Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?

futuresearch.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 87 posts

Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?

#61

Post by coldtea »

GaggiX wrote: post #10
bananaflag wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why this "AGI is not even well defined" meme gained so much traction recently. AGI is something that can do everything better than humans. Write a novel, seduce someone, prove a theorem, fix a pipe, whatever. And it's clear right now we don't have it.

Given your definition what's the difference between AGI and superintelligence? AGI should at least match, not surpass humans in every cognitive task.

AGI is just "artificial" (a program) version of general intelligence (the general purpose intelligence humans have).

Nothing in AGI implies "surpass humans in every cognitive task".

Not even "match in every cognitive task" is really required. There are humans that by definition have "general intelligence" that still don't match other humans "in every cognitive task", just in some.

Why should AGI need to match ALL humans in EVERY congitive task then? An AGI just needs to be as good as an average (or even slightly below average) human, in human-like cognition.

Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?

#62

Post by SoftTalker »

Most jobs do not require congnitive labor. They require following rules, policies and best practices. Independent thinking might even be discouraged. Much of accounting/finance, law, medicine, and business administration fall in this area.

Research and problem-solving in these fields may still need cognitive work, but the day-to-day practice of jobs does not. AI will take all of that work soon.

Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?

#64

Post by izietto »

zeafoamrun wrote: post #54
izietto wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point of view is flawed. You should take the ratio of good / bad AI plans activity and compare it with the same ratio by human work.

My point is a lot of cognitive labor goes into deciding what is even worth doing, and an LLM will happily run with anything you give it.

Yeah which is very fair but I still see arguable assumptions, the most crucial ones imho are that humans are exceptionally good at deciding what is worth doing and that AI will not get better on taking autonomous decisions.

Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?

#65

Post by ddp26 »

daft_pink wrote: post #11

Any chance there is a prediction market for this that we can use, since research has shown they tend to be more accurate than experts?

I linked elsewhere in a comment, Metaculus has AGI forecasts.

You can also now use AI forecasters like FutureSearch [1] (disclaimer: I work there), which are competitive with the best humans / teams of humans. And since you aren't depending on a human crowd, you can ask any variation of AGI questions with any definition, even ask conditional questions.

[1] https://futuresearch.ai/app

Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?

#66

Post by SoftTalker »

dwa3592 wrote: post #23
hodder wrote: post #5

It's a specific subtype of Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. They "know" AI cant do their own jobs, but it seems pretty good at summarizing what others do without understanding the nuance. It seems to really apply to the AI Lab CEOs who appear "shocked" everyone isn't simply replaced with LLMs by now so the timelines get kicked.

i like this and i think it's adjacent to gell-man effect rather than a subtype of it. Any CEO claiming AGI is here will never say, "AGI is here because it can automate what I do today." They are saying AGI is here because they have some loose understanding of what other humans seem to be doing and think the LLMs can also do this. In a way it also makes me think that these CEOs are kind of operating like LLMs - they s…

Reverse imposter syndrome.

Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?

#67

Post by ddp26 »

hyperpape wrote: post #56

"Most purely cognitive labor is automatable" I cannot express how annoyed I am a researcher could use such a shitty definition. It only makes sense to say "most" if you have a clear idea of what constitutes the majority. "Most people are male" yeah, fine..50% + epsilon of humans are males. That's more or less decidable (maybe a little vague because of intersex folks). I believe it's false because there are slightly m…

What's a definition of AGI you would use, for either time, tasks, value, or job descriptions?

Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?

#68

Post by knivets »

hyperpape wrote: post #56

"Most purely cognitive labor is automatable" I cannot express how annoyed I am a researcher could use such a shitty definition. It only makes sense to say "most" if you have a clear idea of what constitutes the majority. "Most people are male" yeah, fine..50% + epsilon of humans are males. That's more or less decidable (maybe a little vague because of intersex folks). I believe it's false because there are slightly m…

Some big names in AI made predictions by pulling random dates based on vibes, the author collected this and called this data.

Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?

#69

Post by ekidd »

yCombLinks wrote: post #32
ekidd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's merely human equivalent but somehow costs a lot more than actual humans, then it's actually pretty marginal until the cost comes down. There are a lot of humans. So you could technically have AGI without entering a true AGI era. "95% as good as an average Harvard graduate across the board, but it costs $5 million/year to run" is impressive and scientifically interesting, but not economically transformative. B…

Well, let's look at someone like Einstein. Just for argument's sake let's say he has a flat salary demand of $5 million dollars. It's not cost effective to hire Einstein to write your CRUD apps in this situation. That doesn't mean there isn't somewhere that he would have a value of $5 million.

No insult to the Harvard grads I know. But the median grad isn't Einstein, and they won't magically earn back $5 million/year. They're not that special, on average.

Now, if you have an AGI that can reliably and repeatedly do Einstein-level science, then I'd argue that we're starting to talk about ASI, aka, "superintelligence." Which would be providing something that humans can't consistently produce at any cost. So cost becomes much less relevant.

But if the best you can do is replace an ordinary smart human for $5 million/year, you have to compete with ordinary smart humans. Who are abundant and who very rarely cost more than $500,000/year, if you're willing to shop around and gamble a bit.

Post reply on HN