Wow! That is highly unscientific and speculative. Wow!
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
431–440 of 663 posts
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think you’re realizing that the OP understands this, and that in this analogy, the horses are human beings
population projections they already predict that prosperity reduces population and even if AI becomes good enough to replace most humans the economic surplus does not disappear it's a coordination problem in many places on Earth social safety nets are pretty robust, and if AI helps to reduce cost of providing basic services then it won't be a problem to expand those safety nets ... there's already a pretty serious an…
I think the concerns with UBI are (1) it takes away the leverage of a labor force to organize and strike for better benefits or economic conditions, and (2) following the block grant model, can be a trojan horse "benefit" that sets the stage for effectively deleting systems of welfare support that have been historically resilient due to institutional support and being strongly identified with specific constituencies. When the benefit is abstracted away from a constituency it's easier to chop over time.
I don't exactly know how I feel about those, but I respect those criticisms. I think the grand synthesis is that UBI exists on top of existing safety nets.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a horrible onboarding experience. Human mentors provide a lot more than just answering questions, like providing context, comraderie or social skills, or even coping mechanisms. Starting a new job can be terrifying for juniors, and if their only friend is faceless chat bot...
You're right. We need to keep tabs on the culture for new hires for the reasons you mentioned. LLMs are really good at many onboarding tasks, but the social ones. I think done right it is a superior onboarding experience. As a new hire, you no longer have to wait for your mentor to be available to learn some badly documented tech things. This is really empowering some of them. The lack of building human context / con…
If they’re badly documented, how does the LLM help?
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think you’re realizing that the OP understands this, and that in this analogy, the horses are human beings
In this analogy, horses are jobs, not humans; you could argue there's not much of a difference between the two, because people without jobs will starve, etc., but still, they're not the same.
Why make the analogy at all if not for the implied slaughter. It is a visceral reminder of our own brutal history. Of what humans do given the right set of circumstances.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#435I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…
I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops. Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create…
If you want another side data point, most people I know both in Japan and Canada use some sort of an AI as a replacement for any kind of query. Almost nobody in my circles are in tech or tech-adjacent circles.
So yeah, it’s just everyone collectively devaluing human interaction.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#436I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…
I think, like the Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa as wanting to kill Africans, you're interpreting it wrong. The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.
> Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa
I'm not up to speed here -- is Bill Gates doing work to reduce the birth rates in Africa?
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this analogy, horses are jobs, not humans; you could argue there's not much of a difference between the two, because people without jobs will starve, etc., but still, they're not the same.
One would argue in a capitalist society like ours, fucking with someone's job at industrial scale isn't awfully dissimilar from threatening their life, it's just less direct. Plenty more people currently are feeling the effects of worsening job markets than have been involved in a hostage situation, but the negative end results are still the same. One would argue also if you don't see this, it's because you'd prefer…
UBI will not save you from economic irrelevance. The only difference between you and someone starving in a 3rd world slum is economic opportunity and the means to exchange what you have for what someone else needs. UBI is inflation in a wig and dark glasses.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#438Truly depressing to see blasé predictions of AI infra spending approaching WW2 levels of GDP as if that were remotely desirable. One, that’s never going to happen, but if it does, it’ll mean a complete failure to address actual human needs. The amount of money wasted by Facebook on the Metaverse could have ended homelessness in the US, or provided universal college. Now here we are watching multiple times that much money get thrown by Meta, Google, et al into datacenters that are mostly generating slop that’s ruining what’s left of the Internet.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes. Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for the point being made. I (not that I'm even as good as "mediocre" at chess) cannot legally get from my current location to the USA without some other human being involved. This is because I'm not an American and wou…
> Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for the point being made. The point is that even those things require oversight from humans. Everything humans do requires oversight from humans. How you missed it, nobody knows. Maybe someday we'll have a robot uprising where humans can be exterminated from life and computers can continue to play chess, but that day is not today. Remove the human oversight and…
> Everything humans do requires oversight from humans. How you missed it, nobody knows.
'cause you said:
Computer chess systems, on the other hand, cannot do anything without human oversight.
> Maybe someday we'll have a robot uprising where humans can be exterminated from life and computers can continue to play chess, but that day is not today. Remove the human oversight and those computers will soon turn into lumps of scrap unable to do anything.
OK, and? Nobody's claiming "today" is that day. Even Musk despite his implausible denials regarding Optimus being remote controlled isn't claiming that today is that day.
The message you replied to was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201604
The chess-playing example there was an existing example of software beating humans in a specific domain in order to demonstrate that human oversight is not a long-term solution, you can tell by the use of the words "end state", and even then hypothetical (due to "if"), as in:
If successful, the end state is full automation
Furthermore, there's nothing at all that says that an insufficiently competent AI won't wipe us out:
And as we can already observe, there's clearly nothing stopping real humans from using insufficiently competent AI due to some combination of being lazy and/or the vendors over-promising what can be delivered.
Also, we've been in a situation where the automation we have can trigger WW3 and kill 90% of the human population despite the fact that the very same automation would be imminently destroyed along with it since the peak of the Cold War, with near-misses on both US and USSR systems. Human oversight stopped it, but like I said, we can already observe lazy humans deferring to AI, so how long will that remain true?
And it doesn't even need to be that dramatic; never mind global defence stuff, just correlated risks, all the companies outsourcing all their decisions to the same models, even when the models' creators win a Nobel prize for creating them, is a description of how the Black–Scholes formula and its involvement in the 2008 financial crisis — and sure, didn't kill us all, but this is just an illustration of a failure mode rather than consequences.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#440> 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines.
Ambivalent??