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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#311

Post by andrepd »

chrisco255 wrote: post #42
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…

> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…

To be fair, self-driving cars don't need to be perfect 0 casualty modes of transportation, they just need to be better than human drivers. Since car crashes kill 2 million people each year (and maim another 2 or 3), this is a low bar to clear...

Of course, the actual answer is that rail and cycling infrastructure are much more efficient than cars in any moderately dense region. But that would mean funding boring regular companies focused on providing a product or service for adequate profit, instead of exciting AI web3 high tech unicorn startups.

Re: AI is different

#312

Post by jrvarela56 »

fmbb wrote: post #305
jrvarela56 wrote: post #278

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 cheap…

> 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. What makes you think the machines will both be smarter and better than us but also be our slaves to make human society better. Is equine society better now than before they started working with humans? (P…

The machine doesn’t suffer if you ask it to do things 24/7. In that sense, they are not slaves.

As to why they’d do what we ask them to, the only reason they do anything is because some human made a request. In this long chain there will obv be machine to machine requests, but in the aggregate it’s like the economy right now but way more automated.

Whenever I see arguments about AI changing society, I just replace AI with ‘the market’ or ‘capitalism’. We’re just speeding up a process that started a while ago, maybe with the industrial revolution?

I’m not saying this isn’t bad in some ways, but it’s the kind of bad we’ve been struggling with for decades due to misaligned incentives (global warming, inequality, obesity, etc).

What I’m saying is that AI isn’t creating new problems. It’s just speeding up society.

Re: AI is different

#313

Post by amanaplanacanal »

BoorishBears wrote: post #226
tfourb wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you live in a place with perfect weather year round? I don’t and I haven’t seen a robo taxi my entire life. I do have access to a Tesla though and it’s current self-driving capabilities are not even close to anything I would call „autonomous“ und real world conditions (including weather). Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least…

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.

The goalpost will be when you can buy one and drive it anywhere. How many cities are Waymo in now? I think what they are doing is terrific, but each car must cost a fortune.

Re: AI is different

#314

Post by Rexxar »

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?

It's a common idea but each time you try to measure social mobility, you find a lot of European countries ahead of USA.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

- https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/15/social-mobil...

Re: AI is different

#315

Post by simgt »

cropcirclbureau wrote: post #204
itsalotoffun wrote: post #136

> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that. [Emphasis added] What a silly premise. Markets don't care . All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. Seeing a real uptick of socio-policital prognostication from…

Yes but can the market not be wrong? Wrong in the sense that, failing to meet our expectations as a useful engine of society? As I understood, what was meant with this this article is that AI completely changes the equations across the board that current market direction appears dangerously irrational to OP. I'm not sure what was meant with your comment though besides haggling over semantics and attacking some in-exp…

Of course it can be wrong, and it is in many instances. It's a religion. The vast, vast majority of us would prefer to live in a stable climate with unpolluted water and some fish left in the oceans, yet "the market" is leading us elsewhere.

Re: AI is different

#316

Post by vkou »

omnimus wrote: post #209
andrei_says_ wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

I wouldn't underestimate what can happen if 1/3 of your workforce is displaced and put aside with nothing to do. People are usually obedient because they have something in life and they are very busy with work. So they don't have time or headspace to really care about politics. When suddenly big numbers of people start to more care about politics it leads to organizing and all kinds of political changes. What i mean…

Getting rid of peaceful processes for transferring power is not going to be the big win that they think it is.

Re: AI is different

#317

Post by danielbln »

nlawalker wrote: post #99
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,…

> Imagine a world where high quality landscaping exists for the average person. And this is made possible because we'll live in a world where the equivalent of today's uber driver owns a team of gardening androids. I think it's going to be the other way around. It's looking like automation of dynamic physical capability is going to be the very last thing we figure out; what we're going to get first is teams of lower-…

Looking at the advancements in low cost flexible robotics I'm not sure I share that sentiment. Plus the LLM craze is fueling generalist advancement in robotics as well. I'd say we'll see physical labor displacement within a decade tops.

Re: AI is different

#318

Post by raincole »

simianwords wrote: post #285
raincole wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To a person from the 1920's which one is more impressive? The internet or chatgpt?

Obvious ChatGPT. I don't know how it is even a question... if you showed GPT3.5 to people from < 20th centuries there would've been a worldwide religion around it.

Re: AI is different

#319

Post by dsign »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #302
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…

The issue is there isn't enough of those small environmental economies to support everyone that exists today without the technology, logistics and trades that are in place today. You can farm and fish the entire undeveloped areas of NYC, but it won't be enough to feed or support the humans that live there. You can say that for any metro area. Density will have to reduce immediately if there is economic collapse, and…

> The issue is there isn't enough of those small environmental economies to support everyone that exists today without the technology, logistics and trades that are in place today.

I agree. I expect some parts of the world will see some black days. Lots of infrastructure will be gone or unsuited to people. On top of that, the cultural damage could become very debilitating, with people not knowing how to do X, Y and Z without the AIs. At least for a time. Casualties may mount.

> Also humans (especially large groups of them) need more than food: shelter, clothes, medicine, entertainment, education, religion, justice, law, etc.

This is true, but parts of the world survive today with very little of any of that. And for some of those things that you mention: shelter, education, religion, justice, and even some form of law enforcement, all that is needed is humans willing to work together.

Re: AI is different

#320

Post by fergonco »

jrvarela56 wrote: post #278

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 cheap…

Rough numbers look good.

But the hyper specialized geek that has 4 kids and has to pay back a credit for his house (that he bought according to his high salary) will have a hard time doing some gardening, let's say. And there are quite a few of those geeks. I don't know if we'll have enough gardens (owned by non geeks!)

It's like cards are switched: those having the upper socioeconomic class will get thrown to the bottom. And that looks like a generation lost.

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