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Raising Children on the Eve of AI

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Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#101

Post by polotics »

Biologist123 wrote: post #43

The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”. I’m not surprised. I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime. I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child l…

May I ask for a hint about where your friend's abused child is located in the world? Also, what data was provided, did the 7 year old have to read the whole IPCC report?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#102

Post by ben_w »

inference-lord wrote: post #94
moltar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could have said the same about the use of tractors. People used to farm by hand. All those people were replaced. Yet here we are doing just fine.

People are still employed to drive tractors though.

90% fewer in absolute numbers compared to driving oxen across fields, despite a simultaneous ten-fold increase in the population.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#103

Post by polotics »

moshun wrote: post #53
Biologist123 wrote: post #43

The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”. I’m not surprised. I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime. I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child l…

I’m not sure being honest with children about something that impacts them so heavily is the wrong move here. Traumatized or not, I suspect teaching children about the problem in clear terms will lead to a better informed generation of scientists, lawmakers, and voters. Hopefully they make and stick to better decisions then those that came before.

As a child I was wholly educated in the certainty that my life was in imminent danger of a nuclear Armageddon... Maybe your "honest with children" about climate change is a hint that they're more likely to have to deal with nuclear winter than anything.

Hence: the best preparation is wide skills and can-do attitude, not ruminations on clueless adults' "honesty"?

What do you think?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#104

Post by arpa »

thanatos519 wrote: post #52

I'm much less concerned about the impact of AI than about climate change and ecological destruction. A radical shift in the distribution of work and wealth is long overdue. I'm sure our children will be better off for AI if it can help us get through the coming war, famine, plague, and "natural" disasters.

AI is tipping the scales not to the favour of the proletariat. "The means of production" is in the hands of the powerful few, and I foresee a very bloody revolution.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#105

Post by safety1st »

j7ake wrote: post #90
safety1st wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Right now we have LLMs and they're a very far cry from any form of AI that could replace a software engineer wholesale. In my little corner of the software engineering universe I have not seen any credible hiring manager say they were going to fire developers and replace them with LLMs (I have seen this threat from one o…

LLMs do not need to replace a software engineer wholesale for engineers to be worried. Even if half of the junior software engineering positions become obsolete because of LLMs, it’s already a huge issue for the entire profession. Of course if you’re in the top of your profession, there’s nothing to worry. But on aggregate one can expect deteriorating conditions. Mostly this will disproportionately affect juniors.

That's where the second half of my comment comes in. I am positing that if LLMs are able to increase the output of developers, the demand for software will increase along with it. The economic term for this is induced demand, and the classic example is roads, when you build more of them the number of cars on the road increases because there were people who used to stay home or take other modes of transportation, and now they drive because there are more and less congested roads. It's not what most regular people believe but it's also not my idea, it's the basis of a ton of tech investor successes.

I think we are in that position with software. Increase the supply of programmer output, virtual or not, and the demand for it goes up, because there's a lot of demand on the sidelines today (like maybe programmer output is too expensive for them now and LLM tooling makes each unit of output cheaper, which in turn makes new customers appear).

Again Marc Andreessen to name just one guy who wrote a famous essay about it has made billions of dollars in large part by betting on this phenomenon which most people don't understand or believe in.

If you look at things from the perspective of the job that you have today, depend upon and which might go away, yeah a job is a fragile thing so it's easy to get scared. But if you look at it from the perspective of there being these guys who keep betting on the idea that software demand will increase and then reality has proven them right and made them rich, this idea of software jobs disappearing is less scary.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#106

Post by ben_w »

keiferski wrote: post #99
duccinator wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have autonomous robots you can use those robots to build more robots leading to an exponential curve. The day they make the first one, we will reach a million in 2-3 years and a billion in 2-4 years after that.

The laws of physics and the material cost of creating robots still exist. Real life isn’t a sci fi movie.

If robots actually replaced all human labour and left nothing for humans to be employed at, then the robots necessarily can do their own resource extraction.

The current cost of a Boston Dynamics Spot is around a year's income, give or take whose income you're measuring against.

If it were able to do any human task at the same rate as a human — and yes, I know it isn't, this is just a anchoring point for the discussion — a group of them would be able to extract and process enough resources in a year sufficient to double their population, all the way from rocks in the ground to a finished deliverable.

n years later, there are 2^n robots. Sure, sure, that's a whole 33 years to go from one total to one per human, not the numbers the other person gave which would need a much shorter (but not wildly implausible) reproduction time of 5-8 weeks, but the point is still valid.

That exponential stops only when some un-substitutable resource is fully exploited, so I'm not sure what the upper limit actually is, but given we exist I assume 8 billion robots is also possible.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#107

Post by rjsw »

keiferski wrote: post #69
xbmcuser wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not happening in the next decade but the change will come a lot faster than a century. As the tech needed for it is improving rapidly as well as getting cheaper. And I think many people are thinking in all or nothing scenario but long before everything is completely autonomous they will bring in efficiency where 1 person with autonomous helpers will be completing jobs that needed multiple people before.

That will still take decades, if not a century. Manufacturing and developing millions of robots that walk around and do repairs (not to mention making them economically affordable) is not something that’s going to happen soon. What’s more likely is that robots replace human factory workers first.

If the robots have a longer working life than the humans they replace then they don't have to be cheaper. Doing physical work breaks down your body relatively quickly.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#108

Post by rjsw »

RandomLensman wrote: post #96
alumic wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is depressing. I think that this might just be the whole picture. Look, I spent a long while studying evolutionary biology in school (detour into pre-med) and came away with a fairly bleak picture of our place in the universe. I use "worth" in precisely that context. Nature gives us a world in which "he who does not work, does not eat" is a rule of law. Human beings--especially modern ones--assign worth quite diff…

A rich person not working is worthless? Historically, humans have not acted that way, nor have such persons had nothing to eat. Wealth can substitute for work.

Apex predators never have to "work" particularly hard.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#109

Post by czl »

bo1024 wrote: post #88
keiferski wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point I’m making. Everyone won’t be a YouTuber. But the successful people will cultivate skills that are similar to those needed by successful YouTubers. Being an anonymous worker with anonymous output means you can be easily replaced.

All of the examples you gave are lottery-ticket professions, though. And even if a large number of people could be successful entertainers, I'm not even sure about the premise. AI-generated media could compete with YouTubers very soon. AI will take a long, long time to replace garbagemen.

> AI will take a long, long time to replace garbagemen.

In some places what holds this back is reliable AI driving. Single driver collection trucks doing all the work with robot arms are common in some places already and we are better for this physically difficult job being done by machines.

Today society shares based on your work contribution and it is our sharing that must evolve when less and less work needs to be done.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#110

Post by keiferski »

ben_w wrote: post #106
keiferski wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws of physics and the material cost of creating robots still exist. Real life isn’t a sci fi movie.

If robots actually replaced all human labour and left nothing for humans to be employed at, then the robots necessarily can do their own resource extraction. The current cost of a Boston Dynamics Spot is around a year's income, give or take whose income you're measuring against. If it were able to do any human task at the same rate as a human — and yes, I know it isn't, this is just a anchoring point for the discussi…

The discussion is about robots replacing laborers and tradesmen, not all human work. It seems far more likely than humans will maintain control of the corporations that manufacture the robots.

The rest of this is just sci-fi speculation.

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