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The Software Revolution

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Software Revolution

#321

Post by jameshart »

wwweston wrote: post #310
lkrubner wrote: post #198

I disagree with this: "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs" That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the…

It's not so much that the industrial revolution net created jobs -- like you, I'm not sure it did (even domestically). It's that the industrial revolution not only created jobs, it created the modern labor market . Before it happened you had a much more distributed economy with many much smaller centers of production (many at the household level or close) in agriculture, trades, and craft manufacturing. Afterwards in…

I'm not sure that's fair. Laboring on construction projects, joining armies, digging minerals out of holes, seasonal work on farms, serving on ships, and so on have been ways for people to earn a living for millennia, selling their labor, not their produce. Having the capital to ply a trade or craft - money to buy raw materials, and tools to add value to them - would have been beyond the reach of most people for a lot of history. There's always been a labor market.

I guess what you mean is that the industrial revolution massively increased the amount of capital you needed to be able to produce goods competitively. Buying a set of tools and some raw materials to make things by hand stopped being a viable route out of the labor market into 'entrepreneurship' when mass machine-produced goods could be supplied more cheaply. Your option was to sell your labor to someone who owned some big machines, much like your ancestors sold theirs to people who owned a patch of fertile land, or a big pile of wood they wanted making into a ship.

So in a sense it created the modern labor market in that it locked a lot more people into it, and obviously diversified the kinds of jobs that existed. On the other hand, it was, as you say, a massive productivity multiplier which meant we were able to create more and more wonderful and complex goods for, in real terms, less and less cost, to the point where nowadays by exchanging your labor for cash, you can soon have enough money to afford a box of electronics that fits in your pocket and allows you to access all the world's information.

Re: The Software Revolution

#322

Post by pajaroide »

falcolas wrote: post #107
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…

Can you expand on the avocado stuff, or do you have a source? Sounds pretty interesting.

Re: The Software Revolution

#323

Post by swatow »

There seem to be two popular but contradictory views on HN.

The first is that technology is creating a rift between those who know how to program, where jobs are being created, and those who don't, where jobs are being destroyed.

The second is that high programmer wages are a good thing, and that attempts to flood the market with programmers, e.g. by teaching everyone to code, are an attack on the middle class.

Re: The Software Revolution

#324

Post by intended »

logicchains wrote: post #311
lkrubner wrote: post #198

I disagree with this: "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs" That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the…

>And because of this, a breathtaking gap opened up between wages in the West and wages everywhere else. This was because of the West getting richer, not everyone else getting poorer. Had the 'third world' countries had the right economic structures in place they too would have gotten richer like the West, much as East Asia has caught up to the West's economic development since economic and social reforms after WW2.

This is factually incorrect, the extensive documentation of the era makes it clear that the east India company and British rule made it a point to destroy native industry, vaccum raw material, on top of introducing laws and acts which penalized you for being a particular race.

All of those economic structures were destroyed and perverted by the conquerors.

Re: The Software Revolution

#325

Post by Retra »

Tenobrus wrote: post #271
aaronem wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So far as I'm aware, most proponents of recursively self improving AIs don't necessarily think they can improve without upper limit (as in perpetual motion). They just think they can improve massively and quickly. Nuclear power lasts a hell of a long time and releases a hell of a lot of energy very fast (see: stars) but that's not perpetual motion/infinite energy either. And prior to those theories being developed it…

There are limits on resource management processes that are far too frequently ignored. "The computer could build it's own weapons!" -- but that would requires secretly taking over mines and building factories and processing ores and running power plants, etc. All of which require human direction. And even if they didn't, we'd need a good reason to network all these systems together, fail to build kill switches, and fail to monitor them, and fail to notice when our resources were being redirected to other purposes, and not have any backup systems in place whatsoever.

There are just so many obstacles in place, that we'd all already have to be brain-dead for computers to have the ability to kill us.

