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The Software Revolution

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Software Revolution

#101

Post by pradn »

rgbrenner wrote: post #67
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…

"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 unemployed." And you believed that? It comes down to money -- there are plenty of people in India willing to work for essentially nothing, and so labor is cheaper than equipment. There's nothing altruistic here... businesses in the US or anywhere else would be happy to replace mach…

There's actually many government programs in India that are expressly designed to provide guaranteed employment for laborers for a set number of days each year.

Re: The Software Revolution

#102

Post by polyomino »

gaius wrote: post #81
brandonmenc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

What does useful mean in this case? They could do anything they want.

Re: The Software Revolution

#103

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

>>While I doubt this would happen to me as a software engineer, I would certainly rather work and have my dignity than sit on my ass, collect basic income, and feel worthless.

Actually, you say that because you are a software engineer: it's quite a dignified job. Digging ditches out in the desert is not.

Re: The Software Revolution

#104

Post by innguest »

peapicker wrote: post #75
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 knew I would hear these objections... and I still stand by my assertion in general.

Care to share your rebuttals to the counterpoints that have been made to your argument?

Is this just faith or opinion to you? Some folks in this world are concerned with what's better for people; should we just take your opinion or should we discuss arguments?

Re: The Software Revolution

#105

Post by mrec »

markbnj wrote: post #78
mrec wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By "pure SF" I mean the realm of pure imagination, unfounded in any actual emerging present circumstance. As far as I know the human race has not yet invented anything more powerful than our ability to control it, with a life both longer than ours and independent of any support from us. So worrying that such a thing might be invented and then wipe us out seems little different than worrying that something all-powerfu…

Sure, we could wait until such a thing is invented before we start worrying about it. But by then it's far, far too late.

It's not the same as worrying about a giant space goat appearing and sneezing us all to death. A lot of very smart, very well-funded people are actively trying to make better, more general AI, capable of learning. Evidence of progress in that effort are all around us. You seem remarkably confident that they'll all run into an as-yet-invisible brick wall before reaching the goal of superintelligence.

Superintelligence doesn't have to be malicious to be worrying; concepts like "malice" are very unlikely to be applicable to it at all. The worry is that as things stand we have no frickin' idea what it'll do; the first challenge for policy is to come up with a robust, practical consensus on what we'd want it to do.

Re: The Software Revolution

#107

Post by falcolas »

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…

> Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely

Humankind has been genetically engineering organisms for most of our existence. Corn originally looked like grass. Chickens were lean, tough, and could fly. Dogs have been transformed from generalist survivors into purpose-built machines breed for beauty, farm work, and everything in between. The avocado, of all things, is a fantastic example of how capable we are at creating something which shouldn't really exist.

Doing the same with bacteria isn't that much harder, if you've got time and a few basic tools. Our manipulation of the genes directly only makes the process faster.

Re: The Software Revolution

#108

Post by civilian »

pi-err wrote: post #57
vijayboyapati wrote: post #34

I think Sam is incorrect when he writes "The great technological revolutions have affected what most people do every day and how society is structured. The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology" Jobs were not created in the sense that people were previously doing nothing. Jobs…

> The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers ... the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century Industrialization, massification, standardization of production and moving to big cities have had tough consequences on worker's life. Charlie Chaplin shows just that. It was a tougher lif…

I doubt it. My mom's family was one of the first to get a washing machine in Sweden. As the story goes, my great-grandmother just stared at it while it was running and cried. Not to be out of a job, but out of joy for all those wasted hours that she had spent hand washing, and she had now regained.

I'd also factor in modern medicine into people's happiness. It is tough on families when you often have infant deaths and you often have horrible diseases like polio and MMR.

Re: The Software Revolution

#109

Post by xj9 »

gaius wrote: post #81
brandonmenc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Oh I dunno, learn to read, find out what modern work they find interesting, get an education, &c. Just because somebody is only qualified to do manual labor now doesn't mean they don't have other talents/abilities.

I did manual labor for a long time before I made the gamble to jump into software development. I had the luck to see it work out, but society can provide resources to help people move into more fulfilling and less physically-taxing careers.

I'll be honest, I love a good day of manual labor, but it isn't physically sustainable. Robots are a much better fit.

Re: The Software Revolution

#110

Post by markbnj »

aggronn wrote: post #94
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…

How is the assumption that "ending of human life would not be so easy" any better than the opposite? If they're equally valid, then its rather fair to take the opposite view because it is more cautious.

Well, I do have around 100k years of evidence that the ending of human life is not so easy, vs. no evidence at all that we're capable of building something that can completely wipe us out. That's not a bad foundation to build an assertion on. I do think, by the way, that we can make something that is able to kill absolutely all of us, but I think it is far more likely to come from tinkering with biology than with software.
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