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Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

writings.stephenwolfram.com

121–130 of 174 posts

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a circular argument here - even if we human always assign intrinsic value to ourselves and our kin, I don't see a clear argument that human capabilities will have external value to the economy at large.

"The economy" is entirely driven by human needs. If you "unwind" all the complexities in modern supply chains, there are always human people paying for something they want at the leaf nodes. Take the food and clothing industries as obvious examples. In some AI singularity scenario where all humans are unemployed and dirt poor, does all the food and clothing produced by the automated factories just end up in big piles…

There's nothing definitional about the economy being driven by human need. In a future scenario where there are superintelligent AIs, there's no reason why they wouldn't run their own economy for their own needs, collecting and processing materials to service each other's goals, for example of space exploration.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#122
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end game is nationalisation lmao. How people cant see this is mad... It wouldnt be the first time in history a govt has taken into their hands an organisation that is deemed too powerful.

if the government is owned by corporations via the stock markets than governments taking over organisations is privatization via a majority shareholdership and not nationalization.

Are you seriously this delusional? THe leaders of tech firms operate at the behest of Trump. Not the other way round.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#123
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the government is owned by corporations via the stock markets than governments taking over organisations is privatization via a majority shareholdership and not nationalization.

Are you seriously this delusional? THe leaders of tech firms operate at the behest of Trump. Not the other way round.

Who funds those tech firms? It's not Trump. His power is mostly theater to his constituents and those who funded Trump: spoiler: he's not entirely self funded, and some of his funding is at least from others so he's conflicted in his self interests to others. We call this a classic conflict of interest.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is instructed to roleplay a cheesy cheery bot and so it responds accordingly, but it (and almost any LLM) can be instructed to roleplay any sort of character, none of which mean anything about the system itself. Of course an AGI system could also be instructed to roleplay such a character, but that doesn't mean it'd be an inherent attribute of the system itself.

so it has emotions but "it is not an inherent attribute of the system itself" but does it matter? its all the same if one can't tell the difference

It (at least LLMs) can reproduce similar display of having these emotions, when instructed so, but if it matters or not depends on the context of that display and why the question is asked in the first place.

For example, if i ask an LLM to tell me the syntax of the TextOut function, it gives me the Win32 syntax and i clarify that i meant the TextOut function from Delphi before it gives me the proper result, while i know i'm essentially participating in a turn-based game of filling a chat transcript between a "user" (with my input) and an "assistant" (the chat transcript segments the LLM fills in), it doesn't really matter for the purposes of finding out the syntax of the TextOut function.

However if the purpose was to make sure the LLM understands my correction and is able to reference it in the future (ignoring external tools assisting the process as those are not part of the LLM - and do not work reliably anyway) then the difference between what the LLM displays and what is an inherent attribute of it does matter.

In fact, knowing the difference can help take better advantage of the LLM: in some inference UIs you can edit the entire chat transcript and when finding mistakes, you can edit them in place including both your requests and the LLM's response as if the LLM did not do any mistakes instead of trying to correct it as part of the transcript itself, thus avoiding the scenario where the LLM "roleplays" as an assistant that does mistakes you end up correcting.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#125
post #23

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down p…

We might just keep making more jobs and coming up with more busy work to keep people grinding away for 40 hours a week. If you look at 1940, women were ~24% of the workforce. Now in 2025 they are ~48%. The numbers are probably similar with immigrant workers having increased greatly in the last 80 years. If you view AI workers as just more labor flooding the workforce it might have a similar affect. If we flooded the…

That example doesn't hold up once you expand your view to other countries. Where are all these jobs that magically materialize in labour surplus economies like Brazil or Bangladesh?

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#126
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way to put this IMO. The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share anything with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has little to no value to them. All the past waves of automation provided a lot of entirely new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by factory workers siphonin…

Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it... Lol as if you really believe that a bunch of people will actually control everything and the govt wont? Think harder.

> Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it

Do you think the government is going to react with mass nationalisation of private companies to fight wealth inequality? What would the threshold be? The top 1% owning half of everything? 70%? I share no such optimism. The wealthy already have their interests much better represented in politics than their share of votes should allow (and this is a really difficult problem to tackle!), this is only gonna get worse and any government action against rich people interests is going to be increasingly difficult to trigger and sustain.

Even if such mass nationalisation happened, why would you expect a better final outcome than every attempt at communism got (while doing the same thing): Namely, government just splitting up those spoils with their cronies?

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#127
post #23

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down p…

I think you arn't paying attention: AS long as there's 1 seller and 1 buyer, Capitalism will happily burn the rest of the population.

Sure there's some other limits on social cohesion, but the idea that we can't squeeze upward and leave a bunch of poor people destitute is optimistic.

It's also how you ensure no one thinks: Hey, maybe capitalism isn't an optimal distribution of social good.

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#128
post #37

Outside of America people aren't really stressed about AI. Like you go to Vietnam or Vienna they mostly just think that they will have a good life with AI. It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job. The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Mic…

I am from Vienna, and this is completely false. Likewise, my friends from many countries, incl. Vietnam, also share the sentiment you describe as "American". Your point has no standing.

Same, and I ain't in any of those locations.

The thing is that there will be less work, but that certainly is not looking like universal income. It is more like rich people will get rid of those who they don't need with some sort of "let's kill parasites" or "cutting weed" because the world is in danger of poor people destroying it. In certain ways, they are already trying to tell that to people so nobody notices that no single person should have a trillion or even a billion of money

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#129
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way to put this IMO. The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share anything with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has little to no value to them. All the past waves of automation provided a lot of entirely new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by factory workers siphonin…

Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it... Lol as if you really believe that a bunch of people will actually control everything and the govt wont? Think harder.

The US govt is already useless in constrast with the ruling corporations. Congress can't get anything done. What makes you think they could or would do anything to the slave owners who pay them?

Re: Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

#130
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the government is owned by corporations via the stock markets than governments taking over organisations is privatization via a majority shareholdership and not nationalization.

Are you seriously this delusional? THe leaders of tech firms operate at the behest of Trump. Not the other way round.

How did Trump get where he is? Who was and is his supply chain? Who made him? Who did he 'use' and 'need' to 'build himself'?
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