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Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

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Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#421

Post by grafmax »

azan_ wrote: post #403
stinkbeetle wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't want that, because it could lead to an uprising against them. They want us provided with the essentials in exchange for being dutiful workers, so we have something to lose. Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment s…

> Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment services. Yes of course capitalists love when economy is bad. Sorry, these dystopic visions do not pass even simplest smell test.

It’s less complicated than that. Externalities are when an individual profits but others pay the price. Think of climate change. And when a small number are so rich they control the government, so there’s nothing to stop them. It’s narrow incentives driving the whole thing.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#422

Post by probablypower »

m000 wrote: post #407

"During bubbles, every experiment or idea gets funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. ... But that doesn't mean anything that is happening isn't real." Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas? The whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can better align with the ne…

> Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas?

A lot of good ideas only look bad in hindsight. It costs time and money to determine goodness, and that deserves funding.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#423

Post by simianwords »

vasco wrote: post #413
simianwords wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not realistic - we are consuming way more than any of the previous generations. Poverty is at an all time low and steeply dropped since the last century. We are curing diseases, people are living long. What's the pessimism about?

I just thought you could make your point without calling other people cringe for disagreeing. I agree the average now is better than any century before, while also agreeing there's many interests of the type the comment you replied to illustrates, trying to either reduce personal freedoms or perpetuating a certain order of things. Both things can be true and they are both realistic view points, specially because ther…

Fair points and I agree with you.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#424

Post by grafmax »

simianwords wrote: post #401
abenga wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we are counting people's wealth in significant fractions of a trillion dollars and young people around the world cannot afford homes no more?

Prices of houses increased but others decreased. Life expectancy increased, consumption increased.

“Phones not homes.”

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#425

Post by FabHK »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #186
irjustin wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real. This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest. The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset? Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.

If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency. My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome. Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t…

> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense.

There are many, many, many, many positional goods. Beachfront properties, original art, historical artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top restaurants, etc.

The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly without money if only we had some more iPhones and other goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.

Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less. Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume 16x as much.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#426

Post by FabHK »

UltraSane wrote: post #344
scotty79 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency? Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bi…

That just seems very wasteful when proof-of-stake works.

Or even good old centralised distributed systems that do it another 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more efficiently than PoS.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#427

Post by gizajob »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #164
mxschumacher wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have to say I'm a little disgusted by these statements. LLMs are useful for many problems, but is there really a conceivable path of them making progress into fighting the countless cancers tormenting humanity?

My framing device: if you had LLMs in the 1500s, how would that help Copernicus determine the orbits of the planets? Maybe through dumb chance, but creating a well reasoned model of the universe required new observations and the ability to interpret the data from a different point of view.

All the 1500s and earlier data that such an LLM would have to have been trained on would lead to an LLM that wouldn’t ever suggest a heliocentric solar system. That LLM might even say he was heretical or refuse to give an answer to anything that led to it saying that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. So no help at all.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#428

Post by squidbeak »

javierluraschi wrote: post #142
akagusu wrote: post #97

The big question is what "society" he is talking about? Is it the "society" that includes all people, or the "society" that includes only rich people?

It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally benefit more rich people.

What you mean is those with some form of ownership of the technology. If development eventually results in full automation, with the expense of production reduced to zero, money will be irrelevant.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#429

Post by squidbeak »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #327
palmotea wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally benefit more rich people. Yes: you'll be homeless and living under a bridge, but you'll have an LLM therapist on your phone to console you. That's a benefit!

No they don't want that, because it could lead to an uprising against them. They want us provided with the essentials in exchange for being dutiful workers, so we have something to lose. Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment s…

At that stage, owners will very likely have enough drones and robots at their command to not need to worry about petty things like flesh and blood uprisings.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#430

Post by squidbeak »

simianwords wrote: post #336
aborsy wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The benefits may barely trickle down, and the conditions for the majority could degrade overall.

Based on what evidence? The last few times this happened the whole world benefitted.

When have we ever had a push to full automation?
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