Moore's Law for Everything • Hacker News Board

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#381

Post by webmaven » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #376

dkersten wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and human population is still growing, meaning there are more and more humans who need jobs, yet as robots improve, the types of jobs left for humans get fewer. At some point, the lines will cross. Maybe it won't be soon, but if population keeps growing and robots keep being able to do more jobs, then eventually it will happen.

I just finished reading Bullshit Jobs. The author makes a good argument for the users that because we decided working is a moral good, we are also great at making up things for people to do. For example: the ballooning of admin jobs in academia that add no benefit to services rendered other than keeping other useless admins busy. According to the book, when you remove the bullshit jobs and bullshit work most of us al…

> According to the book, when you remove the bullshit jobs and bullshit work most of us already work 20 hour weeks or less.

That wouldn't be a problem if the BS was more or less evenly distributed. But unfortunately the distribution is highly uneven, so eliminating the BS, even if you resolve to not cut paychecks, would leave quite a few folks entirely unemployed (so no paycheck at all), and quite a few more significantly underemployed (so at high risk of their employer consolidating three 5h/week jobs into one 15h/week job).

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#382

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:33 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #380

xyzelement wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his logic holds. The point is that we found new jobs for horses because there were areas where machines were inferior to them. Once machines could do everything that a horse could do (probably some mixture of load carrying and agility / endurance) we had no more work for them. To bring the same logic to humans, in history machines freed up humans to do better work than before. Let's say what humans excel at i…

> The point is that we found new jobs for horses because... My core point is that horses didn't have jobs! People used horses to do jobs. > Once machines are more dexterous and can think better than people, there's no more new jobs - because whatever jobs they would be, machines will be better qualified for. I think this is another version of the same error. Machines have jobs in this scenario! People have to pay for…

[deleted]

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#383

Post by smilekzs » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #321

rebelos wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way you could be beguiled by this framing is if you don't understand just how inept most doctors and lawyers really are. A future configuration will probably look something like: far fewer highly talented doctors and lawyers remain employable while the rest are replaced by AI that's shown to be vastly more capable, and that is continually enhanced by the encoded expertise of said highly talented remaining sp…

You don't understand just how inept most doctors and lawyers really are. It doesn't matter how competent or incompetent whatever professional might be. The only thing a deep learning application is going to do is duplicate their behavior. Deep learning involves no "thinking" at all. Just a very elaborate, brute force curve fitting. If the doctors are on average "incompetent" so will be the deep learning app (ie, you…

> fallacy that makes people want to trust self-driving cars

A lot of successful L4+ autonomous vehicles today, contrary to what the press releases want you to believe, are architectured first and foremost as non-learning (i.e. traditional robotics) systems, with relatively well-defined domain-specific sub-problems carved out and delegated to learning-based methods (e.g. recognizing all cars/humans/signs/... in images captured by the vehicle's cameras). These problems tend to have well-defined metrics and massive real-world data sets backing them up, and are increasingly more common to report how confident they are in the provided results.

ADVs have come a long way despite all the doubt, and the top players are finally getting confident in removing the human from the driver's seat. This is not trivial in the post-Uber-ADV-fatal-accident world.

Source: I work on ADVs.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#384

Post by devoutsalsa » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:48 AM UTC

legulere wrote: post #85

ksdale wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GDP per capita of the world is only about $12,000. That's technically "what we need," food, clothes, and shelter for a family of 4, but on a per person basis, it's below the federal poverty line in the US. I don't think it's correct to say that we had enough wealth a long time ago. There are a lot of places in the world that are still desperately poor by any measure, not just by the standards of the wealthy. And…

GDP per capita also counts children. $48,000 for a family of four sounds perfectly fine to me.

The assumes nothing ever goes wrong. One serious illness or injury and you’re bankrupt.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#385

Post by eli_gottlieb » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:49 AM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #123

> We will discover new jobs–we always do after a technological revolution CGP grey put this well > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles (cars etc) will make horses unnecessary. The other horse reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier - remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Rememb…

Horses didn't have the vote. Unemployment is not a technological problem. It's a political problem, and in fact, one that shows the causal arrow runs the other way. Scarce labor spurs innovation, but when labor is cheap, businesses just sweat the workers instead of building new machines.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#386

Post by lukifer » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:52 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #380

xyzelement wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his logic holds. The point is that we found new jobs for horses because there were areas where machines were inferior to them. Once machines could do everything that a horse could do (probably some mixture of load carrying and agility / endurance) we had no more work for them. To bring the same logic to humans, in history machines freed up humans to do better work than before. Let's say what humans excel at i…

> The point is that we found new jobs for horses because... My core point is that horses didn't have jobs! People used horses to do jobs. > Once machines are more dexterous and can think better than people, there's no more new jobs - because whatever jobs they would be, machines will be better qualified for. I think this is another version of the same error. Machines have jobs in this scenario! People have to pay for…

> People used horses to do jobs.

