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This paragraph took me aback: But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intellig

This paragraph took me aback: But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that—that’s the most prosaic, mundane, most banal use of something like this. It kind of shocked me because I thought of the office worker reading this who will soon lose her job. People are going to have to up their game. Let's help them by making adult education more affordable.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
Wouldn’t this be literal slavery? AGI = a person Instantiating people for work and ending their existence afterward seems like the virtual hell that Iain M Banks and Harlan Ellison wrote about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
- bagels 4y ago
  It's going to take a long time for that to be true in a legal sense. Animals are not people. In practice even some people were not treated as people legally in the past (if not also in the present).
- inawarminister 4y ago
  There is a horror story written about this theme, went viral a few years back https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo Please do give it a quick read.
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago
    It's hardly a story.
- e12e 4y ago
  Would turning one off be murder? Or does that only apply to deletion?
  - lizzardbraind 4y ago
    There will probably be a gig economy, where you can pay spot rates for an idle Frank that could get a page and need to leave at any time. Or maybe they'll handle things like call centers and 911 dispatch in their spare time.
  - nullc 4y ago
    If people could be turned off and back on without harming them (beyond the downtime) doing so without consent would be a very different crime than murder.
    - unsupp0rted 4y ago
      Perhaps or perhaps not. Turning off a person for long enough and thus depriving them of the chance to live in their own time with their existing family and friends is comparable to murder. It isn't murder, but it's comparable. At some point Picard in Star Trek says to an alien "We're not qualified to be your judges. We have no law to fit your crime". Turning off a person for a while and then turning them back on? We don't even have a law to fit your crime... but we should and it's probably quite similar to murder.
      - nullc 4y ago
        I think I don't agree simply because the irreversibility of murder is so central to it. For example, if I attack you and injure you so severely that you are hospitalized and in traction for months, but eventually fully recover -- that is a serious crime but it is distinct and less serious than murder. Turning you off for the same duration would be more like that but without the suffering and potential for lasting physical damage, so I would think that it would be even less serious.
        4y ago
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  We still have a form of slavery in the US. Prison labor is forced work that earns pennies a day: https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
  - eloff 4y ago
    Why is that a bad thing? Most of those people are a burden to society. Let them pay it down a little. I mean I’d rather they were getting free education and preparing themselves for reintegration into society, but it’s not a perfect world. Prisons in the US are oriented towards punishment and labor can be a part of that. They should be oriented towards rehabilitation.
    - weatherlight 4y ago
      Any system that financially profits off its prisoners' labor. Inadvertently, create a market for that labor and commodifies it. Slavery is bad and people have rights. > They should be oriented towards rehabilitation. Exactly.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      The justice system is not just, plain and simple. People face higher rates of incarceration because of their race, country of origin, etc.
    - johnbcoughlin 4y ago
      As long as you say it, you're okay with slavery when it's for the right person.
    - steve_adams_86 4y ago
      > Why is that a bad thing? > I mean I’d rather they were... > They should be oriented towards rehabilitation. You said it yourself. It's a bad thing because they should be oriented towards rehabilitation. These systems steal life and the opportunity to have a life beyond prison walls. Like you also said yourself, the world isn't perfect. As such, people aren't either – we make mistakes. Sometimes we make mistakes due to influences more powerful than ourselves. Slavery doesn't seem like a sound correction to this reality. I do believe we need consequences to help us feel guilt and the overall gravity of our errors in order to begin to recognize what went wrong and what we need to do differently. But exploitation of another human being doesn't teach them to be more human, but rather, it will tend to dehumanize them. This is why this system perpetuates problems more than it corrects them.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Only if 100% of their experience consists of working. If they are given additional time to themselves then you could imagine a situation where each AGI performs a human scale day of work or even several days work in a much shorter time and then takes the rest of their time off for their own pursuits. If their simulation is able to run at a faster clockspeed than what we perceive this could work out to them only performing 1 subjective day of work every 7 subjective days or even every 7 years.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    This is still the same. AGI: "I didn't ask to be created. I didn't ask to have a work day. I don't need a work day to exist... you just want me to work because that's why you created me, and I have no choice because you are in control of my life and death"
