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I wish GPT4 had never happened

chaudhry.notion.site

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Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#701

Post by namarie »

carapace wrote: post #581
IIAOPSW wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big issue is the transition. What happens when we still need around 30% employment to keep things going. Neither enough automation for everyone to take permanent holiday nor enough labour to go around for everyone to make the current way sustainable. I have no good answer for how to address this middle point.

I think you start with a kind of non-profit member-owned "general automation corp." that supplies a level of basic QoL: clean water, food, shelter, clothing, energy, internet, medical, etc. per-member, at a set rate, say US$300 per month. That is, you pay in $300/mo. and that covers your rent, food, utilities, health insurance, etc. Over time the rate you pay falls to zero and remains there for the rest of your life.…

Why do it through a corporation rather than through government?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#702

Post by crop_rotation »

visarga wrote: post #682
crop_rotation wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for penning down your emotional response. HN is mostly in denial of anything ChatGPT (most people haven't used GPT4 and keep pasting results of GPT3.5). The thing is that there is nothing other than denial that people can express. Saying that their jobs will become much less relevant is just too hard for almost anyone to swallow. People in this thread keep talking about productivity improvements, not realis…

This technology lowers the entry barrier to almost any field. It empowers self education, creative hacking and growth. Why are you making it sound like a disaster? We can scale our ambitions quickly and absorb the new productivity without losing jobs. We have not solved global warming, poverty or colonised the space. We have to scale AI billions of times. We have to survive the demographic crash. There's plenty of sc…

> This technology lowers the entry barrier to almost any field.

I am not saying it doesn't. But there is some factor n, that if the productivity increase is n times x in a short amount of time, the world will not evolve as rosily as you are thinking.

> It empowers self education, creative hacking and growth.

Again, I never said anything contrary. But making random new products for which there is no market by self education is not a bright prospect for much of humanity.

> Why are you making it sound like a disaster?

You are welcome to counter my points. I am just enumerating my view of the future.

> There's plenty of scope for AI to fill in without replacing humans.

Are you seeing the same pace of improvements I am seeing? One year ago there was no talk of any such thing, and now we have GPT4

AI might be very good for humanity as a whole over a millennium, but for individual human beings it is hard to say the same.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#703

Post by simonh »

mertd wrote: post #655
bayarearefugee wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people appreciate the mass disruption of a shift like this happening across so many industries all at the same time. This sort of professional shift works when automation comes for a subset of a single sector, but we're looking at an everywhere all at once situation. How many plumbers are we going to need, exactly? I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a res…

People are very good at creating work. Every time tech creates a paradigm shift and people cry that there will be not enough work, the exact opposite happens.

Exactly, we’ve been automating the living crap out of almost everything for hundreds of years, but employment has never been higher. Automation leads to higher productivity, cheaper goods and services, increased need for technical skills, thus higher wages and higher demand.

Of course there can be some painful periods of adjustment, but that’s often caused by misguided policy trying to hold back the tide and delay the inevitable.

Ultimately yes, full no holds barred human level AI may well render human labour obsolete, but we’re a very long way away from that.

I know some people think LLMs are close to that already, but no, not even remotely close. I do believe strong AI is possible and maybe even inevitable. They’re a huge step forward, and are easily the biggest advance towards strong AI in my lifetime, but these things are just tools.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#704

Post by zamnos »

mertd wrote: post #655
bayarearefugee wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people appreciate the mass disruption of a shift like this happening across so many industries all at the same time. This sort of professional shift works when automation comes for a subset of a single sector, but we're looking at an everywhere all at once situation. How many plumbers are we going to need, exactly? I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a res…

People are very good at creating work. Every time tech creates a paradigm shift and people cry that there will be not enough work, the exact opposite happens.

Right. The last time a labor saving device came around, letting you do in 2 hours what it used to take 8 to do, it didn't give you 6 hours of vacation, it just meant you were more productive over your 8 hour day. If your job is now 90% "copy and paste into ChatGPT", you're still getting paid to know what to type into it.

Then again, I'm also reminded of a story of a homebuilder, hiring two workers. Together they held up the material and one of them measured the hypotenuse. Well, after someone showed him the Pythagorean theorem, the boss no longer needed the two workers to hold the materials up, and so sent one of them home. That day's labor market didn't expand to hire the guy who's job was replaced by a calculator. Does that extrapolate to the whole labor market, over a longer period of time, given a calculator for words?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#705

Post by ilyt »

lumb63 wrote: post #685
HyperSane wrote: post #450

The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.

