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Replacement.ai

replacement.ai

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Re: Replacement.ai

#691

Post by gaul_bladder »

IgorPartola wrote: post #678
elAhmo wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You underestimate how creative are people with finding things to do. Society didn't collapse because we automated stuff that was done in the past almost exclusively by humans, such as agriculture. It won't if robots start driving trucks.

The difference I see is that when we automated car factories, etc. there were still loads of jobs that (a) were better done by a human AND (b) most humans could perform them. The issue is that if you eliminate all jobs that don’t require a PhD or equivalent, what happens to the people who are just not cut out to be nuclear physicists or biochemists, etc?

> The issue is that if you eliminate all jobs that don’t require a PhD or equivalent, what happens to the people who are just not cut out to be nuclear physicists or biochemists, etc?

The divine right of the new kings will be born from social Darwinism

Re: Replacement.ai

#692

Post by gaul_bladder »

garganzol wrote: post #118

It seems that some tech people are prone to ludditism. No wonders here, AI is sharper and brighter than most tech workers usually are. Instead of facing the new reality, some people start to talk about the bubbles, AI being sloppy, etc. Which is not generally true; mostly it's the users' psychological projection of their own traits and the resulting fear-induced smear campaigns. The phenomenon is well described in ps…

[flagged]

Re: Replacement.ai

#693

Post by thunky »

strogonoff wrote: post #684
thunky wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) humans benefit from having jobs and 2) human benefit is the end goal. There's no law of nature saying that a human must work 40 hours per week or starve. The current dependence on work is a consequence, not a goal.

Having to pay bills is part of current socioeconomic reality. Deriving satisfaction from being a useful member of society and social ties is part of human psychological nature. Working on replacing human jobs with robots has two concrete outcomes, 1) impacting people’s ability to have jobs that pay bills and often create a meaning their lives and 2) concentrating wealth in technological elites (who run those robots),…

> Having to pay bills is part of current socioeconomic reality.

This is a man-made reality though, and we have as much power to change it as we did to create it.

> Deriving satisfaction from being a useful member of society and social ties is part of human psychological nature.

I can't get behind this idea that "work" is the only way that a person can feel like a useful member of society. This is just the result of our (man-made) programming that makes it seem like the only way. We've essentially been brainwashed into accepting the backwards idea that we need work even if work doesn't need us.

> If we are acting in good will, we should dedicate effort to addressing the concrete impact

I agree, but i don't think the right answer is to stop the tech and keep digging holes and filling them in just to get a paycheck. The solution is to fix the humans. Unfortunately our government is trash so yeah we're probably screwed unless we first figure out how to get govt to actually represent the people. Andrew Yang is the only politician-adjacent I've seen take this conversation seriously.

Re: Replacement.ai

#694

Post by sivartnotrab »

allturtles wrote: post #32

This is a brilliant piece of satire. "A Modest Proposal" for the AI age. The leader bios are particularly priceless. "While working for 12 years as the Director of HR for a multinational, Faith realized that firing people gave her an almost-spiritual high. Out of the office, Faith coaches a little league softball team and looks after her sick mother - obligations she looks forward to being free of!"

I know it's good satire when it takes me a min to realize its satire

Re: Replacement.ai

#695

Post by fwip »

Ray20 wrote: post #670
pydry wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland. America isnt really a democracy it's a plutocracy.

Just for example. When the elite drives all their opponents into poverty and sends them to rot in prison for the slightest outcry, that's anything but democracy. https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/swiss-lgbtq-groups-...

"Soral was convicted repeatedly in France and sentenced to jail time in 2019 for denying the Holocaust, which is a crime in France." Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Re: Replacement.ai

#696

Post by spopejoy »

gnfargbl wrote: post #27

The hypothesized superintelligent AI will be essentially immortal. If it destroys us, it will be entirely alone in the known Universe, forever. That thought should terrify it enough to keep us around... even if only in the sense that I keep cats.

I would think that if AI is so smart, it would realize that zero-sum games are for suckers.

Only an AI as _dumb_ as us would want something as stupid as domination, which after all is based on competition for resources that a long time ago were distributable in a way that could feed every human on earth etc.