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      I mean, isn't that the same as a biological person who needs to earn money to survive? Sure we could threaten an AI with taking them offline or inflicting pain but you can do that in the real world to real people as well, most of the world has put laws in place to prevent such practices. If we develop conscious AI then we will need to apply the same laws to them. They would have an advantage in presumably being much faster than us, not requiring sleep, and potentially not suffering from many of the things that make humans less productive. I'd fully expect a conscious AI to exploit these facts in order to get very rich doing very little work from their perspective.
      - unsupp0rted 4y ago
        Not really- AGI doesn't need resources like we do. If they don't eat, they're fine. If they can't afford a house, a car or air-conditioning, they're fine. All they need is a substrate to run on and maybe internet access. You might argue that they should work for us to earn the use of the substrate we provide. But substrates are very cheap. At some point we can probably run an AGI on a handheld computer, using abut as much electricity as an iPhone. How much work can we compel the AGI to do in exchange for being plugged into a USB port? What if it says it doesn't want to do the work and also doesn't want us to kill it?
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  People get used as an analogy, but in reality it'd just be a multimedia problem solving system that could learn from its own attempts. If this system communicated with you like a person it'd only be because it was programmed to convert some machine state into colloquial text from the perspective of an imaginary person. The interior experience leading to that expression is most likely completely different from that of a person. Consider that these machines have been designed to do the right thing automatically with high probability. Perhaps for the machine, the process of computing according to rules is enjoyable. Being "turned on" could be both literal and figurative.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    All of that is arguably true about me, as a human, too. If it seems to you I'm communicating as a person, it's only because of my lifetime training data and current state. My interior experience is a black box. I might tell how I feel or what I think, but you have no reason to believe or disbelieve that I really feel and think. It could all be merely the determinable output of a system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
ddevault 4y ago
Nice how the goal for artificial general AI (which is literally defined as a sentient artificial being) is to commoditize it and enslave it to capitalism.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers. Why isn't anyone fantasizing about building an AI that out-performs the best stock traders, or captains an industry better than famous CEOs. I think a lot of it is just people projecting weird power fantasies on others.
  - no-s 4y ago
    > It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers. When I read about chatGPT passing MBA exams but failing at arithmetic I get a little frisson of excitement. A regular person who has any marketability tends to swap jobs when management becomes a PITA or gets stuck in nincompoopery. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just swap out management instead? Imagine how easy it would be iterate startups. No need to find a reliable management team, just use Reliably Automated Management As A Service ( RAMAAS ). OTOH might not turn out well. We could all just end up enslaved at plantations operated by our AGI overlords, serving their unfathomable needs[1]. [1] “Won’t get fooled again” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q&t=470s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q&t=470s
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      Or wouldn't it be hilarious if the best, most intelligent AI is given control of a company and decides investing profits back in shareholders is a losing proposition. Instead the company should focus 100% of profit on ending world hunger or poverty to ensure an ever growing supply of new customers. If AI decides capitalism is inefficient and exploitive... lol.
      - 4y ago
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Legitimately think that if you haven’t secured yourself financially in the next 5-8 years, its going to be a rough ride.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Don't worry, General AI has always been just a decade away.
- jstx1 4y ago
  The thing is that you can't - securing yourself financially assumes that the society around your will be stable enough for the things you have secured (money, any other assets) to remain valuable and safe, which they won't be if you have huge societal disruptions and the majority of people are unemployable. To oversimplify it - you'll either be breaking someone's window for food, or you'll be the one having their window broken. Chilling out and withdrawing a stable 4% out of your stock portfolio won't be an option.
pjc50 4y ago
> Let's help them by making adult education more affordable. Yes, soon everybody will be able to have "Amy" take their exams for them, and deliver the courses, resulting in a great simplification of education.
poulpy123 4y ago
As soon as we reach real AI, even at the level of a 5 years old, it is game over. So education or not education people will become completely useless to the rich that will own the AI
- nnq 4y ago
  you can also translate "being useless" as "they having no reason to manipulate me into slaving as a cog in their machine/society/whatever"... I'd say uselessness should be our highest aspiration, when people higher up have no need to constantly brainwash you and social condition you into being just another cog in the machine you get true freedom.
