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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#211

Post by xpe »

fraboniface wrote: post #197

On this, read Daniel Susskind - A world without work (2020). He says exactly this: the new tasks created by AI can in good part themselves be done by AI, if not as soon as they appear then a few years of improvement later. This will inevitably affect the job market and the relative importance of capital and labor in the economy. Unchecked, this will worsen inequalities and create social unrest. His solution will not…

Characterizing government along only one axis, such as “big” versus “small”, can overlook important differences having to do with: legal authority, direct versus indirect programs, tax base, law enforcement, and more.

In the future, I could imagine some libertarians having their come to AI Jesus moment getting behind a smallish government that primarily collects taxes and transfers wealth while guiding (but not operating directly) a minimal set of services.

Re: AI is different

#212

Post by juniperus »

eternauta3k wrote: post #203

At some point far in the future, we don't need an economy: everyone does everything they need by themselves, helped by AI and replicators. But realistically, you're not going to have a personal foundry anytime soon.

resources and materials will still be required, and economics will spawn from this trade.

Re: AI is different

#213

Post by snapey »

nibnalin wrote: post #202
andrewmutz wrote: post #201

Reading smart software people talk about AI in 2025 is basically just reading variations on the lump of labor fallacy. If you want to understand what AI can do, listen to computer scientists. If you want to understand it’s likely impact on society, listen to economists.

What or whose writing or podcasts would you recommend reading / listening?

Tyler Cowen has a lot of interesting things to say on the impact of AI on the economy. His recent talk at DeepMind is a good place to start https://www.aipolicyperspectives.com/p/a-discussion-with-tyl...

Re: AI is different

#214

Post by victorbjorklund »

leshow wrote: post #182
schneems wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…

UBI is not a good solution because you still have to provision everything on the market, so it's a subsidy to private companies that sell the necessities of life on the market. If we're dreaming up solutions to problems, much better would be to remove the essentials from the market and provide them to everyone universally. Non-market housing, healthcare, education all provided to every citizen by virtue of being a hu…

So basically the model North Korea practices?

Re: AI is different

#215

Post by chr1 »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #164
schneems wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…

Not sure how exactly politicians will jump from “minimal wages don’t have to be livable wages” and “people who are able to work should absolutely not have access to free healthcare” and “any tax-supported benefits are actually undeserved entitlements and should be eliminated” to “everyone deserves a universal basic income”.

The money transferred from tax payers to people without money is in effect a price for not breaking the law.

If AI makes it much easier to produce goods, it reduces price of money, making it easier to pay some money to everyone in exchange for not breaking the law.

Re: AI is different

#217

Post by 9dev »

visarga wrote: post #105
btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

> displace humans ... AI can displace human work but not human accountability. It has no skin and faces no consequences. > can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily ... Are we talking about AI that always needs trainers to fix their prompts and training sets? How are we going to train AI when we lose those skills and get rid of humans? > what do displaced humans transition to? Humans with all powerful A…

> ask that question to all the companies laying off junior folks in favor of LLMs right now. They are gleefully sawing off the branch they’re sitting on.

> Humans with all powerful AI in their pockets... what could they do if they lose their jobs?

At which point did AI become a free commodity in your scenario?

Re: AI is different

#218

Post by closewith »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #207
btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

Snarky but serious question: How do we know that this wave will disrupt labor at all? Every time I dig into a story of X employees replaced by "AI", it's always in a company with shrinking revenues. Furthermore, all of the high-value use cases involve very intense supervision of the models. There's been a dream of unsupervised models going hog wild on codebases for the last three years. Yet even the latest and greate…

> instead of only somewhat reliably fulfilling very narrowly scoped tasks that require no creativity or expertise.

This alone is enough to completely reorganise the labour market, as it describe an enormous number of roles.

Re: AI is different

#219

Post by ares623 »

csoups14 wrote: post #131
voidhorse wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The complete irony in all software engineers enthusiasm for this tech is that, if the boards wishes come true, they are literally helping them eliminate their own jobs. It's like the industrial revolution but worse, because at least the craftsmen weren't also the ones building the factories that would automate them out of work. Marcuse had a term for this "false consciousness"-when the structure of capitalism en…

Or they realize it and they're trying to squeeze the last bit of juice available to them before the party stops. It's not exactly a suboptimal decision to work towards your own job's demise if it's the best paying work available to you and you want to save up as much as possible before any possible disruption. If you quit, someone else steps into the breach and the outcome is all the same. There's very few people act…

Yeah I get that. I myself am part of a team at work building an AI/LLM-based feature.

I always dreaded this would come but it was inevitable.

I can’t outright quit, no thanks in part to the AI hype that stopped valuing headcount as a signal to company growth. If that isn’t ironic I don’t know what is.

Given the situation I am in, I just keep my head down and do the work. I vent and whinge and moan whenever I can, it’s the least I can do. I refuse to cheer it on at work. At the very least I can look my kids in the eye when they are old enough to ask me what the fuck happened and tell them I did not cheer it on.

Re: AI is different

#220

Post by OneMorePerson »

xpe wrote: post #165
OneMorePerson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far from an expert on this topic, but what differentiates AI from other non physical efficiency tools? (I'm actually asking not contesting). Won't companies always want to compete with one another, so simply using AI won't be enough. We will always want better and better software, more features, etc. so that race will never end until we get an AI fully capable of managing all parts (100%) of the development process (…

> what differentiates AI from other non physical efficiency tools? At some point: (1) general intelligence; i.e. adaptivity; (2) self replication; (3) self improvement.

Yeah I agree, it's not about where it's at now, but whether where we are now leads to something with general intelligence and self improvement ability. I don't quite see that happening with the curve it's on, but again what the heck do I know.
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