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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

#181

Post by odo1242 »

somenameforme wrote: post #165
thedailymail wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane. "There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.…

A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life", while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life phil…

Well, keep in mind students at UCLA at 1967 were probably among the most wealthy in the country. A lot more average people at UCLA nowadays. Of course being financially well off wouldn't be the most important thing if you were already financially well off.

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

#182

Post by bloppe »

schmichael wrote: post #147
somenameforme wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything…

Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours. At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology. Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will rea…

Margins require a competitive edge. If productivity gains are spread throughout a competitive industry, margins will not get bigger; prices will go down.

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

#183

Post by vlovich123 »

enduser wrote: post #138
twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to auto…

I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.

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

#185

Post by qsera »

kfarr wrote: post #146
hephaes7us wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, at a certain point the training would likely involve interaction with reality (by sensors and actuators), rather than relying on secondhand knowledge available in textual form.

Yeah I feel like the real ah ha moment is still coming once there is a GPT-like thing that has been trained on reality, not its shadow.

Look I think that is the whole difficulty. In reality, doing the wrong thing results in pain, and the right thing in relief/pleasure. A living thing will learn from that.

But machines can experience neither pain nor pleasure.

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

#186

Post by themafia »

> Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000 new-hire questions a month.

> Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us.

What getting high on your own supply actually looks like. These are not the types of questions most people have or need answered. It's unique to the hiring process and the nascent status of the technology. It seems insane to stretch this logic to literally any other arena.

On top of that horses were initially replaced with _stationary_ gasoline engines. Horses:Cars is an invalid view into the historical scenario.

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

vlovich123 wrote: post #183
enduser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to auto…

I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by chongli »

kfarr wrote: post #146
hephaes7us wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, at a certain point the training would likely involve interaction with reality (by sensors and actuators), rather than relying on secondhand knowledge available in textual form.

Yeah I feel like the real ah ha moment is still coming once there is a GPT-like thing that has been trained on reality, not its shadow.

Yes and reality is the hard part. Moravec’s Paradox [1] continues to ring true. A billion years of evolution went into our training to be able to cope with the complexity of reality. Our language is a blink of an eye compared to that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

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

#189

Post by samdoesnothing »

jordwest wrote: post #92
actionfromafar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it really, though? Dollars aren't meant to be held.

I think the idea of dollars as purely a trading medium where absolute prices don't matter wouldn't be such an issue if wages weren't always the last thing to rise with inflation. As it is now anyone with assets is only barely affected by inflation while those who earn a living from wages have their livelihood eroded over time covertly.

Barely affected? They benefit massively from it. That is why the rich get richer.

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

#190

Post by samdoesnothing »

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…

It's inflation, simple as that. The US left the gold standard at the exact same time that productivity diverged from wages. Coincidence? No.

Pretty much everything gets more expensive, with the outliers being tech which has gotten much cheaper, mostly because the rate at which it progresses is faster than the rate at which governments can print money. But everything we need to survive, like food, housing, etc, keeps getting more expensive. And the asset class get richer as a result.

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