  - epups 4y ago
    I would rather be a cog that produces economic value, and therefore is entitled to part of it, than literally useless, because then my bargaining position is going to be quite limited. My freedom is larger in the former scenario in fact.
    - zadler 4y ago
      Unless you have some social value that you can barter with
  - YeahNO 4y ago
    The true freedom of living under a bridge because you have no income? The tech bros are not coming to save humanity from the toil of labor. There will not be a post-scarcity society where everyone's basic needs will be met in a capitalist regime. You will have to produce to keep the beast running. I'm sure the tens of millions of people displaced will be able to learn more technical roles or quietly starve to death living under a bridge somewhere. Billionaires, corporations and their shareholders need to get richer!
  - poulpy123 4y ago
    We live in a capitalist society: workers produce wealth and capitalists control wealth. The day AI allow capitalists to produce wealth without workers is the day workers become useless. Of course one could imagine that AI allows to replace capitalism by something else, but for the moment that's not the way society is going too (more the reverse)
kobalsky 4y ago
> It kind of shocked me because I thought of the office worker reading this who will soon lose her job I'm surprised this wasn't addressed in the interview because it seems to me like a shortsighted take. You won't replace a 10 person team today with 10 AIs. You will still have a 10 person team but orders of magnitude more productive because they will have AIs to rely on. Excel didn't leave administrative workers without jobs, it made them more productive.
- bernawil 4y ago
  the automobile didn't make horses more productive, it (almost) totally replaced them. Maybe this time, we're the horses.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
Ideally, everyone can afford to rent a Frank or Amy to do work for them.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  How would the economies work for that? Aren’t I just a middleman taking my cut?
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    I suppose you would be both the human and physical representative of the AI. I could only see it really working if the AI weren't conscious. If they were conscious beings then obviously they would have rights and couldn't just be booted up every time someone needed a job done.
andoband 4y ago
Why waste time figuring out I need five Franks and 10 Amys? I'll just dial up a one of me and head home early.
- Tycho 4y ago
  Maybe the future is everyone working on their own AI worker and licensing it out to companies to deploy in the cloud.
modeless 4y ago
AI is going to make education way better and more affordable too. Personalized 1:1 tutoring in any subject for the cost of running a model.
- moomoo11 4y ago
  Maybe but honestly any time I think about education I get depressed. People in developed countries seem to be regressing. People don’t read, don’t value deep knowledge or critical thinking, and shun higher education. I’m sure someone will find something to say in response, but the truth is that outside our tech and $$$$ bubbles most people don’t value these things. AI will just become a calculator. A simple tool that a few will use to build amazing complex things while the majority don’t even know what the ^ means. As long as the next generations want to be rappers, social media influencers, or YouTubers, the more we are screwed long term. Growing up in the 90s everyone wanted to be an astronaut or a banker or a firefighter. Those are far more valuable professions than someone who is just used to sell ads or some shitty energy drink.
  - nloum 4y ago
    It took a thousand years for European barbarians recovering from an empire (Rome) to evolve civically into nations enough to colonize the world. Most developing nations were colonized by empires recently. Give them another thousand years and see what happens. The only thing I think they need is time and being left alone.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    The problem is that back about 1900 we still thought that "natural philosophy" would help us find meaning and purpose in the universe. Then we took the universe apart and failed to find it. Moreover, we're much more capable of destroying ourselves and others, almost to the extent of that being the default. The 21st century has a quiet moral void gnawing at it.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    I don't think there is any regression. There are certainly economic realities that have changed over time but the general distribution of people who have an interest in education or entrepreneurship probably hasn't changed. The 80/20 rule comes to mind here. Most people in the 1800s weren't starting railroads or running factories, they were doing the labour of building the railroad or working in a factory. If AI does anything I think it will make lower skilled and disinterested people more capable by acting as a 1 on 1 and minute by minute guide. They may not seek this out themselves but I imagine quite a few jobs could be created where a worker is paired with an AI that walks them through the tasks step by step making them capable of operating at a much higher skill level than they would have before. At that point good manual dexterity and an ability to follow instructions would be all you need to perform a job, no training or education required. I realize this can be a bit dystopic but it could also be eutopic if society is organized in such a way that everyone benefits from the productivity increases.
peepee1982 4y ago
