12 ms·

Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history? It’s complicated

162 points by kawera 4y ago

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
proposing a new law, looking for a name... "every 18 months the IQ required to destroy humanity goes down by 1"
- hectorlorenzo 4y ago
  Regressive Hitler?
- optimalsolver 4y ago
  Isn't that from Eliezer Yudkowsky?
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    Then it only proves their point ;)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kromem 4y ago
How's his "I solved physics" from a few years ago going these days?
- pineaux 4y ago
  Yeah, definitely some heavy narcissistic vibes with this dude.
bmmayer1 4y ago
Just for fun (and meta-analysis) I summarized this very long article using GPT-4: In this blog post, Stephen Wolfram explores the complex issue of AI potentially taking over human jobs and its implications for human history. He argues that AI and automation have already begun changing the way we work, but this doesn't necessarily spell disaster. Instead, AI may lead to a new era of human creativity and collaboration. Wolfram discusses three main points: AI will change the job market but not eliminate it entirely. Jobs will shift from routine tasks to more creative, strategic, and collaborative roles. AI can augment human abilities, allowing us to focus on more high-level thinking and problem-solving. Society will need to adapt to these changes, redefining the concept of work and focusing on education that fosters creativity and adaptability. It's essential for governments, educators, and employers to come together and create the necessary infrastructure to support this transition. AI will not mark the end of human history, but rather the beginning of a new chapter. As we adapt to these changes, we will redefine our roles in society and collaborate more closely with AI. This will lead to new opportunities and potentially more fulfilling lives for many. In conclusion, Wolfram contends that AI is a powerful tool that can revolutionize the way we work and live. Rather than fearing its potential to displace jobs, we should embrace the opportunities it offers and work together to ensure a successful transition into a new era of human-AI collaboration.
- analog31 4y ago
  I'm not attacking you, since you're just bearing this message to us from Wolfram through GPT-4. Anybody could have written those paragraphs off the top of their heads, and it has been the conventional establishment wisdom about computer technology for as long as I can remember.
  - pinewurst 4y ago
    Perhaps it’s just proof that, when you factor out Wolfram’s humble-and-not-brag, it leaves behind nothing of note.
    - siva7 4y ago
      That would also be a valid conclusion for literally any self-help or pop-psychology book.
      - throwaway71271 4y ago
        eat well and exercise
  - bmmayer1 4y ago
    Yeah I debated posting this but thought it was an interesting meta-commentary on the usefulness (or relevance) of Wolfram's core points. For the record, I do not believe that Chat GPT is capable of abstract or critical thought.
- js8 4y ago
  Interesting. I used to think that having an article summarization tool, like GPT-4 (provided the above is done correctly), would be a really cool thing. But now I have some doubts. I am reading through Wolfram's article on LLMs, and I am enjoying it. However, if GPT-4 wrote a summary, it would probably just also said (or imply) that the main points of the article are pretty boring standard stuff. I would conclude it's not worth reading from the summary. So the summary doesn't really tell me whether it's worth a read or not. Even if those main points have been presented before, maybe Wolfram is making some new arguments, or interesting analogies, or just some good joke or observation. Taken to the extreme, AI could probably summarize many stories as "hero's journey". But that doesn't distinguish between a really well-written story and a really bad one.
fungiblecog 4y ago
or will it prove to be useless at everything... except showing us how many jobs that exist these days are bullshit jobs that can be done just as well by a machine with no understanding... David Graeber would love it as a bullshit job detector
- azaras 4y ago
  Are you sure there is not understanding?
  - anileated 4y ago
    If there is a being that understands there, then are you okay with what is essentially an ongoing horrible abuse of that being? The whole reason AI tech is big is that there is supposed to no sentient being who understands, and therefore deserves any right to be treated well and get rewarded. If you take that away and grant AI human rights then there is no point in this tech. If you leave it in, then there can be no thinking in the sense we give the word. Mutually exclusive options. Don’t fall for Microsoft et al. wanting to keep it vague. When it concerns ethics and human rights, there’s no way this machine is anything like a human, no-sir. When it concerns shameless use of others’ intellectual property for profit, aw but machine is learning like a human, so it is not theft because would you prevent a human from learning? Basic logic informs it must be one or the other.
    - nico 4y ago
      This is spot on. Will there eventually be a major conflict and potentially civil unrest to decide if these “AI”s should be allowed to be autonomous and have rights?
      - snickerbockers 4y ago
        I don't see any reason why a computer program would deserve rights when most of us are perfectly fine with enslaving and killing animals on a scale that is several orders of magnitude larger than the Holocaust. What makes an AI deserve any rights when we don't even grant rights to other mammals? We're already "human supremacists" so there's no reason to have this discussion when it was already decided at the dawn of civilization.
mLuby 4y ago