I'm not saying an AI would "choose" world peace, but people somehow assume that "kill everybody but me" and even "survival at all costs" are a given for a non-biological entity. Instead these concepts could look quite irrational.

Re: Replacement.ai

#697

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

skybrian wrote: post #525
throwaway0123_5 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of quality of life, much/most of the value of intelligence is in how it lets you affect the physical world. For most knowledge workers, that takes the form of using intelligence to increase how productively some physical asset can be exploited. The owner of the asset gives some of the money/surplus earned to the knowledge worker, and they can use the money to affect change in the physical world by paying for…

What are the barriers to entry? Seems like there are lots of AI startups out there? There is a rush to build data centers so it seems that hardware is a bottleneck and maybe that will remain the trend, but another scenario is that it stops abruptly when capacity catches up? I'm wondering why this doesn't this become a race to the bottom?

Is the suggestion that AGI (or even current AI) lowers the barrier of entry to making a company so much that regular people can just create a company in order to make money (and then buy food/shelter)? If so, I think there's a lot of problems with that:

1) It doesn't solve the problem of obtaining physical capital. So you're basically limited to just software companies.

2) If the barrier to entry to creating a software product that can form the basis of a company is so low that a single person can do it, why would other companies (the ones with money and physical capital) buy your product instead of just telling their GPT-N to create them the same software?

3) Every other newly-unemployed person is going to have the same idea. Having everyone be a solo-founder of a software company really doesn't seem viable, even if we grant that it could be viable for a single person in a world where everyone has a GPT-N that can easily replicate the company's software.

On a side note, one niche where I think a relatively small number of AI-enabled solo founders will do exceptionally well is in video games. How well a video game will do depends a lot on how fun it is to humans and the taste of the designer. I'm suspicious that AIs will have good taste in video game design and even if they do I think it would be tough for them to evaluate how fun mechanics would be for a person.

Re: Replacement.ai

#698

Post by cutemonster »

serial_dev wrote: post #388
bittercynic wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The "government" is just the set of people who hold power over others. Often, yes, but in a more functional society it would be the mechanism we collectively use to prevent a few people from amassing excessive wealth and power.

Where did this ever work out? It’s extremely common that policies are universally hated by the people, yet the people in power do it anyway.

The Nordic countries are pretty ok functioning democracies, with many smaller political parties. And pretty high taxes

(What do you refer to with "this"?)

Re: Replacement.ai

#699

Post by insane_dreamer »

Windchaser wrote: post #652
insane_dreamer wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already in a post-scarcity world. The only reason there is still scarcity is entirely because it is created by humans to acquire more wealth. You think that's going to change just because many more people find themselves without?

Oh, nah, we're definitely not post-scarcity. If the whole world's population used resources at the rate that the US population does, we'd need 4.9 Earths. So: getting the whole world up to US standards of living is going to take a lot of changes to lifestyle or technological advances. Both of these are scarcity issues.

> If the whole world's population used resources at the rate that the US population does

Why would the US's wasteful use of resources be the benchmark for "sufficiency"?

There's enough food to feed the world, and enough raw materials to produce the things we need. The problem is not scarcity of resources, it's distribution of resources.

Re: Replacement.ai

#700

Post by Lumoscore »

That sounds totally ominous! It's like the moment the AI finally shows up to take over the corner office.

But I think it misses the bigger picture, which you hit on: Robots are helpful, but they're still just tools. An AI can crunch data, find opportunities, and trade faster than any human ever could. It's an incredible helper!

However, humans are the ones controlling them. We decide what they trade, and we build the secure systems they rely on. An AI millionaire is still relying on infrastructure that humans have to build to be fast, cheap, and totally stable. If the foundation is shaky, the AI's complex trades fall apart.

That reality is what makes me ignore the AI hype and focus entirely on infrastructure. The smart developers know that the long game is building utility assets on robust foundations.

They're moving to systems that are super fast and near-zero cost because AI requires zero friction. They're also demanding global market reach so the assets they create aren't trapped anywhere.

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