Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like our careers could just be snuffed out instantly with little recourse available. You’ve likely heard this sentiment before but it’s the right one so I’ll be the one to post it today: your job is not your purpose, and the economy is not the society. Obviously your whole comment is well founded and relatable, but I think this is the only cure for your anxieties. The world is a beautiful, beautiful place, w…
What do you suppose we all do during the transition to utopia? How do we feed our families once we've been laid off and while we wait for the arrival of paradise? People already going through this now.
Raising Children on the Eve of AI
221–230 of 237 posts
Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I see no reason to believe that all AGI (or GAI, to use your acronym) entities will be identical I absolutely agree. There will be a Cambrian explosion of superintelligent forms. > The additional value that humans present would thus be a diversity factor. We already have a test for this. Parrots, octopus, whales and many other creatures are also diverse. But our problems are beyond their experience. Do we value the…
> We already have a test for this. Parrots, octopus, whales and many other creatures are also diverse. But our problems are beyond their experience. Do we value their diversity as thinkers in our economy? > We don't. I don't mean humans as they presently are, but humans as somewhat-novel GAI entities after upgrading (and humans as an ongoing source: likely there will be some humans that aren't interested in changing…
We are a mess. We often think some things are worth more than money, but are not motivated to spend money on them when needed.
Everything form climate change, to saving specific species.
I think GAI's (green field, or human uplifts) will be much more coherent. They won't be settling for a beautiful wonderful Goldberg brain, designed by a series of a million fortunate accidents, like we have to.
Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. That outcome will need a lot of foresight and democratic regulation, because market forces will want AIs to exploit people. But, let’s assume we find a political system that is smarter than the people wanting to use AIs for bad ends. So, the world would look very much like the world now, where you earn money proportionally to…
> Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. The parent comment didn’t say “nothing nefarious” at all. It just said we overestimate the short term impact. This comment section is full of people acting like AI is going to make most jobs obsolete within a matter of years. One of the top comments as I write this is from someone writing melodramatically about Sam Altman ta…
This is an interesting point - we got a lot of productivity out from pre-AI automation and information technology, but instead of automating away our jobs, we created new ones, some frequently called "bullshit jobs" because the economy as it is defined can't handle a huge mass of people who are not "working" on something.
One such overestimation was self-driving cars - we all thought, ten years ago, our cars would have the front seats turned backwards while the car would take us safely to our destinations. That didn't pan out, despite the humongous hype (remember the Dojo computer?) and Uber and Lyft still employs meatware-guided cars.
Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
My grandparents still recognize the world. they drove cars in their 20s and drive them now. They go shopping at stores much the same as the past. They eat at restaurants much the same as the past. They read books, watch movies much the same as the past. they cook, see friends and family. they live in a house. it still has rooms and furnu much the same as the past. what's changed? more entertainment. easier communicat…
in grocery stores it's harder to pay with just cash. and now all the menus are qr codes.
Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI
#225One bit of warning: we tend to overestimate the short term impact of new tools while underestimating their long term ones. It’s likely our kids will have recognisable professions with better phones than not. AI will be there assisting us in increasingly sophisticated ways, acting as intelligent agents and maybe even impersonating us at simple interactions. Value and supply chains change slowly and those are the thing…
I will always remember Amara's Law, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Having been in the tech industry for 20+ years taught me a lot about the long-term impact. PS. My daughter's name is Amara. :-)
Her law is a lot better than Murphy's ;-)
Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI
#226This feels incredibly detached from my reality. In my reality, there’s a brutal land war two countries over, and I’m agonizing whether I’m dooming my children by not teaching them battlefield first aid, trench digging and FPV drone piloting.
Don't you think the drone flying will be fully automated by the time your kids have to enter the trenches?
Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. That outcome will need a lot of foresight and democratic regulation, because market forces will want AIs to exploit people. But, let’s assume we find a political system that is smarter than the people wanting to use AIs for bad ends. So, the world would look very much like the world now, where you earn money proportionally to…
> Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. The parent comment didn’t say “nothing nefarious” at all. It just said we overestimate the short term impact. This comment section is full of people acting like AI is going to make most jobs obsolete within a matter of years. One of the top comments as I write this is from someone writing melodramatically about Sam Altman ta…
"within a matter of years" has two very different meanings: a few years from now, or a few years from when the AI is good enough.
> If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology.
> It’s the same reason the world didn’t collapse when technology enabled people to do something other than work on farms.
