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

writings.stephenwolfram.com

151–160 of 174 posts

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In the UK we have approx 22 million adults doing not much so you can see it in developed places too.

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

#152

There is a simple fact that means we won’t have zero jobs in the future. Human wants is endless. At no point will humans say ”that is enough we don’t need more” so will always have the incentive to use both capital and people. Is certain jobs gonna be replaced? Probably. Let’s say we make substantial advances in robotics and it makes sense to replace all the staff in McDonalds with machines? Yea, then those jobs are…

Jobs do not occur because of wants. They occur at the intersection of wants and economic possibilities. Economic possibilities might go to zero.

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

#153
post #148

A big short-term risk that I see is that AI is going to cripple wealth redistribution mechanisms that we currently rely on. Most willing persons have access to income by providing labor right now. If the value of that labor diminishes because AI can do most of it for cheaper/free, that is a big problem because wealth/class barriers become insurmountable and the american dream basically dies completely. Automation in…

It'll probably go kinda socialist. From AI according to its ability to each according to his need.

What incentive do politicians have to make that happen, when they could more easily blame immigrants and transgender people?

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

#154
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll probably go kinda socialist. From AI according to its ability to each according to his need.

What incentive do politicians have to make that happen, when they could more easily blame immigrants and transgender people?

There have always been politicians offering that kind of thing - Berni, Corbyn etc. The issue is will people vote for them? So far mostly no because someone has to do the work and many workers prefer to keep the proceeds. If AIs can do the work it may be more attractive.

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

#155
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

If you look at real world examples of machines replacing jobs like in the industrial revolution it didn't really go like that. The rich didn't monopolise everything because competition reduced the profits and the works moved on to other jobs like the ones we do today.

The "let's kill parasites" stuff has arisen more in land grabs to clear the indigenous people, not due to tech.

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

#156
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok well I didn't meet everyone in Vienna or Vietnam, but those I did meet hadn't been laid off in the name of AI (yesterday three of my friends were laid off from Amazon). And if you're laid off in Vienna you still have access to healthcare, and there's a functioning safety net, and just generally a sense that you're not alone in this. In the united states my apartment has a homeless man living beneath it and every n…

I think US social issues and AI are rather separate. We have quite a few AI worriers from the UK, Hinton being maybe the best known.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd be suprised how effective robots will be at manual tasks eventually. Manipulating physical objects in space is a different problem from manipulating text strings, but efforts to solve this problem are already well under way. Boston Dynamics has shown us that the difference between a clumsy robot and an agile one is mostly software, and the differences between current Unitree-class robot and an actual pr…

yeah yeah, we heard it million times. Noble lies. The "robots will do the manual work" story sounds comforting, but it’s not how automation usually spreads in a capitalist economy like ours. Capitalism automates where the return on investment is easiest and fastest, not where society most needs relief. That’s why AI is hitting creative and white-collar work first: you can replace or augment digital labor from a data…

People always vastly overestimate what can be done in the short term, and vastly underestimate what can be done in the long term.

I'm reclining right now typing on what would have been in the 1980s an unimaginable hypercomputer lying in my lap, at a cost far less in inflation-adjusted terms roughly that of a ZX80, connected by gigabit-speed links to a world-spanning network of similarly unimaginably fast servers connected by near-terabit optical links. And all this has changed the world in ways impossible to anticipate in the 1980s, ways that look like the most extreme cyberpunk fiction of that time. Who could have anticipated, for example, that politics is now substantially driven by covert bot farms, or that LLMs could seduce people into suicidal psychoses?

Yes, robots are going to be underwhelming for quite some considerable time, just like the ZX81 represented almost no improvement over the ZX80 and so on - each generation represented only a marginal increase over the previous. Solar panels were crap 20 years ago; toys useful only for powering pocket calculators. But they got a little bit better year by year, and small improvements compund exponentially. Now renewables are approaching 50% of electrical power generation in many places, and it's pretty clear that in another 20 years, wind/solar/battery will be the sole generation source for all but the most niche activities.

I expect the robot boosterism of the present day to bust pretty quickly when we see how different their capabilities are from the fantasy. But fast-forward just 20 years, and supply chains adapt much faster than expected (cf. Chinese electric car manufacturing) and the concept of ubiquitous robotics seems much more feasible. It certainly seems likely that if we can make roughly 100 million cars every year, we can make robots at a similar rate. I think it's likely to change the world in ways we can't imagine yet.

People live longer than 20 years, and the average person born today can expect to see perhaps four such technological revolutions. Think long-term.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we had human level cognitive capabilities in a box (I'm assuming we will get there in some way this century), are you confident that such a construct will be kept sufficiently isolated and locked down?

I honestly think that this is extremely overoptimistic, just looking at how we currently experiment with and handle LLMs; admittedly the "danger" is much lower for now because LLMs are not capable of online learning and have very limited and accessible memory/state, but the "handling" is completely haphazard right now (people hooking up LLMs with various interfaces/web access, trying to turn them into romantic partners, etc.)

The people opening such a pandoras box might also be far from the only ones suffering the consequences , making it unfair to blame everyone.

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

#159
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…

Also just to be clear on the outcome of what you said: Humans will be cheaper than AI in order to compete. AI uses 10litres of water and 10kwh of power per day to digg a hole? You'd better do it for less human! I'm not sure on the human needs costs vs the AI costs and what lifestyle it would allow me. I'm sure as shit not having kids in such a world. I suspect it's ghetto like meager living while competing against ma…

In the UK 10litres of water and 10kwh of power cost about £2.50. Hiring someone to dig holes probably runs 50x that.
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