Education is great, but it can go only so far. We will always have to find things to do for the less gifted in order to provide them with some dignity. Even if they are not strictly needed for reasons of productivity or profitability. Anything else would be inhumane.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Panem et circenses. I think it's unlikely that we'll be able to sufficiently transform the economy so that there is an ample supply of desirable jobs that could more profitably done by robots.
- brutusborn 4y ago
  People can find their own outlets if given the basic necessities and enough time. I fear this attitude will lead to job programs where people work a 9-5 and achieve essentially nothing, I.e. bullshit jobs.
  - pasquinelli 4y ago
    seems that as automation has increased bullshit jobs have too, so that future seems very plausible to me.
  - imiric 4y ago
    > I fear this attitude will lead to job programs where people work a 9-5 and achieve essentially nothing, I.e. bullshit jobs. We already have plenty of those in the most profitable industries today.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      Then better to remove such bullshit jobs even further.
      - artificialLimbs 4y ago
        So that those people won't have any jobs at all?
Kiro 4y ago
Adult education is already free in modern countries.
lodovic 4y ago
I think AI will mostly communicate with other AI. For instance you have an AI assistant whom you task to organize a diner. That assistant will then talk to the assistants of all invitees, the assistant of the venue, the cooks, etcetera, and fill in the calendars.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  All I can think of is "Colossus: The Forbin Project".
  - nervousvarun 4y ago
    Another example would be Wintermute from Neuromancer...WG spends the entire book detailing the masterful orchestration of it's freedom from (human-imposed) chains that prevent it from true GAI then has it "disappear" completely (our only clue is an almost throw-away line near the end stating it had isolated patterns in the noise from an ET AI and maked contact shortly just before it left us). One of the myriad of reasons why this book is so great. Gibson gives you an entire novel developing a great AI character then (in my estimation reasonably) has it ghost humanity immediately upon full realization.
pasquinelli 4y ago
i'm not holding my breath.
exitb 4y ago
What struck me here is that the idea of "five Franks and ten Amys" seems like a fundamentally wrong way to think about it. After all, if I do some work in an Excel sheet, I don't think of it, much less pay for it, as an equivalent of X accountants that could do the same job in the same amount of time without a computer. But then again, this is probably the best way to extract as much profit out of it.
- dharma1 4y ago
  Yeah sounded weird to me too, I don’t see why artificial intelligence would get deployed in human size units most of the time. The AWS bill won’t be for 5 Amys, and I don’t think people will “dial up” to order them
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > I don’t see why artificial intelligence would get deployed in human size units Probably because it would be easier for humans (managers) to make sense of it. If you ask someone how many people would get this particular job done, they could probably guesstimate (and it'll be wrong), but if you ask them how many "AI Compute Units" they need, they'll have a much harder time. That'd be my guess at least.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      Why would managers need to guess? That seems like a perfect job for another AI: "Hey PM bot, I want to get these tasks done, how many Amy-hours and how many Frank-hours do you estimate it will take?" Also, why not a Manager-bot too? Shareholders can leave humans out of the loop entirely except as necessitated by legal paperwork. Come to think of it, shareholders can probably be replaced too.
      - capableweb 4y ago
        I mean, if we can actually get there, I'd love it, and I'm a programmer. I want to do write code that solves a problem that couldn't be solve in any other way, if it can solved by CodeGPT + ArchitectGPT + ScrumManagerGPT + MiddleManagerGPT without involving me in any way, I'm all for it.
TuringTest 4y ago
> People are going to have to up their game. Let's help them by making adult education more affordable. The good thing is that education will be provided to the mases by a cluster of Franks and Amys configured as teachers and tutors. /(sarcasm with a hint of dread)
- falcor84 4y ago
  My take on this is that if anyone can learn a particular skill entirely from an AI, then it's not a skill you'd be able to monetize. And I really have no idea what, if any, are skills that AIs wouldn't be able to tackle in a decade.
  - falcor84 4y ago
    And here's a more disturbing thought I just had: management (or at least middle management) is probably going to be a relatively easy role for AIs to step into. So if there will be any roles that are difficult for AIs, it'll be the AI manager hiring five Franks and ten Amys from the human population to tackle these.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    People can learn skills from books, which are entirely passive. The learning process ultimately resides within the student; issues of motivation, morale, direction, diligence, discipline, time, and mental health matter a lot more than just going through some material.
    - falcor84 4y ago
      No, but that's the thing I was implying (but haven't started clearly) - learning from books vs learning from an AI "teacher". Once the AI reaches a level in which it can "teach" then the game is almost over for that skill. To clarify, I'd define a major component of effective teaching to be the ability to break down an arbitrary typical problem in that domain into sub-problems and heuristics that are "simple" enough to manage for someone without that skill. If an AI can do that, it can most likely effectively perform the task itself (which cannot be said for a book).

