Article: >There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
Dispute Owen's claim, the global felony and bullshit markets are bigger.
The dead economy theory
661–670 of 1001 posts
Re: The dead economy theory
#662The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…
We can take your train of thought further still. If AI ever becomes super good at lawyering, why would we even need law firms and lawyers at all?
We could feed legislation and constitution into the model and have it argue against other lawyer bots in court in front of a judge bot.
Re: The dead economy theory
#663All of these discussions seem to assume there's a limit at human level intelligence beyond which AI can progress no further. What stops the AI companies taking their human level model and training it even more until it's superhuman?
Re: The dead economy theory
#664I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle). What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. M…
I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money? 1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500. 2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game. 3) So you ha…
This coupled with incentives by middle upper middle mng to grow headcount as that is how you progress in mng career path regardless of need.
If apple blows a few billion on excess headcount, no one will bat n eye. Senior director of internal tool org ABC needs 10 more people to get the next version out when a multi year long miss has no material impact.
Re: The dead economy theory
#665I feel like people have said that about every technical revolution. I dont think this article would have been out of place in the hay day of the industrial revolution. Its never been true in the past. Otoh, there always has to be a first time for everything. I think to be convincing though it needs more evidence on how this differed from other technical revolutions.
It's been true in the past for the generation that's living through the technical revolution. The Industrial Revolution was a very grim time to be a worker.
There is a world of difference between the situation for labour being grim, and labour ceasing to exist.
Re: The dead economy theory
#666This article, both compelling and bleak, leaves little doubt: the Butlerian Jihad is coming. The forward-thinking universities should start training Mentats now.
Re: The dead economy theory
#667The problem below just was solved with workers organization.
> The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed
Re: The dead economy theory
#668I have led AI integration in a university faculty. From this experience I can conclude that good work is only produced when humans are in the loop. It's not a technical barrier, but a categorical one. "Good" work is defined by humans and our judgment is irrational but rooted in our evolutionary survival needs. In other words, AI don't have human motivation by definition. Without human in the loop, the top most motiva…
Said simply: LLMs don’t have subjective reasoning.
They only “know” objective info.
Train one on your ad profile and who knows, maybe it makes decisions like you would ethics preferences and all
Re: The dead economy theory
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future? I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theor…
this is Amodei's position in a nutshell for AI development. We have to go as fast as possible because China. It's not the only frame though. If AI models and warfare (cyber, biological) becomes easily accessible and dangerous enough, there is a strong incentive for the world's leaders to cooperate towards something akin to nuclear non-proliferation. In fact, there's strong incentives now to slow down AI progress for…
There is no reason to slow down and only reasons to speed up. AI has not had the world shatteringly obvious negative potential as atomics by a long shot.
There is a latent potential for a negative outcome but the surface is showing a relatively benign productivity boost similar to a smart phone.
Only time will tell if the negative impact is on the scale of atomics or manmade bioweapons. Sadly, humans usually need to be burned a few times before learning the lesson. Eugenics seems to be a universal no go publicly across the world. But that was a painful lesson.
Re: The dead economy theory
#670The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel. The author suggests it will fail because we'll all use drugs and booze and commit suicide. But it works for retired people. They love it. Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?
Anyway why is painting (inferior to robot painting, zero market value) an acceptable hobby but crystal meth is not?
A painting doesn’t randomly yell STOP FOLLOWING ME outside my window at 3AM