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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#441

Post by Herring »

techdmn wrote: post #430
pzo wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared. > I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did. Horses typically live between 25 to 30 years. I agree with OP that most likely those horses were not decimated (killed) but just died out and people stopped mass breeding them. Also as other noticed chart shows 'horses PER person in US'. Population between 1900 and 1950 increased from…

I think the phrase "fair distribution on social level" is doing a lot of work in this comment. Do you consider this to be a common occurrence, or something our existing social structures do competently? I see quite the opposite, and have very little hope that reduced reliance on labor will increase the equability of distribution of wealth.

It probably depends on the society you start out with, eg a high trust culture like Finland will probably fare better here.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#442

Post by cryptonector »

This is another one of those apocalyptic posts about AI. It might actually be true. I recommend reading The Phools, by Stanislav Lem -- it's a very short story, and you can find free copies of it online.

Also maybe go out for some fresh air. Maybe knowledge work will go down for humans, but plumbing and such will take much longer since we'll need dextrous robots.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#443

Post by abixb »

netsharc wrote: post #360
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I 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.

One could argue that the quality of life per horse went up, even if the total number of horses went down. Lots more horses now get raised in farms and are trained to participate in events like dressage and other equestrian sports.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#444

Post by cryptonector »

maciejzj wrote: post #353

I 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…

> Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing [...]

Yes, actually, because this has been a deep vein of writing for the past 100 or more years. There's The Phools, by Stanislav Lem. There's the novels written by Boris Johnson's father that are all about depopulation. There's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. How about Logan's Run? There has been so much writing about the automation / technology apocalypse for humans in the past 100 years that it's hard to catalog it -- much of what I have read or seen go by in the vein I've totally forgotten.

It's not remotely a surprise to see this amp up with AI.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#445

Post by 9rx »

ben_w wrote: post #439
9rx wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The words "on the other hand" draws a contrast, suggesting that the subject of the sentence before it ("chess grandmasters") are different with regard to the task ("show up to elite tournaments"), and thus can manage without the…

> The words "on the other hand" draws a contrast, suggesting that the subject of the sentence before it

I know it can be hard for programmers stuck in a programming language mindset, especially where one learned about software from "Learn to code" movements, but as this is natural language, technically it only draws what I intended for it to draw. If you wish to interpret it another way, cool. Much like as in told in the Carly Simon song of similar nature, it makes no difference to me.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#446

Post by botanrice »

shaka-bear-tree wrote: post #140
twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

Funny the original post doesn’t mention AI replacing the coding part of his job. There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it. I want to be be optimistic. But it’s hard to ignore what I’m doing and seeing. As far as I can tell, we haven’t hit serious unemployment yet because of momentum and…

idk man, I work at a big consultant company and all I'm hearing is dozens of people coming out of their project teams like, "yea im dying to work with AI, all we're doing is talking about with clients"

It's like everyone knows it is super cool but nobody has really cracked the code for what it's economic value truly, truly is yet

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#447

Post by cryptonector »

UncleMeat wrote: post #388
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I 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…

> I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity [...]

Who do they think will make their ventures profitable? Who do they think will take their dollars and provide goods and services in exchange?

If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#448

Post by netsharc »

everdrive wrote: post #436
netsharc wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For example, interview from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MMifQvuN08

When the Covid-truther geniuses "figured out" that "Bill Gates was behind Covid", they pulled out things like this as "proof" that his master plan is to reduce the world's population. Not to reduce the rate of increase, but to kill them (because of course these geniuses don't understand derivatives)...

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#449

Post by gunt_crusher »

simgt wrote: post #306
impossiblefork wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the big problem here though, is that humans go from being mandatory to being optional, and this changes the competitive landscape between employers and workers. In the past a strike mattered. With robots, it may have to go on for years to matter.

In this scenario wages will have been driven down so much that there will be barely anyone left to buy the products made by these fully automated corps. A strike won't work, but a revolt may and is more likely to happen.

[dead]

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#450

Post by arowthway »

FuckButtons wrote: post #434
bambax wrote: post #377

Earlier 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.

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.

How is decreasing the number of horses killed every year brutal?
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