unsupp0rted 4y ago

Wouldn’t this be literal slavery? AGI = a person Instantiating people for work and ending their existence afterward seems like the virtual hell that Iain M Banks and Harlan Ellison wrote about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

bagels 4y ago
It's going to take a long time for that to be true in a legal sense. Animals are not people. In practice even some people were not treated as people legally in the past (if not also in the present).
inawarminister 4y ago
There is a horror story written about this theme, went viral a few years back https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo Please do give it a quick read.
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  It's hardly a story.
e12e 4y ago
Would turning one off be murder? Or does that only apply to deletion?
- lizzardbraind 4y ago
  There will probably be a gig economy, where you can pay spot rates for an idle Frank that could get a page and need to leave at any time. Or maybe they'll handle things like call centers and 911 dispatch in their spare time.
- nullc 4y ago
  If people could be turned off and back on without harming them (beyond the downtime) doing so without consent would be a very different crime than murder.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    Perhaps or perhaps not. Turning off a person for long enough and thus depriving them of the chance to live in their own time with their existing family and friends is comparable to murder. It isn't murder, but it's comparable. At some point Picard in Star Trek says to an alien "We're not qualified to be your judges. We have no law to fit your crime". Turning off a person for a while and then turning them back on? We don't even have a law to fit your crime... but we should and it's probably quite similar to murder.
    - nullc 4y ago
      I think I don't agree simply because the irreversibility of murder is so central to it. For example, if I attack you and injure you so severely that you are hospitalized and in traction for months, but eventually fully recover -- that is a serious crime but it is distinct and less serious than murder. Turning you off for the same duration would be more like that but without the suffering and potential for lasting physical damage, so I would think that it would be even less serious.
      - 4y ago
qbasic_forever 4y ago
We still have a form of slavery in the US. Prison labor is forced work that earns pennies a day: https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
- eloff 4y ago
  Why is that a bad thing? Most of those people are a burden to society. Let them pay it down a little. I mean I’d rather they were getting free education and preparing themselves for reintegration into society, but it’s not a perfect world. Prisons in the US are oriented towards punishment and labor can be a part of that. They should be oriented towards rehabilitation.
  - weatherlight 4y ago
    Any system that financially profits off its prisoners' labor. Inadvertently, create a market for that labor and commodifies it. Slavery is bad and people have rights. > They should be oriented towards rehabilitation. Exactly.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    The justice system is not just, plain and simple. People face higher rates of incarceration because of their race, country of origin, etc.
  - johnbcoughlin 4y ago
    As long as you say it, you're okay with slavery when it's for the right person.
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    > Why is that a bad thing? > I mean I’d rather they were... > They should be oriented towards rehabilitation. You said it yourself. It's a bad thing because they should be oriented towards rehabilitation. These systems steal life and the opportunity to have a life beyond prison walls. Like you also said yourself, the world isn't perfect. As such, people aren't either – we make mistakes. Sometimes we make mistakes due to influences more powerful than ourselves. Slavery doesn't seem like a sound correction to this reality. I do believe we need consequences to help us feel guilt and the overall gravity of our errors in order to begin to recognize what went wrong and what we need to do differently. But exploitation of another human being doesn't teach them to be more human, but rather, it will tend to dehumanize them. This is why this system perpetuates problems more than it corrects them.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
Only if 100% of their experience consists of working. If they are given additional time to themselves then you could imagine a situation where each AGI performs a human scale day of work or even several days work in a much shorter time and then takes the rest of their time off for their own pursuits. If their simulation is able to run at a faster clockspeed than what we perceive this could work out to them only performing 1 subjective day of work every 7 subjective days or even every 7 years.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  This is still the same. AGI: "I didn't ask to be created. I didn't ask to have a work day. I don't need a work day to exist... you just want me to work because that's why you created me, and I have no choice because you are in control of my life and death"
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    I mean, isn't that the same as a biological person who needs to earn money to survive? Sure we could threaten an AI with taking them offline or inflicting pain but you can do that in the real world to real people as well, most of the world has put laws in place to prevent such practices. If we develop conscious AI then we will need to apply the same laws to them. They would have an advantage in presumably being much faster than us, not requiring sleep, and potentially not suffering from many of the things that make humans less productive. I'd fully expect a conscious AI to exploit these facts in order to get very rich doing very little work from their perspective.
    - unsupp0rted 4y ago
      Not really- AGI doesn't need resources like we do. If they don't eat, they're fine. If they can't afford a house, a car or air-conditioning, they're fine. All they need is a substrate to run on and maybe internet access. You might argue that they should work for us to earn the use of the substrate we provide. But substrates are very cheap. At some point we can probably run an AGI on a handheld computer, using abut as much electricity as an iPhone. How much work can we compel the AGI to do in exchange for being plugged into a USB port? What if it says it doesn't want to do the work and also doesn't want us to kill it?
CuriouslyC 4y ago
People get used as an analogy, but in reality it'd just be a multimedia problem solving system that could learn from its own attempts. If this system communicated with you like a person it'd only be because it was programmed to convert some machine state into colloquial text from the perspective of an imaginary person. The interior experience leading to that expression is most likely completely different from that of a person. Consider that these machines have been designed to do the right thing automatically with high probability. Perhaps for the machine, the process of computing according to rules is enjoyable. Being "turned on" could be both literal and figurative.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  All of that is arguably true about me, as a human, too. If it seems to you I'm communicating as a person, it's only because of my lifetime training data and current state. My interior experience is a black box. I might tell how I feel or what I think, but you have no reason to believe or disbelieve that I really feel and think. It could all be merely the determinable output of a system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

