME secretarial work, and some workers retrained to do it, but most simply had…
Unfortunately, yes. One real-world example was the former Linotype typesetters. As far as I know, they had union-negotiated benefits such as job security until retirement, early retirement, or generous severance packages. It just requires the appropriate political organization. It doesn’t happen on its own.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the big difference is that the only thing anyone ever needs a pot to do is hold fluids (or soil). It's a lot easier to spec out than a modern software product.
> anyone ever needs a pot to do is hold fluids Yes, but this might also be a counter-point to your position. In a world of rising baselines, having a "pot but without all the bells and whistles" might be a thing people need. Instead of having a pot that holds fluids at every conceivable angle with 20 temperature thresholds, 5 versions that hold liquid in a cloud for you, with monthly subscriptions, having the ability…
> a pot that holds fluids at every conceivable angle with 20 temperature thresholds, 5 versions that hold liquid in a cloud for you, with monthly subscriptions, having the ability to get a "like a pot but make it left handed and only holds sand because this is what I need"
Ah I see you're familiar with PowerPot by Atlassian(TM)
Very powerful potware, pity about how much soil it leaks.
Re: What will be left for us to work on?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is because you only look at one hypothetical experience, in a vacuum, not the continued experience. In other words, removing the dimension of time, and the fact that you get wildly different output for the same input with LLM, not so for compilers. It's like a light switch where the light has a slightly different colour every time you turn it on, sometimes the colour is very different, and sometimes it emits bur…
> and the fact that you get wildly different output for the same input with LLM, not so for compilers. Quite so. It is true that most compilers allow you to opt in to reproducible output, but it is generally not the default [iirc, gc is the only mainstream compiler that makes always reproducible output a design requirement]. There are advantages to not have to worry about reproducible output, like performance gains i…
> gc is the only mainstream compiler that makes always reproducible output a design requirement
This is just splitting hairs. And temperature = 0 is not comparable either, because the we will not keep models trained on data of a specific point in time around forever.
> Implementation details are immaterial, but when you don't understand the implementation it stands to reason that one would want to focus on that facet in order to learn more about it.
Not splitting hairs is not the same as not knowing what a hair is.
> Hey, that’s what discussion is for: to learn.
You told me nothing I didn't know or didn't expect, because it gets brought up every time like clock work. It seems to be be part and parcel of not seeing or not wanting to see the woods for all the trees.