Absolutely agree.
Unfortunately, that transition from agricultural to industrial did mess a lot of things up. Some was our own ignorance of the direct impacts of our actions (for example, the first people to realise CO2 would cause global warming thought this would be good), while some other issues were our ignorance of group dynamics and responses to incentives (which is basically why neither laissez-faire capitalism nor communism worked quite as intended), and finally quite a lot of the world was very upset to find itself being ruled over by a small moist island in the North Atlantic whose leaders treated everyone more than 60 miles from St. Paul's Cathedral as primitives and barbarians fit only to provide curios for museums.
Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
In five years the world will be identical to the present. In 15, it will be unrecognizable.
My grandparents still recognize the world. they drove cars in their 20s and drive them now. They go shopping at stores much the same as the past. They eat at restaurants much the same as the past. They read books, watch movies much the same as the past. they cook, see friends and family. they live in a house. it still has rooms and furnu much the same as the past. what's changed? more entertainment. easier communicat…
My dad was born before the UK joined WW2, he lived through the arrival of colour TV. One of the earliest stories people had about mum was during an air raid where her family had to shelter under the kitchen table. Dad was about to turn 6 when Nagasaki was bombed. He was 8 when the transistor was finally prototyped. At university, he studied electrical engineering, he only learned about this new thing called "software" on a two day training course at work. When he settled down and started a family, phone numbers were 4 digits, "long distance" meant the next town, international was unheard of. One of my mum's resentments was that my dad had grown up thinking that eating out was too expensive, such that he never took her anywhere — thanks to WW2 both grew up with rationing, which also means their experience of what foods are available in (super)markets radically changed over the years (one of mum's anecdotes was the first time she bought a chilli pepper, from a street market, she just bit into it like it was a banana or apple because she didn't know any better).
My parents saw the fall of the British Empire, the Beeching cuts, the moon landings, the invention of nuclear power and solar power. The house went from no loft insulation to loads, from a void cavity on the walls to filled cavity, it gained PV on the roof.
They lived through the sexual revolution, the introduction and widespread availability of oral contraceptives.
My uncle moved to Australia (from the UK), and I'm told that was because he really didn't like his mum and that was as far as he could go. My first international trip was, in part, to meet him, with my gran paying for herself, my parents, and me to all go together because international travel got that much cheaper (my brother and sister went later, they were at university at the time).
They saw AIDS enter the news, were around for PrEP to enter human trials. The first heart transplant, liver transplant, lung transplant. They saw smallpox eradicated. They saw witchcraft and homosexuality legalised. They saw the USSR collapse, having previously visited a divided Berlin (where I now live). They saw the formation of the EU.
My dad took a lot of books out of the library. Me? Audio books and podcasts, which I listen to sped-up, so that I can multi-task, either on a commute or during a long walk. Dad was 40 when the Walkman was introduced.
I see robots helping clean up the food courts in a mall close to what was, in their lifetime, a heavily fortified no-mans land. The first vacuum cleaner I bought was a Roomba.
Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI
#229One bit of warning: we tend to overestimate the short term impact of new tools while underestimating their long term ones. It’s likely our kids will have recognisable professions with better phones than not. AI will be there assisting us in increasingly sophisticated ways, acting as intelligent agents and maybe even impersonating us at simple interactions. Value and supply chains change slowly and those are the thing…
This sounds humble, but it's a prediction that actually contains a lot of confidence about where the future will go.
> But here’s the problem: in saying “for all I know, human-level AI might take thousands of years,” I thought I was being radically uncertain already. I was explaining that there was no trend you could knowably, reliably project into the future such that you’d end up with human-level AI by roughly such-and-such time. And in a sense, I was right. The trouble, with hindsight, was that I placed the burden of proof only on those saying a dramatic change would happen, not on those saying it wouldn’t. Note that this is the same mistake most of the world made with COVID in early 2020.
> I would sum up the lesson thus: one must never use radical ignorance as an excuse to default, in practice, to the guess that everything will stay basically the same.
Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI
#230Life changed less than you think: The cobbler down the streets still makes shoes, the butcher next door still cures meat, the carpenter in the neighbourhood still builds chairs. It’s just that the cobblers brother works in a bio-factories clean room, and the carpenters wife is a sysadmin.
There are butchers around, though who knows how long that will last, once vat-grown flesh is both affordable and available.