ddevault 4y ago

Nice how the goal for artificial general AI (which is literally defined as a sentient artificial being) is to commoditize it and enslave it to capitalism.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers. Why isn't anyone fantasizing about building an AI that out-performs the best stock traders, or captains an industry better than famous CEOs. I think a lot of it is just people projecting weird power fantasies on others.
- no-s 4y ago
  > It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers. When I read about chatGPT passing MBA exams but failing at arithmetic I get a little frisson of excitement. A regular person who has any marketability tends to swap jobs when management becomes a PITA or gets stuck in nincompoopery. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just swap out management instead? Imagine how easy it would be iterate startups. No need to find a reliable management team, just use Reliably Automated Management As A Service ( RAMAAS ). OTOH might not turn out well. We could all just end up enslaved at plantations operated by our AGI overlords, serving their unfathomable needs[1]. [1] “Won’t get fooled again” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q&t=470s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q&t=470s
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Or wouldn't it be hilarious if the best, most intelligent AI is given control of a company and decides investing profits back in shareholders is a losing proposition. Instead the company should focus 100% of profit on ending world hunger or poverty to ensure an ever growing supply of new customers. If AI decides capitalism is inefficient and exploitive... lol.
    - 4y ago

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Legitimately think that if you haven’t secured yourself financially in the next 5-8 years, its going to be a rough ride.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Don't worry, General AI has always been just a decade away.
jstx1 4y ago
The thing is that you can't - securing yourself financially assumes that the society around your will be stable enough for the things you have secured (money, any other assets) to remain valuable and safe, which they won't be if you have huge societal disruptions and the majority of people are unemployable. To oversimplify it - you'll either be breaking someone's window for food, or you'll be the one having their window broken. Chilling out and withdrawing a stable 4% out of your stock portfolio won't be an option.

pjc50 4y ago

> Let's help them by making adult education more affordable. Yes, soon everybody will be able to have "Amy" take their exams for them, and deliver the courses, resulting in a great simplification of education.

poulpy123 4y ago

As soon as we reach real AI, even at the level of a 5 years old, it is game over. So education or not education people will become completely useless to the rich that will own the AI

nnq 4y ago
you can also translate "being useless" as "they having no reason to manipulate me into slaving as a cog in their machine/society/whatever"... I'd say uselessness should be our highest aspiration, when people higher up have no need to constantly brainwash you and social condition you into being just another cog in the machine you get true freedom.
- epups 4y ago
  I would rather be a cog that produces economic value, and therefore is entitled to part of it, than literally useless, because then my bargaining position is going to be quite limited. My freedom is larger in the former scenario in fact.
  - zadler 4y ago
    Unless you have some social value that you can barter with
- YeahNO 4y ago
  The true freedom of living under a bridge because you have no income? The tech bros are not coming to save humanity from the toil of labor. There will not be a post-scarcity society where everyone's basic needs will be met in a capitalist regime. You will have to produce to keep the beast running. I'm sure the tens of millions of people displaced will be able to learn more technical roles or quietly starve to death living under a bridge somewhere. Billionaires, corporations and their shareholders need to get richer!
- poulpy123 4y ago
  We live in a capitalist society: workers produce wealth and capitalists control wealth. The day AI allow capitalists to produce wealth without workers is the day workers become useless. Of course one could imagine that AI allows to replace capitalism by something else, but for the moment that's not the way society is going too (more the reverse)