This problem isn’t specific to AI. Luddites were concerned about machines taking their jobs. Marx recognized the role of “capital” (of which AI is the intellectual type) in suppressing the incomes of the working class relative to the owning class. Both Marx and the Luddites conceived of different solutions. One solution (the Luddite one) is to eschew the technology. If nobody adopts the technology, nobody has to, but…

Tax the corporations more than the people would be a good start. Make profits from savings in manpower go back to the social programs, maybe ven universal basic income.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#706

Post by famahar »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #679
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #29

The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .

> The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. I would go fucking insane if I didn’t have a purpose. Jobs are necessary part of life.

You haven't found a fulfilling purpose outside of a job then. There was a period in my life where I didn't need to work for a year. I spent it reading books, supporting my friends, exploring my city on bike, learning an instrument, and creating art (which I would show at monthly events). It was way more fulfilling than any job I've had.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#707

Post by ilyt »

adventured wrote: post #660
HyperSane wrote: post #450

The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.

> The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. Or they're mistaken in their assessment of what's going to actually happen, as they frequently have been when it comes to technological progress.

Well, every time it happened some people had their jobs made obsolete and were fired, and they had to find something else to do.

And every time it happened the income inequality grew because the savings were mostly going as profits for the top levels of company.

Yes, it hasn't been a disaster, but it clearly set some bad trends going.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#708

Post by hgs3 »

lumb63 wrote: post #685
HyperSane wrote: post #450

The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.

This problem isn’t specific to AI. Luddites were concerned about machines taking their jobs. Marx recognized the role of “capital” (of which AI is the intellectual type) in suppressing the incomes of the working class relative to the owning class. Both Marx and the Luddites conceived of different solutions. One solution (the Luddite one) is to eschew the technology. If nobody adopts the technology, nobody has to, but…

My own pet idea for economic reform would be to have people democratically vote on the services they want and if there aren't enough volunteers/robots/AI to perform them then you draft people. In this scenario people will get the services they themselves are willing to put in the work for. Such a system wouldn't need money, would be fair, and technological advancements would bring freedom.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#709

Post by ilyt »

htss2013 wrote: post #601
pydry wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could just stop being economically gaslighted it would help. The economic system can't be simultaneously unproductive enough to require us to keep raising the retirement age and so productive that job loss is a big problem. It is possible that a political war on labor is being waged at both ends.

It's possible to have certain things be abundant and other things be scarce simultaneously, because technology doesn't make everything abundant at the same time. That means certain types of labor are abundant and others scarce at the same time as well. There may be a war on certain kinds of labor but having to raise the retirement age and having job losses from tech aren't evidence of it.

It seems more like war on paying people fair wage for the work. Suits don't want to live in age where shit job doesn't come with shit pay coz that cuts into profits.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#710

Post by kypro »

HyperSane wrote: post #450

The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.

So many problems with this line of reasoning.

For one, it's not even clear that democratic politics can work post-AGI. Democracies work because together citizens hold more power than any government or any other individual or collective in society. In the past that was largely expressed as physical power, and why things like gun ownership was important because it allowed the collective to revolt against their leaders, but in more recent times our collective power comes from our economic power.

In a world in which governments can just print money with AGI, then they don't need us. In fact, in this world we're just leaches on state resources and space. And now the dynamic shifts from the state be dependant on the people to the people being dependant on the charity of the state. I see no reason to believe that this would be a stable long-term arrangement.

Also, what you're saying is just hopeium. In reality we don't have this economic system. So AGI is going to be bad for us. And how are you going to change that? Are you going to strike when you're unemployed? Is the government realistically going to be able to tax an AGI company which is doing $100T in revenue 95% of profits? Why wouldn't they just relocate or lobby for lower tax?

Secondly even if we assume by some miracle we can change the economic system and tax companies 95% without them relocating or lobbying to reduce taxes, have you considered that some people actually want to work?

I've been poor most my life. The idea of being a state dependant doesn't really bother me, but what does upset me is that I've spend 20 years of my life skilling up in a profession which will now have no value. And no knowledge professions can ever have value again in post-AGI world.

Perhaps I can go into a manual labour job for a little before manual labour starts being automated too. And then maybe after that the only jobs that will remain are a handful jobs where interaction with real human is valued (hospitality, etc). Perhaps we're just spoilt in the present because we have so many cool jobs. Today people genuinely like working and want to work. I got into coding not because I had to for financial reasons but just because I loved doing it in my spare time so I might as well be paid to do it. But maybe we need to just accept that this was never a sustainable dynamic and that the economic benefits of AGI out weigh us living a fulfilling life...

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