Re: The Software Revolution

#326

Post by Retra »

mrec wrote: post #139
aaronem wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Self-improvement as perpetual motion seems unlikely. I'm a not-terribly-bright mostly-hairless ape, but I can understand the basics of natural selection. I can imagine setting up a program to breed other hairless apes and ruthlessly select for intelligence. After a few generations, shazam, improvement. The only reason you wouldn't call that process "SELF-improvement" is that I'm not improving myself, but there's no r…

The problem with this is that you have to determine what the goals are and how to evaluate whether they are met in a meaningful way. A computerized process like this will quickly over-fit to its input and be useless for 'actual' intelligence. The only way past this is to gather good information, which requires a real-world presence. It can't be done in simulation.

It's the same reason you can't test in a simulation. Say you wanted to test a lawnmower in a simulation... how hard are the rocks? How deep are the holes? How strong are the blades? How efficient is the battery? If you already know this stuff, then you don't need to test. If you don't know it, then you can't write a meaningful simulation anyway.

So that is not an approach that can be automated.

Re: The Software Revolution

#327

Post by Micaiah_Chang »

jameshart wrote: post #317
Micaiah_Chang wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "more to it" is "if the AI is much faster at thinking than humans, then even humans in the observe/decide/act are not secure". AI systems having bugs also imply that protections placed on AI systems would also have bugs. The fear is that maybe there's no such thing as a "superintelligence proof" system, when the human component is no longer secure. Note that I don't completely buy into the threat of superintellig…

First: what do you mean 'upgrade everything from human secure'? I think if we've learnt anything recently it's that basically nothing is currently even human secure, let alone superintelligent AI secure. Second: most doomsday scenarios around superintelligent AI are, I suspect, promulgated by software guys (or philosophers, who are more mindware guys). It assumes the hardware layer is easy for the AI to interface wit…

By 'upgrade everything from human secure' I meant that some targets aren't necessarily appealing to human targets but would be for AI targets. For example, for the vast majority of people, it's not worthwhile to hack medical devices or refrigerators, there's just no money or advantage in it. But for an AI who could be throttled by computational speed or wishes people harm, they would be an appealing target. There just isn't any incentive for those things to be secured at all unless everyone takes this threat seriously.

I don't understand how you arrived at point 3. Are you claiming that somehow memory safety is impossible, even for human level actors? Or that the AI somehow can't reason about memory safety? Or that it's impossible to have self reflection in C? All of these seem like supremely uncharitable interpretations. Help me out here.

Even ignoring that, there's nothing preventing the AI from creating another AI with the same/similar goals and abdicating to its decisions.

Re: The Software Revolution

#328

Post by intended »

nostromo wrote: post #137
gaius wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That laborer could write music perhaps? Or maybe become a painter? Or perhaps he or she could just focus on the happiness of their family and friends. "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematicks and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their childre…

In India?

Even in first world countries, incomes for poets and musicians are not distributed on a bell curve. There's the very wealthy, and the paupers elsewhere.

And as other posters have pointed out - the goal for education is to be employable. Witness all those pol sci majors who have themselves to blame for not choosing an employable profession.

So the idea that someone can study music is a luxury.

Further this is India. Construction and road workers live under crushing poverty, where the daily calorie deficit alone makes survival difficult. There's a deficit of teachers for children let alone adults.

And America is today starting to ape the educational pressures of India and China, where taking up a non STEM field was a sign of failure.

Re: The Software Revolution

#329

Post by api »

lkrubner wrote: post #198

I disagree with this: "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs" That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the…

I'm fairly convinced that eventually there will be two and only two choices: universal income and a shortened work week, or such extreme wealth divisions that stability demands a totalitarian police state resembling the worst sort of comic book cyberpunk dystopia. Age of abundance or feudal hellhole. Your pick. There simply will not be enough economically viable work to sustain any system that demands labor to maintain cash flows. Automation will be too efficient, programmable, adaptable.

... I suppose there is a third option: an anti-technology crusade that bans automation to restore employment. But a make-work economy sucks, and is not likely to succeed in the long term.

Re: The Software Revolution

#330

Post by adamzerner »

> We can’t try to stop technological progress.

Why? This seems like a very important claim that wasn't explored enough. It felt like a cached thought (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cached_thought).

What are the chances that some existential crisis happens? What are the benefits of technological progress? Why do you think that the latter outweighs the former?

Perhaps you thought it wasn't worth going into here? That's fair, but I think it's worth a quick paragraph to summarize.

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