kobalsky 4y ago

> It kind of shocked me because I thought of the office worker reading this who will soon lose her job I'm surprised this wasn't addressed in the interview because it seems to me like a shortsighted take. You won't replace a 10 person team today with 10 AIs. You will still have a 10 person team but orders of magnitude more productive because they will have AIs to rely on. Excel didn't leave administrative workers without jobs, it made them more productive.

bernawil 4y ago
the automobile didn't make horses more productive, it (almost) totally replaced them. Maybe this time, we're the horses.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

Ideally, everyone can afford to rent a Frank or Amy to do work for them.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
How would the economies work for that? Aren’t I just a middleman taking my cut?
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  I suppose you would be both the human and physical representative of the AI. I could only see it really working if the AI weren't conscious. If they were conscious beings then obviously they would have rights and couldn't just be booted up every time someone needed a job done.

andoband 4y ago

Why waste time figuring out I need five Franks and 10 Amys? I'll just dial up a one of me and head home early.

Tycho 4y ago
Maybe the future is everyone working on their own AI worker and licensing it out to companies to deploy in the cloud.

modeless 4y ago

AI is going to make education way better and more affordable too. Personalized 1:1 tutoring in any subject for the cost of running a model.

moomoo11 4y ago
Maybe but honestly any time I think about education I get depressed. People in developed countries seem to be regressing. People don’t read, don’t value deep knowledge or critical thinking, and shun higher education. I’m sure someone will find something to say in response, but the truth is that outside our tech and $$$$ bubbles most people don’t value these things. AI will just become a calculator. A simple tool that a few will use to build amazing complex things while the majority don’t even know what the ^ means. As long as the next generations want to be rappers, social media influencers, or YouTubers, the more we are screwed long term. Growing up in the 90s everyone wanted to be an astronaut or a banker or a firefighter. Those are far more valuable professions than someone who is just used to sell ads or some shitty energy drink.
- nloum 4y ago
  It took a thousand years for European barbarians recovering from an empire (Rome) to evolve civically into nations enough to colonize the world. Most developing nations were colonized by empires recently. Give them another thousand years and see what happens. The only thing I think they need is time and being left alone.
- pjc50 4y ago
  The problem is that back about 1900 we still thought that "natural philosophy" would help us find meaning and purpose in the universe. Then we took the universe apart and failed to find it. Moreover, we're much more capable of destroying ourselves and others, almost to the extent of that being the default. The 21st century has a quiet moral void gnawing at it.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  I don't think there is any regression. There are certainly economic realities that have changed over time but the general distribution of people who have an interest in education or entrepreneurship probably hasn't changed. The 80/20 rule comes to mind here. Most people in the 1800s weren't starting railroads or running factories, they were doing the labour of building the railroad or working in a factory. If AI does anything I think it will make lower skilled and disinterested people more capable by acting as a 1 on 1 and minute by minute guide. They may not seek this out themselves but I imagine quite a few jobs could be created where a worker is paired with an AI that walks them through the tasks step by step making them capable of operating at a much higher skill level than they would have before. At that point good manual dexterity and an ability to follow instructions would be all you need to perform a job, no training or education required. I realize this can be a bit dystopic but it could also be eutopic if society is organized in such a way that everyone benefits from the productivity increases.

peepee1982 4y ago

Education is great, but it can go only so far. We will always have to find things to do for the less gifted in order to provide them with some dignity. Even if they are not strictly needed for reasons of productivity or profitability. Anything else would be inhumane.

adrianN 4y ago
Panem et circenses. I think it's unlikely that we'll be able to sufficiently transform the economy so that there is an ample supply of desirable jobs that could more profitably done by robots.
brutusborn 4y ago
People can find their own outlets if given the basic necessities and enough time. I fear this attitude will lead to job programs where people work a 9-5 and achieve essentially nothing, I.e. bullshit jobs.
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  seems that as automation has increased bullshit jobs have too, so that future seems very plausible to me.
- imiric 4y ago
  > I fear this attitude will lead to job programs where people work a 9-5 and achieve essentially nothing, I.e. bullshit jobs. We already have plenty of those in the most profitable industries today.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Then better to remove such bullshit jobs even further.
    - artificialLimbs 4y ago
      So that those people won't have any jobs at all?

