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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#291

Post by sawyna »

Unpopular opinion: Let us say AI achieves general intelligence levels. We tend to think of current economy, jobs, research as a closed system, but indeed it is a very open system.

Humans want to go to space, start living on other planets, travel beyond solar system, figure out how to live longer and so on. The list is endless. Without AI, these things would take a very long time. I believe AI will accelerate all these things.

Humans are always ambitious. That ambition will push us to use AI more than it's capabilities. The AI will get better at these new things and the cycle repeats. There's so much humans know and so much more that we don't know.

I'm less worried about general intelligence. Rather in more worried about how humans are going to govern themselves. That's going to decide whether we will do great things or end humanity. Over the last 100 years, we start thinking more about "how" to do something rather than the "why". Because "how" is becoming more and more easier. Today it's much more easier and tomorrow even more. So nobody's got the time to ask "why" we are doing something, just "how" to do something. With AI I can do more. That means everyone can do more. That means governments can do so much more. Large scale things in a short period. If those things are wrong or have irreversible consequences, we are screwed.

Re: AI is different

#292

Post by Ekaros »

idiotsecant wrote: post #65
drooby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

In your example i think it's a great deal more likely that the Uber driver is paid a tiny stipend to supervise a squad of gardening androids owned at substantial expense by Amazon Yard.

Why would anyone be on the field? Why not just have a few drones flying there monitoring whole operation remotely. And have one person monitor too many sites at same time likely from cheapest possible region.

Re: AI is different

#293

Post by mejutoco »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #128
fallous wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything? How about legal liability for the car killing someone? Are all the self-driving vendors stepping up and accepting full legal liability for the outcomes of their non-deterministic software?

Thousands have died directly due to known defects in manufactured cars. Those companies (Ford, others) still are operating today. Even if driverless cars killed more people than humans they would see mass adoption eventually. However they are subject to farr higher scrutiny than human drivers and even so make fewer mistakes, avoid accidents more frequently and can't get drunk, tired, angry, or distracted.

There is a fetish for technology that sometimes we are not aware of. On average there might be less accidents, but if specific accidents were preventable and now they happen, people will sue. And who will take the blame? The day the company takes the blame is the day self-driving exists IMO.

Re: AI is different

#294

Post by huimang »

motorest wrote: post #282
taormina wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are eliminating the need to have a vast array of positions on payrolls. From copywriters to customer support, and even creative activities such as illustration and even authoring books, today's LLMs are already more than good enough to justify replacing people with the output of any commercial chatbot service. I'd love a source to these claims. Many companies are claiming that they are able to layoff folks bec…

> I'd love a source to these claims. Have you been living under a rock? You can start getting up to speed by how Amazon's CEO already laid out the company's plan. https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/amazon-generative... > (...) AI is just a scapegoat to counteract the reckless overhiring due to (...) That is your personal moralist scapegoat, and one that you made up to feel better about how jobs are being elim…

These supposed "productivity gains" are only touted by the ones selling the product, i.e. the ones who stand to benefit from adoption. There is no standard way to measure productivity since it's subjective. It's far more likely that companies will use whatever scapegoat they can to fire people with as little blowback as possible, especially as the other commenter noted, people were getting hired like crazy.

Each one of the roles you listed above is only passable with AI at a superficial glance. For example, anyone who actually reads literature other than self-help and pop culture books from airport kiosks knows that AI is terrible at longer prose. The output is inconsistent because current AI does not understand context, at all. And this is not getting into the service costs, the environmental costs, and the outright intellectual theft in order to make things like illustrations even passable.

Re: AI is different

#295

Post by motorest »

sneak wrote: post #289
motorest wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere. Utter nonsense. Do you believe the European countries that provides higher education for free are manning tenure positions with slaves or robbing people at gunpoint? How come do you see public transportation services in some major urban centers being provided free of charge…

> Are countries with access to free health care using slavery to keep hospitals and clinics running? No, robbery. They’re paid for with tax revenues, which are collected without consent. Taking of someone’s money without consent has a name. Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

Which class mobility is this that you speak of? The one that forces the average US citizens to be a paycheck away from homelessness? Or is it the one where you are a medical emergency away from filing bankruptcy?

Have you stopped to wonder how some European countries report higher median household incomes than the US?

But by any means continue to believe your average US citizen is a temporarily embarrassed billionaire, just waiting for the right opportunity to benefit from your social mobility.

In the meantime, also keep in mind that mobility also reflects how easy it is to move down a few pegs. Let that sink in.

Re: AI is different

#296

Post by ACCount37 »

thephotonsphere wrote: post #259
BoorishBears wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've ridden just under 1,000 miles in autonmous (no scare quotes) Waymos, so it's strange to see someone letting Tesla's abject failure inform their opinions on how much progress AVs have made. Tesla that got fired as a customer by Mobileye for abusing their L2 tech is your yardstick? Anyways, Waymo's DC launch is next year, I wonder what the new goalpost will be.

Tesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc. LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...

Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras.

The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.

Re: AI is different

#297

Post by willguest »

DrewADesign wrote: post #221
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.

Economics is essentially the study of resource allocation. We will have resources that will need to be allocated. I really doubt that AI will somehow neutralize the economies of scale in various realms that make centralized manufacturing necessary, let alone economics in general.

I so wish this were true, but unfortunately economics has a catch-all called "externalities" for anything that doesn't fit neatly into its implicit assessments of what value is. Pollution is tricky, so we push it outside the boundaries of value-estimation, along with any social nuance that we deem unquantifiable, and carry on as is everything is understood.

Re: AI is different

#298

Post by juniperus »

motorest wrote: post #295
sneak wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are countries with access to free health care using slavery to keep hospitals and clinics running? No, robbery. They’re paid for with tax revenues, which are collected without consent. Taking of someone’s money without consent has a name. Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA? Which class mobility is this that you speak of? The one that forces the average US citizens to be a paycheck away from homelessness? Or is it the one where you are a medical emergency away from filing bankruptcy? Have you stopped to wonder how some European countries report higher median household incomes than t…

the economic situation in Europe is much more dire than the US...

Re: AI is different

#299

Post by dkersten »

closewith wrote: post #223
dkersten wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the people with the money aren’t going to just give it to everyone else. We already see the richest people hoard their money and still be unsatisfied with how much they have. We already see productivity gains not transfer any benefit to the majority of people.

There is an old and reliable solution to this problem, the gibbet.

Yes. However people are unwilling to take this approach unless things get really really bad. Even then, the powerful tend to have such strong control that people are afraid to act out of fear of reprisal.

We’ve also been gaslit into believing that it’s not a good approach, that peaceful protests are more civilised (even though they rarely cause anything meaningful to actually change).

Re: AI is different

#300

Post by dbdblldwn »

mcny wrote: post #228
sneak wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere. The costs of what you propose are enormous. No legislation can change that fact. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Who’s going to pay for it? Someone who is not paying for it today. How do you intend to get them to consent to that? Or do you think that the needs of t…

> You’re talking about 3-5 trillion dollars per year just for the USA I just want to point out that's about a fifth of our GDP and we spend about this much for healthcare in the US. We badly need a way to reduce this to at least half. > There is a reason we all pay for our own food and housing. The main reason I support UBI is I don't want need based or need aware distribution. I want everyone to get benefits equally…

Just want to point out that any abstract intrinsic value about the economy like GDP is a socialized illusion

Reduce costs by eliminating fiat ledgers that only have value if we believe and realize the real economy is physical statistics and ship resources where the people demand

But of course that simple solution violates the embedded training of Americans. So it's a non-starter and we'll continue to desperately seek some useless reformation of an antiquated social system.

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