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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#271

Post by essnine »

juniperus wrote: post #233
aorloff wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time someone casually throws out UBI my mind goes to the question "who is paying taxes when some people are on UBI ?" Is there like a transition period where some people don't have to pay taxes and yet don't get UBI, and if so, why hasn't that come yet ? Why aren't the minimum tax thresholds going up if UBI could be right around the corner ?

The taxes will be most burdensome for the wealthiest and most productive of institutions, which is generally why these arrangements collapse economies and nations. UBI is hard to implement because it incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity. This creates economic crisis, taxes are basically a smaller scale version of this, UBI is like a more comprehensive wealth redistribution sche…

The assumption here that UBI "incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity" is the part that doesn't make sense. What do you think universal means? How does it disincentivize productive activity if it is provided to everyone regardless of their income/productivity/employment/whatever?

Re: AI is different

#272

Post by mmmore »

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.

Here's a thoughtful post related to your lump of labor point: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TkWCKzWjcbfGzdNK5/applying-t...

What economists have taken seriously the premise that AI will be able to do any job a human can more efficiently and fully thought through it's implications? i.e. a society where (human) labor is unnecessary to create goods/provide services and only capital and natural resources are required. The capabilities that some computer scientists think AI will soon have would imply that. The ones that have seriously considered it that I know are Hanson and Cowen; it definitely feels understudied.

Re: AI is different

#273

Post by ACCount37 »

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…

Is the ability to burn someone at a stake for making a mistake truly vital to you?

If not, then what's the advantage of "having skin" is? Sure, you can't flog an AI. But AI doesn't need to be threatened with flogging to perform at the peak of its abilities. A well designed AI performs at the peak of its abilities always - and if that isn't enough, you train it until it is.

Re: AI is different

#274

Post by ekianjo »

For every industrial revolution (and we dont even know if AI is one yet) this kind of doom prediction has been around. AI will obviously create a lot of jobs too. the infra to run AI will not building itself, the people who train models will still be needed, the AI supervisors or managers or whatever we call it will be necessary part of the new workflows. And if your job needs hands you will be largely unaffected as there is no near future where robots will replace the flexibility of what most humans can do.

Re: AI is different

#275

Post by geraneum »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #127
devmor wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The internet did that ages ago. We just pretended it didn't because some students didn't know how to use Google.

Everyone knows how to use Google. There's a difference between a corpus of data available online and an intelligent chatbot that can answer any permutation of questions with high accuracy with no manual searching or effort.

> Everyone knows how to use Google.

Everyone knows how to type questions into a chat box, yet whenever something doesn’t work as advertised with the LLMs, the response here is, “you’re holding it wrong”.

Re: AI is different

#276

Post by Guthur »

yard2010 wrote: post #265

I think so too - the latest AI changes mark the new "automate everything" era. When everything is automated, everything costs basically zero, as this will eliminate the most expensive part of every business - human labor. No one will make money from all the automated stuff, but no one would need the money anyway. This will create a society in which money is not the only value pursued. Instead of trying to chase paper…

It will only be zero as long as we don't allow rent seeking behaviour. If the technology has gatekeepers, if energy is not provided at a practically infinite capacity and if people don't wake themselves from the master/slave relationships we seem to so often desire and create, then I'm skeptical.

The latter one is probably the most intellectually interesting and potentially intractable...

I completely disagree with idea that money is currently the only driver of human endeavour, frankly it's demonstrably not true, at least not in it's direct use value, it maybe used as a proxy for power but it's also not directly correlatable.

Looking at it intellectually from a Hegelian lens of master/slave dialectic might provide some interesting insights. I think both sides are in some way usurped. The slaves position of actualisation through productive creation is taken via automation, but if that automation is also widely and freely available the masters position of status via subjection is also made common and therefore without status.

What does it all mean in the long run? Damned if I know...

Re: AI is different

#277

Post by raincole »

simianwords wrote: post #237
atleastoptimal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone knows how to use Google. There's a difference between a corpus of data available online and an intelligent chatbot that can answer any permutation of questions with high accuracy with no manual searching or effort.

Do you really think the jump from books to freely globally accessible data instantly available is a smaller jump than internet to ChatGPT? This is insane!!

It's not just smaller, but neglectable (in comparison).

In the internet era you had to parse the questions with your own brain. You just didn't necessarily need to solve them yourself.

In ChatGPT era you don't even need to read the questions. At all. The questions could be written in a language you don't understand, and you still are able generate plausible answers to them.

Re: AI is different

#278

Post by jrvarela56 »

This whole ‘what are we going to do’ I think is way out of proportion even if we do end up with agi.

Let’s say whatever the machines do better than humans, gets done by machines. Suddenly the bottleneck is going to shift to those things where humans are better. We’ll do that and the machines will try to replace that labor too. And then again, and again.

Throughout this process society becomes wealthier, TVs get cheaper, we colonize Mars, etc. The force that keeps this going is human insatisfaction: once we get these things we’ll want whatever it is we don’t have.

Maybe that’s the problem we should focus on solving…

Re: AI is different

#279

Post by dsign »

ares623 wrote: post #253
dsign wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big fan of your argument and don't disagree. If AI makes a virus to get rid of humanity, well we are screwed. But if all we have to fear from AI is unprecedented economic disruption, I will point out that some parts of the world may survive relatively unscathed. Let's talk Samoa, for example. There, people will continue fishing and living their day-to-day. If industrialized economies collapse, Samoans may find it ver…

Won’t 8 billion people will have incentive to move to Samoa in that case?

Realistically, in an AI extreme economic disruption scenario, it's more or less USA the only one extremely affected, and that's 400 million people. Assuming it's AI and nothing else causes a big disruption before, and with the big caveat that nobody can't predict the future, I would say:

- Mexico and down are more into informal economies, and they generally lag behind developed economies by decades. Same applies to Africa and big parts of Asia. As such, by the time things get really dire in USA and maybe in Europe and China, the south will be still in business-as-usual.

- Europe has lots of parliaments and already has legislation that takes AI into account. Still, there's a chance those bodies will fail to moderate the impact of AI in the economy and violent corrections will be needed, but people in Europe have long traditions and long memories...They'll find a way.

- China is governed by the communist party, and Russia have their king. It's hard to predict how will those align with AI, but that alignment more or less will be the deciding factor there, and not free capitalism.

Re: AI is different

#280

Post by ozim »

drooby wrote: post #53
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…

Carpenters, landscapers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, elderly care, nurses, cooks, servers, bakers, musicians, actors, artists... Those jobs are probably still a couple decades plus off from displacement. some possibly never, And we will need them in higher numbers.. and perhaps it's ironic because these are some of the oldest professions. Everything we do is in service of paying for our housing, transportation,…

I just have to see how you get let’s say 100k copywriters trained to be carpenters.

You also force them to move to places where there is less carpenters?

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