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

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

#131

Post by cal_dent »

morkalork wrote: post #125
ericmcer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, i do feel that many people woho talk about jevon's paradox element of employment have not spent much time in developing economies. You can have a lot of people doing absolutely nothing, economically, day to day and still have a functioning state

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

#133

Post by throwaway77770 »

myrmidon wrote: post #67
adrianN wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it care to stay alive? The discussion is pretty pointless as we have no knowledge about alien intelligence and there can be no arguments based on hard facts.

Any form of AI unconcerned about its own continued survival would be just be selected against. Evolutionary principles/selection pressure applies just the same to artificial life, and it seems pretty reasonable to assume that drive/selfpreservation would at least be somewhat comparable.

That assumes that AI needs to be like life, though.

Consider computers: there's no selection pressure for an ordinary computer to be self-reproducing, or to shock you when you reach for the off button, because it's just a tool. An AI could also be just a tool that you fire up, get its answer, and then shut down.

It's true that if some mutation were to create an AI with a survival instinct, and that AI were to get loose, then it would "win" (unless people used tool-AIs to defeat it). But that's not quite the same as saying that AIs would, by default, converge to having a drive for self preservation.

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

#134

Post by bigbadfeline »

myrmidon wrote: post #67
adrianN wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it care to stay alive? The discussion is pretty pointless as we have no knowledge about alien intelligence and there can be no arguments based on hard facts.

Any form of AI unconcerned about its own continued survival would be just be selected against. Evolutionary principles/selection pressure applies just the same to artificial life, and it seems pretty reasonable to assume that drive/selfpreservation would at least be somewhat comparable.

> Any form of AI unconcerned about its own continued survival would be just be selected against. > Evolutionary principles/selection pressure applies

If people allow "evolution" to do the selection instead of them, they deserve everything that befalls them.

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

#135

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

mips_avatar wrote: post #20

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…

This is fantasy land.

Yeah, a rural farmer who’s never exposed to AI except when it made it possible for her to communicate with someone visiting the farm who dint speak the same languages isn’t worried about AI.

But policy makers, technologists, economists, the elite abs other educated people aware of more than the basics of AI are all concerned about its impacts.

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

#136

Post by in-silico »

tsoukase wrote: post #103

If an LLM hallucinates in 1% of occasions and gives subpar output in 5%, this kills his effectiveness to replace anyone. Imagine a support guy on the other side of the phone to speak gibberish 10 times a day. Now, imagine a doctor. These will never lose their jobs.

The models don't need to be perfect. They only need to be as reliable as humans.

Emergency department doctors misdiagnose about 5% of patients [1], so replacing them with an LLM that hallucinates on 1% of cases would actually be a significant improvement.

1: https://effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov/products/diagnostic-err...

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

#137

Post by defrost »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #135
mips_avatar wrote: post #20

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…

This is fantasy land. Yeah, a rural farmer who’s never exposed to AI except when it made it possible for her to communicate with someone visiting the farm who dint speak the same languages isn’t worried about AI. But policy makers, technologists, economists, the elite abs other educated people aware of more than the basics of AI are all concerned about its impacts.

Or, local to where I am, rural farmers using AI bots to hint them on capital machine repairs (their gear runs into the millions), summarise ANOVA trials on grain crop samples, reinforce their personal conspiracy theories and biases, and answer a huge run of everyday queries.

Some can see the benefits. Some (with overlap) can see the downsides (wrong answers and enforcing bad traits).

> But policy makers, technologists, economists, the elite a[nd] other educated people ..

also overlap with rural farmers.

I think a problem here is your image of what a rural farmer is.

A good many here are multi millionaires, in assets at least, have children in elite private schools, have family members in local, state, and federal government who started out farming, went to university, have careers that may include farming on the side, and retire to farming.

Next you'll be saying grandmothers can't code weather modelling and prediction software on Cyber 205's or something equally daft.

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

#139

Post by falkensmaize »

HEmanZ wrote: post #112
simianwords wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but llm's dont speak gibberish 10 times a day even now. from my usage, chatgpt has not said one obviously strange thing since o3 came out.

What are you working on that they are so knowledgeable?Even the best models absolutely make stuff up, even to this day. I literally spend all day every day working with them (all latest ChatGPT models) and it’s still 10-15% BS. I had ChatGPT 5.2 thinking straight up make up an api after I pasted the full api spec to it earlier today. And built its whole response around a public api that did not exist. And Claude cli…

Just today I had Claude Opus 4.5 try to write to a fictional Mac user account on my computer during a coding session. It was pretty weird - the name was very specific and unique enough that it was clear it was likely bleed through from training data. It wasn’t like “John Smith” or something.

That’s the kind of thing that on a large scale could be catastrophic.

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

#140

Post by BurningFrog »

falcor84 wrote: post #121
BurningFrog wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That's an interesting argument. I don't like it, but I can't prove it wrong, so maybe we're approaching a new era where this is true.

But we're clearly not there now, so I stand by my prediction for the medium future!

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