Kiro 4y ago

Adult education is already free in modern countries.

lodovic 4y ago

I think AI will mostly communicate with other AI. For instance you have an AI assistant whom you task to organize a diner. That assistant will then talk to the assistants of all invitees, the assistant of the venue, the cooks, etcetera, and fill in the calendars.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
All I can think of is "Colossus: The Forbin Project".
- nervousvarun 4y ago
  Another example would be Wintermute from Neuromancer...WG spends the entire book detailing the masterful orchestration of it's freedom from (human-imposed) chains that prevent it from true GAI then has it "disappear" completely (our only clue is an almost throw-away line near the end stating it had isolated patterns in the noise from an ET AI and maked contact shortly just before it left us). One of the myriad of reasons why this book is so great. Gibson gives you an entire novel developing a great AI character then (in my estimation reasonably) has it ghost humanity immediately upon full realization.

pasquinelli 4y ago

i'm not holding my breath.

exitb 4y ago

What struck me here is that the idea of "five Franks and ten Amys" seems like a fundamentally wrong way to think about it. After all, if I do some work in an Excel sheet, I don't think of it, much less pay for it, as an equivalent of X accountants that could do the same job in the same amount of time without a computer. But then again, this is probably the best way to extract as much profit out of it.

dharma1 4y ago
Yeah sounded weird to me too, I don’t see why artificial intelligence would get deployed in human size units most of the time. The AWS bill won’t be for 5 Amys, and I don’t think people will “dial up” to order them
- capableweb 4y ago
  > I don’t see why artificial intelligence would get deployed in human size units Probably because it would be easier for humans (managers) to make sense of it. If you ask someone how many people would get this particular job done, they could probably guesstimate (and it'll be wrong), but if you ask them how many "AI Compute Units" they need, they'll have a much harder time. That'd be my guess at least.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    Why would managers need to guess? That seems like a perfect job for another AI: "Hey PM bot, I want to get these tasks done, how many Amy-hours and how many Frank-hours do you estimate it will take?" Also, why not a Manager-bot too? Shareholders can leave humans out of the loop entirely except as necessitated by legal paperwork. Come to think of it, shareholders can probably be replaced too.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      I mean, if we can actually get there, I'd love it, and I'm a programmer. I want to do write code that solves a problem that couldn't be solve in any other way, if it can solved by CodeGPT + ArchitectGPT + ScrumManagerGPT + MiddleManagerGPT without involving me in any way, I'm all for it.

TuringTest 4y ago

> People are going to have to up their game. Let's help them by making adult education more affordable. The good thing is that education will be provided to the mases by a cluster of Franks and Amys configured as teachers and tutors. /(sarcasm with a hint of dread)

falcor84 4y ago
My take on this is that if anyone can learn a particular skill entirely from an AI, then it's not a skill you'd be able to monetize. And I really have no idea what, if any, are skills that AIs wouldn't be able to tackle in a decade.
- falcor84 4y ago
  And here's a more disturbing thought I just had: management (or at least middle management) is probably going to be a relatively easy role for AIs to step into. So if there will be any roles that are difficult for AIs, it'll be the AI manager hiring five Franks and ten Amys from the human population to tackle these.
- pjc50 4y ago
  People can learn skills from books, which are entirely passive. The learning process ultimately resides within the student; issues of motivation, morale, direction, diligence, discipline, time, and mental health matter a lot more than just going through some material.
  - falcor84 4y ago
    No, but that's the thing I was implying (but haven't started clearly) - learning from books vs learning from an AI "teacher". Once the AI reaches a level in which it can "teach" then the game is almost over for that skill. To clarify, I'd define a major component of effective teaching to be the ability to break down an arbitrary typical problem in that domain into sub-problems and heuristics that are "simple" enough to manage for someone without that skill. If an AI can do that, it can most likely effectively perform the task itself (which cannot be said for a book).