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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

541–550 of 608 posts

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#541

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

>First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor nuisance. My attempt to talk you out of it: If nobody has a job then nobody can pay to make the robot and AI companies rich.

So what? If you can generate all goods and services without anyone else's help, you'll just do that. You don't need other people buying what you produce. You don't need other people at all, except for a very small number of servants.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who needs the money when you have an autonomous system to produce all the energy and resources you need? These systems simply do not need the construct of money as we know it at a certain point.

The star trek society is is a remote possibility here. One can hope.

What makes you think the people who control these post-scarcity machines are going to share their output with you?

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#543

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

Let's pursue your idea a bit further. Up to a certain ELO level, the combination between a human and a chess bot has a higher ELO than both the human and the bot. But at some point, when the bot has an ELO vastly superior to the human, then whatever the human has to add will only subtract value, so the combination has an ELO higher than the human's but lower than the bot's. Now, let's say that 10 or 20 years down the…

There are other scenarios: the AIs might decide that they are more alike than not, and team up against humans. Or the AI that first achieves runaway self-improvement pulls the plug on the others. I do not know how it will play out but there are serious risks.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#544

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

If you assume AGI that is better than humans for effectively free of course it seems better.

But your assumptions are based on an idealized thing unrelated to anything that is shown.

No one is paying your wage for AI, full stop, you transition for cost savings not "might as well". Also given most AI cost is in training you likely still wouldn't transition since the capital investment is painful.

Robotics isn't new but hasn't destroyed blue collar yet (the US mostly lost blue collar for other reasons not due to robotics). Especially since robotics is very inflexible leading to impedance problems when you have to adapt.

Mostly though I would consider the problem with your argument it is it basically boils down to nihilism. If an inevitability that you can no control over has a chance of happening you should generally not worry about it. It isn't like in your hypothetical there are meaningful actions to take so it isn't important.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#545

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

>First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor nuisance. My attempt to talk you out of it: If nobody has a job then nobody can pay to make the robot and AI companies rich.

Don't take it to the limit, but consider a continuous relaxation : underemployed people doing whatever is not feasible or economically attractive to AI/robots, like prostitution, massage therapy, art, sales, social work, etc.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because there’s no objective research on this. Similarly, there are no good citations to support your objection. They simply don’t exist yet.

Maybe not worth discussing something that cannot be objectively assessed then.

Then don't; all I did was offer my thoughts in a public comments section.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all sounds like the stochastic parrot fallacy. Total determinism is not the goal, and it not a prerequisite for general intelligence. As you allude to above, humans are also not fully deterministic. I don't see what hard theoretical barriers you've presented toward AGI or future ASI.

Did you just invent a nonsense fallacy to use as a bludgeon here? “Stochastic parrot fallacy” does not exist, and there actually quite a bit of evidence supporting the stochastic parrot hypothesis.

I imagine "stochastic parrot fallacy" could be their term for using the hypothesis to dismiss LLMs even where they can be useful; i.e., dismissing them for their weaknesses alone and ignoring their strengths. (Of course, we have no way to know for sure without their input.)

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even as the field evolves, the phoning home telemetry of closed models creates a centralized intelligence monopoly. If open source atrophies, we lose the public square of architectural and design reasoning, the decision graph that is often just as important as the code. The labs won't just pick up new patterns; they will define them, effectively becoming the high priests of a new closed-loop ecosystem. However, the r…

> It might make the technology itself hit a ceiling because it's no longer being fed novel human problem-solving at scale. My read of the recent discussion is that people assume that the work of far fewer number of elites will define the patterns for the future. For instance, implementation of low-level networking code can be the combination of patterns of zeromq. The underlying assumption is that most people don't k…

> The underlying assumption is that most people don't know how to write high-performance concurrent code anyway, so why not just ask them to command the AI instead.

The data economics reflexivity of LLM input means that when you reduce the future volume of that input to the few experts who "know how to write X anyway", the LLM labs just lost one of the most important inputs. All those non-experts who voted with their judgement and left in the wake of their effort to use the expert-written code, grist for the LLM input weighing mill.

I find it is usually the non-experts that run into the sharp operational edges the experts didn't think of. When you throw the non-experts out of the marketplace of ideas, you're often left with hazardous tooling that would just as soon cut your hand off than help you. It would be a hoot if the LLM's and experts decided to output everything and training in Common Lisp, though.

If handed just Babbage's Difference Engine, or the PDP-11 Unix V7 source code and nothing else, LLM's could speed-run and eventually re-derive the analogs of Zig, ffmpeg, YouTube, and themselves, I'll grant that "just let them cook with the experts" is a valid strategy. The information imparted by the activity around the source code is deeply recursive, and absent that I'm not sure how the labs are going to escape a local minima they're digging themselves into by materially shrinking that activity. If my hypothesis is correct, then LLM labs are industrial-scale stripping away the very topsoil that their products rely upon, and it is a single-turn cheap game that gets enormously more expensive in further iterations to create synthetic topsoil.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor nuisance. My attempt to talk you out of it: If nobody has a job then nobody can pay to make the robot and AI companies rich.

Being rich is ultimately about owning and being able to defend resources. IF something like 99% of humans become irrelevant to the machine run utopia for the elites, whatever currency the poors use to pay for services among each other will be worthless to the top 1% when they simply don't need them or their services.

Would we just be splitting society in two in that case? Seeing as the poor would have nothing to give to the rich, nor the rich to the poor, wouldn’t the poor 99% just create their own new society with their own units of value?
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