If I order food delivered, I and the restaurant are using a human to do a job. If that job can be done by a drone instead, that human has to find something else to do for income. For better or worse, the labor market is a process for turning other humans into tools.

The fact that the horse is paid in oats and not wages is irrelevant: a socially useful niche is transferred from a biological creature to a machine. It's an open question whether the future will contain enough socially useful niches for every working-age human (at least, ones that can pay a subsistence wage).

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#387

Post by jaakl » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:00 AM UTC

There is one curve following Moore’s Law alarmingly accurately: global temperature record. Many say it is direct result of the other curves, industrialism, perhaps even capitalism in general. What about trying to fix this first?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#388

Post by themacguffinman » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:00 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #365

themacguffinman wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nation-state desires & institutional desires are human desires . Capital can't "fire" capital owners, that's just a non-sequitur, the very concept of capital ownership is both defined and enforced by human beings. Other capital owners and consumers, ie. humans, fire them. Yes, entire industries are reconfigured and nation-states are redrawn because some humans want them to be reconfigured . This seems like a fundamen…

>One might group together the common interests of an organization as a whole for the sake of simplifying discussion, but the same applies to you. You're a system of competing interests which we call "themacguffinman" solely for the purpose of simplification. You're nothing but an organisation of cells, systems and drives and the interaction of a lot of parts that we slap a label on for practical purposes. When we say…

> Britain has interests that are older and different than the interests of any of her people.

Well no, Britain's interests are literally and technically and metaphorically and whatever-ly not older than the interests of any of her people. Britain did not exist in any way, shape, or form before any of her people. The humans of Britain sent other humans of Britain to die for the sake of humans of Britain. Britain doesn't have territory, the rulers and leaders of Britain have territory. Someone always benefits.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of systems thinking. It can be useful to describe the collective interests of an organization as a whole system, but they're still human interests. Sending immune cells to kill themselves to fend off a disease is still in the interests of cells, just like the humans of Britain sending humans to die in a war is still in the interests of humans. And just like humans can't have interests without cells, organizations and economies can't have interests without humans.

I'm also not saying that humans are special or unique in the way that they can have interests, I'm saying that the capitalist economy we live in is defined by human interests and cannot somehow become non-human. Human interests will always be involved because that's how we define the system of capitalism & economy. Suggesting that our economy could somehow replace all humans makes as much sense to me as suggesting that a body of water could some day replace all of its H2O molecules.

I'm going to go ahead and say that of course increasing inequality caused by capitalism is a major concern for many humans which seems to be what you're getting at. This talk of Britain & capitalism functioning without humans is distractingly nonsensical. No, capitalism can't get rid of humans because a capitalist economy without humans is not a capitalist economy. No, the importance of horses is not comparable to the importance of humans to a system literally defined by interactions between humans.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#389

Post by webmaven » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:05 AM UTC

scatters wrote: post #300

statstutor wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do. If wealth continues to become increasingly centralised, the wealthy might be able to have all their desires fully satisfied, while the poor won't have enough power to demand that - which potentially creates a vicious cycle. Then the existence of suf…

Continues? The world is more equal than it ever has been, at least since the invention of agriculture.

> Continues? The world is more equal than it ever has been, at least since the invention of agriculture.

Sure, globally. But that's as a result of a rising floor beneath extreme poverty, ie. the percentage of people subsisting on less than $1.90 per day has been dropping.

Sure, that's only a part of the story, and a growing global middle class is nothing to sneeze at, but the reduction in poverty is projected to slow considerably over the next decade, with half a billion remaining in extreme poverty in 2030, 87% of whom will be concentrated in sub-saharan Africa.

Meanwhile, social mobility up and out of the middle class is also slowing considerably in the various advanced economies, as is downward mobility from the upper class into the middle class, while downward mobility from middle to working class is growing.

I don't mean to diminish the progress that has been made so far, but it is starting to look likely that these successes are stagnating.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#390

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:12 AM UTC

cbozeman wrote: post #316

sudosysgen wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you not imagine a scenario where most humans cannot provide a significant amount of value? Horses also can learn to provide different value, just up to a threshold lower than that of humans. But humans still have a threshold.

I'm shocked he can't. All you have to do is look at the bell curve for IQ and see where this all leads, and its nowhere pretty. A person with an 85 IQ or below is too dumb to even be in the Army, even doing the most basic of tasks. Turns out, a military force with advanced computerized weaponry requires smart people. Now here's the kicker... 85 and below is something like 16% of the population. That's 1,250,000,000 p…

How is this shocking?

More than 25% of people OF WORKING AGE aren't part of the labor force in almost all western economies [1]. And another 20-30%+ of the population is too old to be part of the labor force / retired [2].

This is well over 16% with too low of an IQ to contribute in a theoretical economy. It doesn't seem hard to shift priorities - the age for retirement, the people who qualify for welfare, etc...

Since 2015, the US and France already spend over 30% of GDP on social programs [3].

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_str...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_...