Live data from Hacker News

Replacement.ai

replacement.ai

601–610 of 725 posts

Re: Replacement.ai

#601
post #260

Agriculture used to be more than 50% of ALL employment in the USA. Now it's barely 2%. Ever wondered why? I understand the spirit of this, but most of this alarmism is misguided in my view.

Think most people do get this. More technology, more growth and innovation is fantastic and people see the benefits (even its taken for granted at times). The problem is the in-between stage between new technology and huge society ramifications which, rationally, people should be concerned with. If you fall on the right side of that on the other side, great but many don't and that's happened time after time. Society doesn't move in a straight line up despite what lots of condensed charts say - collateral damage occurs

Re: Replacement.ai

#602
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ML is limited to replacing some tasks that humans do, yes it will be much like any past technological innovation. If we build AGI, we don't have a past comparison for that. Technologies so far have always replaced a subset of what humans currently do, not everything at once.

AGI does not replace "everything". It might replace most of the work that someone can do behind a desk, but there are a lot of jobs that involve going out there and working with reality outside of the computer.

It isn't really general intelligence if it doesn't compete, or outcompete us, at a large enough portion of knowledge work jobs that we are forced out of the labor market.

Also don't forget that plenty of knowledge work is focused on automating manual labor. If AGI is a thing, it will eventually be used to also outcompete us on physical work too.

People like to point to plumbers as an example of a safe(r) job, and it is. But automating plumbing tasks is most difficult because the entire industry is designed to be installed by humans. Without that constraint it would likely be much easier to design plumbing systems and robots to install and maintain them more efficiently than what we have today with human-optimized plumbing.

Re: Replacement.ai

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think this is a pretty good argument against AI dooming that I don’t here that often. Sam Altman doesn’t own AI. His investors actually own most of the actual assets. Eventually there is going to be pressure for open ai to deliver returns to investors. Given that the majority of the US economy is consumer spending, the incentive is going to be for open ai to increase consumer spending in some way. That’s e…

I'd agree. The logical fallacy I always observe in (what I call) the marxist-nihilist AI doom scenario is that it assumes that the top N% of people perfectly cooperate in a way that the remaining 100-N% cannot. Even stratified social structure is far too muddled for a "mass-replacement" scenario to not cause the elites to factionalize across different plans that would be best for them, which in turn prevents the kind…

Technofeudalism by Varoufakis is about this N% cooperation. Growing wealth concentration means this collusion becomes possible with smaller and smaller N% cooperating. If it's game theory optimal to cooperate I have no doubt Thiel will be releasing the robo hounds the minute he can.

Re: Replacement.ai

#604

Personal belief, but robots coming for your jobs is not a valid argument against robots. If robots can do a job better and/or faster, they should be the ones doing the jobs. Specialization is how we got to the future. So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income. I don't necessarily feel like it's the AI company's problem to fix either. This is what government is for, and n…

Robots might be the future, but humans are more important and should be peioritized first. lets make sure the humans needs are met, and then you can play with your robot toys, ok?

Re: Replacement.ai

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually an extremely good analogy (but in the opposite way of what you imply), as you don't own your job or your wife. Banning AI for job security is like banning dildos because they make men feel insecure.

I think you don’t get the point. It‘s about that if we are only trying to optimize for outcome, we will loose what makes it more than just biological. I don’t see how it makes sense that a women using a dildo is in any way similar to a human to human interaction, it’s more than just getting off right?

Is your suggestion to ban future sex robots in order to make sure that human-to-human connection is more robust? (I don't know the right answer, just that intuitively it seems not right to do it, even if the outcome of very good sex robots means less couples / less children / etc.).

Re: Replacement.ai

#606

[flagged]

When you objectify the idea of wife as an NPC and you’re the center of your universe, this makes sense. Pretty sure my wife would take a baseball bat to the motherfucker’s robot brain. But it’s her call. Others may prefer a non human companion. And let’s all work to keep the government out of our bedrooms, shall we? We all know how well that’s been going. When you equate sex with garbage collection, you have bigger problems than our AI future.

Re: Replacement.ai

#608

Personal belief, but robots coming for your jobs is not a valid argument against robots. If robots can do a job better and/or faster, they should be the ones doing the jobs. Specialization is how we got to the future. So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income. I don't necessarily feel like it's the AI company's problem to fix either. This is what government is for, and n…

> robots coming for your jobs is not a valid argument against robots. Taking work away from people is practically the definition of technology. We invent things to reduce the effort needed to do things. Eliminating work is a good thing, that’s why inventing things is so popular! What ends up happening is the amount of work remains relatively constant, meaning we get more done for the same amount of effort performed b…

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

There is zero indication that there will be new jobs, new work. Just because there was lots of low hanging fruit historically does not mean we will stumble into some new job creators now. Waiving away concerns with 'jobs always have magically appeared when needed' is nonsense and a non-response to their concerns.

Re: Replacement.ai

#609

Henry Ford's philosophy was that if he paid his workers a higher wage, they would be able to afford the products they were producing, namely his Model T automobiles. This would, in turn, create a larger customer base for his company and help stimulate the economy by increasing consumer spending.

Ford was sued for that philosophy by his shareholders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Re: Replacement.ai

#610
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've replaced human jobs in the past not just made them more efficient. Horses (and all the jobs to do with them) were completely displaced by cars. Those jobs aren't more efficient, they're gone. Similar with many other jobs during the industrial revolution. This is not a zero sum game. For an economy to exist we need consumers. For consumers to exist we need people to have jobs and be paid. So the equilibrium is t…

> This is not a zero sum game. For an economy to exist we need consumers. I think that's really unimaginative and not thinking about it right. If you control the basic resources and own the tools needed to convert those into whatever you want, why does the "economy" even matter? If you can get anything you want without needing anything from the other 95% of people, having "consumers" in the sense you're thinking does…

There have always been some people powerful or rich enough to control the resources and tools needed for whatever they want yet the equilibrium has never been what you describe.
Post reply on HN