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

The Software Revolution

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 397 posts

Re: The Software Revolution

#81

Post by gaius »

brandonmenc wrote: post #64
peapicker wrote: post #58

"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…

> It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job It's more dignifying to give someone a living wage, freeing their time so they can pursue useful work, than it is to waste their time by assigning them a dirt-shoveling make-work job that, in the end, grinds everything around them to a halt.

What useful work could a manual labourer do, if you automated his job away tomorrow? It sounds harsh but not everyone can be a Javascript developer or whatever the current fashionable thing is. And what's to stop that useful thing being automated away next?

Re: The Software Revolution

#82

Post by dnautics »

minthd wrote: post #69
Balgair wrote: post #35

Nitpicking: Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely than a 'bad-actor' getting their hands on enough uranium for a dirty bomb. Nukes are relatively easy to understand and make, get enough U238 together and it pretty much goes boom. Little Boy just shot 1 half at the other sub critical half. Blammo. Viruses are not that easy, as the cell is complicated beyond all measure. It's as if we dug up…

Yes biology is complicated. But we are starting to understand it reasonably well,and more importantly ,we're starting to design it even without understanding. For example, there's a company that produces microbes that create certain materials(genomatica), and uses evolution(with the goal being yield per bacteria) to evolve much more efficient strains - even without deeply understanding how the cell work.And i believe…

I'm just going to say what should be obvious: One is not going to be able to engineer a dangerous plague that will wipe out the human race in one shot. One would have to do experiments, and those experiments will be noticed, because people will get sick and die.

I did get lucky and design, from first principles, a 4-fold increase in enzyme activity once, but I am not sure that is something I could repeat.

Re: The Software Revolution

#83

Post by zanny »

alexfarran wrote: post #28
azakai wrote: post #22

> In human history, there have been three great technological revolutions and many smaller ones. The three great ones are the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the one we are now in the middle of—the software revolution. Arguably the control of fire was a great revolution as well.

And the wheel, that was revolutionary.

And spoken language, and writing, and masonry, and metalcasting, and cultivation, and domestication, scientific theory, logical thought, etc. A lot of things mattered a lot to get us where we are, and fundamentally changed the world when they happened (or at least changed the founders world in the short term as it spread globally).

Re: The Software Revolution

#84

Post by svachalek »

abtinf wrote: post #51

The last few posts from Sam Altman have been deeply troubling and make me worried for the future of YC. He presents leftist ideas as fact without evidence of serious critical thought or even basic economic education. "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a tho…

What is factually wrong about that statement? He doesn't say the new technology requires huge numbers of weavers and farmers.

There's nothing about being freed for "new purposes" that means those new purposes have economic value or will necessarily uplift your standard of living. In the developing world, they are undergoing the industrial revolution now so they are going through the same process of replacing farm jobs with factory jobs. But in the developed world, unemployment and inequality are rising.

Re: The Software Revolution

#85

Post by shit_parade »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #14
shit_parade wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is implementation, do you really trust the US government to give it even more power over its people by allowing to hand out 'basic incomes' to everyone? I'm sure it will only become yet another tool to oppress dissent.

I don't think your fears are well grounded, and I'm not aware of significant efforts by the US government to "oppress dissent" in other recent cases.

Free speech zones, excessive pursuit of whistle blowers, proposed restrictions on cryptography, extensive use of national security letters, resisting FOIA requests, defending NSA programs, killing US citizens in secret.

I'm flabbergasted you believe my fears of government overreach and suppression of dissent is not well grounded.

Re: The Software Revolution

#86

Post by aaronem »

mrec wrote: post #55
markbnj wrote: post #24

I don't necessarily buy the "AI can end humanity" thing. As a cliche that's become very easy to repeat, but I've yet to see a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF. The ending of human life would not be so easy for computers to accomplish. But on the subject of concentration of power and the wide-scale elimination of low- and middle-range jobs I think he is dead on. I fear that the…

Sidetrack, but I'm curious. What do you mean by "a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF"? It reads as if you're asking for a mechanism for a future technological event explained purely in terms of present technology. The whole "existential risk" concerns aren't about what present systems can do, they're about what future self-improving system might do. If we postulate this hypothe…

Not OP, but I agree with the point you question, and my rationale for so doing is that I've yet to see a compelling argument that a self-improving system is other than the software version of a perpetual-motion machine. Those seemed plausible enough, too, when thermodynamics was as ill-understood as information dynamics is now.

Re: The Software Revolution

#87

Post by jqm »

peapicker wrote: post #58

"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…

I would rather sit on my ass and feel worthless than do something inefficiently or something not needed and feel worthless.

Never mind I don't usually feel worthless even when sitting on my ass because I find something to do.

Re: The Software Revolution

#88

Post by aaronem »

woodman wrote: post #63
peapicker wrote: post #58

"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…

> I would certainly rather work and have my dignity... I've never felt any pride in busy work, I've always found it to be insulting. I would have thought everybody felt the same way, but I guess I would have been wrong.

Building a road isn't busywork; when it's done, there's a road where no road was before.

Re: The Software Revolution

#90

Post by gphil »

delinka wrote: post #11
gphil wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're asking sama about his opinion or if you want others to chime in. A popular answer among the HN crowd that I tend to agree with is to tax the wealthy and distribute the proceeds to the poor via a "basic income" scheme.

Why wait for a tax? If we're in the top %x of income earners, why aren't we taking it upon ourselves to give away our wealth? Form a charitable organization that takes care of people, donate your money. Edit: I'm with the others here replying with "reduced burdens on the middle class and small businesses" and "...teach a man to fish..." I keep seeing this basic income and wealth distribution topic on HN and I would g…

I don't have a good answer for why this doesn't happen. However, the fact of the matter is that the wealthy, on the whole, don't naturally redistribute their wealth very effectively.
Post reply on HN