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The Software Revolution

blog.samaltman.com

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351–360 of 397 posts

Re: The Software Revolution

#351

Post by markvdb »

puranjay wrote: post #180
shin_lao wrote: post #127

"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines. It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence o…

The problem is that it was relatively easy to master the technologies of the industrial revolution. It isn't the same for the software revolution. You can take virtually any adult from any part of the world and teach him how to work in a factory within a few months of study. You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code. It requires way higher intellect and time to master coding. I think of myself as rela…

The 50 years old weaver in 1800 Manchester was rare or dead. Life expectancy at birth was only around 48.5 even in 1900-1910 in England and Wales.

http://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/Docs/DEIP_Gallop.pdf

Relevance? The industrial revolution enabled increases in life expectancy. At this moment, the software revolution is doing something similar.

Re: The Software Revolution

#352

Post by motters »

api wrote: post #329
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 mainta…

That's the contemporary situation. We have something close to a police state with mass surveillance, militarised police and heavy restrictions on protesting. At the same time we're also seeing more interest in Basic Income and I expect there will be more of a political push for that in the near future. All of the above are about trying to keep the lid on a situation where technology is facilitating greater inequality. In the current situation oligarchs with large capital reserves and the ability to purchase legislation can continue to exfiltrate much of the wealth created by the population.

Re: The Software Revolution

#353

Post by agumonkey »

cbd1984 wrote: post #212
ghostly_s wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your arrogance is showing. Sure, you could learn how to operate a lathe on an assembly line in a matter of weeks; in just the same way nearly any adult of average education could learn in a matter of weeks to write WordPress templates, or cobble together SQL queries, or etc. etc. To become a master machinist, the kind who can do anything with a lathe that a lathe can be asked to do? Years of dedication and expertise.

The problem with this is that those cobbled-together SQL queries are precisely the kinds of things good programmers either replace or automate away; you can automate away an assembly-line job, but not as cheaply, and not as easily. There might not be any such thing as a 100x programmer or whatever, but the value proposition for replacing a few sub-par programmers with one better programmer and a framework is a lot cl…

Software (in the Turing sense), removing the material complexity, accelerated the notion of automation. Easy things can be, medium-complexity too, only leaving the NP-complete stuff to be done by hand. Jobs are an endangered species.

Re: The Software Revolution

#354

Post by jacquesm »

frandroid wrote: post #38
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…

If nukes are so easy, how come Iran, with all its oil wealth, is still not there? It remains a difficult state actor play.

The tech is (relatively) easy, it's getting that materials that is (fortunately) hard. But there is enough of it in enough places with imperfect oversight that it is a source of concern.

Re: The Software Revolution

#355

Post by ajuc »

api wrote: post #329
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 mainta…

Another option is self-enforced population decline (already happening in many developed countries) - for now it's artificaly solved by immigration from not-so-well developed countries, but this will stop at some point.

Re: The Software Revolution

#356

Post by ajuc »

tomphoolery wrote: post #339
api wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mainta…

> Age of abundance or feudal hellhole. Why not both? We certainly have all kinds of societies on earth today. What makes you think we won't have areas that are highly progressive but also areas that are extremely sadistic in the treatment of their people?

An intersting thought experiment is to compare their economic output. If feudal hellhole is more efficient eventually only hellholes will remain.

Re: The Software Revolution

#357

Post by jacquesm »

packetized wrote: post #138
frandroid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nukes are so easy, how come Iran, with all its oil wealth, is still not there? It remains a difficult state actor play.

Stuxnet, for one. Also, the realization that having a nuclear weapon when you're Iran is a terribly bad idea, from a diplomatic standpoint.

Being caught making one is a terribly bad idea. Having one (or more) would be an enormous plus from a diplomatic standpoint especially after a test, having them in undisclosed locations and too many to knock them all out in one strike is even better. Not that that's a world we should prefer to live in but history has shown that the quickest way to increase your diplomatic clout as a nation is to join the nuclear club.

Re: The Software Revolution

#358

Post by jacquesm »

EliAndrewC wrote: post #250
tptacek wrote: post #167

Can someone ELI5-with-a-CS-degree why I should be concerned about AI ending human life?

Here's the standard argument, as I understand it: - There are something like 100,000,000,000 neurons in the human brain, each of which can have up to around 10,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. This is basically why the brain is so powerful. - Modern CPUs have around 4,000,000,000 transistors, but Moore's law means that this number will just keep going up and up. - Several decades from now (probably in the 2…

If the math would work out that way a cluster of 25 or so computers should be able to support a full blown AI. But clusters of 10's of thousands of computers are still simply executing relatively simplistic algorithms. So I would estimate that the number of transistors required for AI would be either much higher than the number of neurons (which are not easily modeled in the digital domain) or that our programming bag of tricks would need serious overhaul before we could consider solving the problem of hard AI.

Re: The Software Revolution

#359

Post by simonh »

intended wrote: post #324
logicchains wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I really think that's too simplistic a view. As has been pointed out, plenty of countries that were not colonised lagged behind in industrial development. Many of those that were colonies (and I do agree colonisation had a pernicious effect) have been independent for several generations now.

As counter-examples, Japan went from being extraordinarily backward to being an industrial powerhouse in a single generation, in time to go toe-to-toe with Russia and the USA in the early 20th century, and walk all over Korea and China. For that matter, once it got it's act together China has surged forward, growing GDP by a factor of 20 in only 25 years. So why did Japan go through this revolution almost 100 years earlier than China? Why has India lagged behind industrially, while surging ahead in terms of IT?

There are a host of cultural factors at play here. Japan responded to US colonial interference by deciding to modernise to prevent that ever happening again. China responded to the humiliation of colonial aggression by tearing itself apart for 100 years. Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt have gone nowehere since the end of colonialism, while Israel is a technological powerhouse. Turkey always seems so close to finally truning a corner and becoming an advanced modern state, but never quite manages to get it done. 'Because colonialism' just isn't enough of an explanation for any of this.

Re: The Software Revolution

#360

Post by vineetraja »

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…

This particular government scheme is now under criticism and proposed overhaul, which includes shifting the focus away from dig-and-fill kind of activities to more permanent ones.
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