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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#101

Post by schoen »

COAGULOPATH wrote: post #94

> In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines. But would you rather be a horse in 1920 or 2020? Wouldn't you rather have modern medicine, better animal welfare laws, less exposure to accidents, and so on? The only way horses conceivably have it worse is that there are fewer of them (a kind of "repugnant conclus…

> No human regards it as a tragedy that there are only 9 billion of us instead of 90 billion.

I have met some transhumanists and longtermists who would really like to see some orders of magnitude increase in the human population. Maybe they wouldn't say "tragedy", but they might say "burning imperative".

I also don't think it's clearly better for more beings to exist rather than fewer, but I just want to assure you that the full range of takes on population ethics definitely exists, and it's not simply a matter of straightforward common sense how many people (or horses) there ought to be.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#102

Post by xlbuttplug2 »

kgk9000 wrote: post #82

I think the author's point is that each type of job will basically disappear roughly at once, shortly after AI crosses the bar of "good enough" in that particular field.

I think the turning point will be when AI assisted individuals or tiny companies are able to deliver comparable products/value as the goliaths.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#103

Post by philipwhiuk »

raincole wrote: post #14
barbazoo wrote: post #2

Engine efficiency, chess rating, AI cap ex. One example is not like the other. Is there steady progress in AI? To me it feels like it’s little progress followed by the occasional breakthrough but I might be totally off here.

What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI is getting better and better. Before someone says "but benchmark doesn't reflect real world..." please name what metric you think is meaningful if not benchmark. Token consumption? OpenAI/Anthropic revenue?

OpenAI net profit.

The figures for cost are wildly off to start with.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#104

Post by [deleted] »

rvz wrote: post #81
billisonline wrote: post #50

An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of change in LLMs slowed down, and those exci…

Remember, these companies (including the author) have an incentive to continue selling fear of job displacement not because of how disruptive LLMs are, but because of how profitable it is if you scare everyone into using your product to “survive”. To companies like Anthropic, “AGI” really means: “Liquidity event for (AI company)” - IPO, tender offer or acquisition. Afterwards, you will see the same broken promises as…

[deleted]

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#105

Post by magarnicle »

adventured wrote: post #16

It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here. As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much. I think it's a very clear c…

I value this comment even though I don't really agree about how useful AI is. I recognise in myself that my aversion to AI is at least partly driven by fear of it taking my job.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#106

Post by ternus »

Regarding horses vs. engines, what changed the game was not engine efficiency, but the widespread availability of fuel (gas stations) and the broad diffusion of reliable, cheap cars. Analogies can be made to technologies like cell phones, MP3 players, or electric cars: beyond just the quality of the core technology, what matters is a) the existence of supporting infrastructure and b) a watershed level of "good/cheap enough" where it displaces the previous best option.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#107

Post by mlrtime »

renewiltord wrote: post #76
websiteapi wrote: post #22

funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…

Well, politically, housing becoming cheaper is considered a failure. And this is true for all ages. As an example, take Reddit. Skews younger, more Democrat-voting, etc. You'd think they'd be for lower housing prices. But not really. In fact, they make fun of states like Texas whose cities act to allow housing to become cheaper: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/1nw4ef9/... That's just an example, b…

Thank you, I've replied too many times that if people want low priced housing, it's easily found in Texas. The replies are empty or stating that they don't want to live there because... it's Texas.

So the young want cheap affordable housing, right in the middle of Manhattan, never going to happen.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#108

Post by d--b »

ible wrote: post #5

People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other. The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each oth…

I was trying to phrase something like this, but you said it a lot better than I ever could.

I can’t help but smile at the possibility that you could be a bot.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#109

Post by wotWhytho »

zdragnar wrote: post #90
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give backing i’m from Australia which has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita of US citizens but a lower average wealth. This shows through in the wealth of a typical citizen. Less homelessness, better living standards (hdi in australia is higher) etc. Compare sorting by median vs average to get a sense of the issue; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... This is a recent development where…

> All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening taxes on the middle class… seems obvious right? You could tax 100% of all of the top 1%'s income (not progressively, just a flat 100% tax) and it'd cover less than double the federal government's budget deficit in the US. There would be just enough left over to pay for making the covid 19 ACA subsidies permanent and a few other pet projects. Of course, you…

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#110

Post by wotWhytho »

websiteapi wrote: post #22

funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…

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