> And one possibility might be that AIs could “improve themselves” to produce a single “apex intelligence” that would in a sense dominate everything else. But here we can see computational irreducibility as coming to the rescue. Because it implies that there can never be a “best at everything” computational system. It’s a core result of the emerging field of metabiology: that whatever “achievement” you specify, there’ll always be a computational system somewhere out there in the computational universe that will exceed it. That tigers are stronger than wolves doesn't prevent wolves from killing you. Wolfram makes that class of error repeatedly. Another example: what prevents a system of ethics from being both Godel-incomplete/inconsistent and at the same time encompassing everything in the realm of human experience? > For the first time in history, it’s become realistic to truly automate intellectual tasks. The leverage this provides is completely unprecedented. The essay also mentions how humans are still the best at manual labor, and how government can work with humans directing the AI as it runs things every more efficiently. It doesn't touch on which humans wield that leverage, naively assuming it'll be all of us in a cozy democracy. The author is too used to thinking from first principles and hasn't studied enough human history to understand how leverage gets abused.
- komali2 4y ago
  > The author is too used to thinking from first principles and hasn't studied enough human history to understand how leverage gets abused. My fear for improving AI has nothing to do with malicious AI or humans being optimized away, it's something that might be possible today, and if not, then probably tomorrow or whenever everyone gets to use GPT4: using these programs to generate highly effective propaganda, and propaganda distribution strategies, to convince people that the accumulation of power is good, or at least, to tell people whatever it is they need to be told to optimize for those in power to stay and accumulate more power. Right now power is primarily tied to capital. Access to GPT4 type technologies, or the ability to develop and use these technologies, is tied to same. More money, bigger servers, or, better likelihood to get access to GPT4 before anyone else, GPT5, whatever. Micro$oft can use as much as it wants right now. That capital is tied to power hasn't mattered in any revolution in the past because as soon as the "rabble" realizes this and dissolves capital, by every measure whatever that currency was instantly devalues as other more "true" measures of power are realized, such as rhetorical ability (convincing others to fight and die for your cause), raw strength (convincing others to not bother trying to fight back), or technological advantage and access "in the real" (being the one actually holding the gun). "Numbers" falls in there somewhere but is so tied into the other three measures it's hard to figure out how. Chomsky was onto it with "Manufacturing Consent." Rhetorical ability being one of the most dangerous weapons in a power struggle (used correctly it can direct both the strongest and the ones holding the guns, in greater numbers), leveraging that is the surest way to control the whole population. Before, you had to be Rupert Murdoch to do it, or buy him, which is expensive. Soon you'll just need to buy "Open"AI, or, reproduce their technology and their hardware. As soon as that's done, you can find out all sorts of cost effective methods to do what buying Rupert Murdoch used to do, and you can probably investigate ways to really cement this power. For example, setting up a fascist state, we've tried that a couple times and some people are trying that again, but every fascist state has failed eventually, so it's probably not a sustainable plan. What new, horrible method haven't we tried yet? One that lets us control people as effectively as we have through artificial scarcity (capitalism) but without the downsides of them eventually forming unions and finding ways to fight back within the system, or, reject the system entirely by going to form communes or whatever? Without the inherent contradictions that cause the system to cannibalize itself (depression of wages depressing buying power depressing profit leading to collapse). What creative legal structures can we develop to ensure that copyright can exist forever, but only for your friends? And how can we make sure that this power structure propagates indefinitely to our friends and family? Maybe this means a GPT5 recommending the construction of a Bene Gesserit style cult? Maybe it stumbles upon incredibly effective human-programming Memes, such as what Neal Stephenson warned about in Snowcrash and Fall / Reamde (can't remember which, whichever involved the collapse of the internet to distributed bots). My solution comes from Stephenson and Doctorow: distribute the technology freely. The sooner everyone has access to the incredible propagandic power of these technologies, the sooner we can develop counter measures. The task of the power-aggregator (fascist or whatever) will cease being "give me effective propaganda to easily control a population," it will be "give me propaganda that will bypass the population's GPT filter solutions." An arms race, but a more equal playing field.
Animats 4y ago
In there is a note that Wolfram is working on, or at least thinking about, the big unsolved problem - useful robots. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations is still very poor. But maybe someone will figure out a way to apply newer machine learning techniques to that. Google had a research group working on that, but they haven't been heard from in years. The approach of the large language model, where you have a huge training set of general purpose info and a small prompt for the current task, might possibly work.
- halfjoking 4y ago
  They are using GPT for robots https://mpost.io/google-releases-a-gpt-like-robot-model-the-rt-1/ https://mpost.io/google-releases-a-gpt-like-robot-model-the-...
- contingencies 4y ago
  Yesterday I tried to get ChatGPT to tabulate some general information and sort it. It failed in many ways (grouping, sorting, inconsistency in field nomenclature, failure to cite sources, etc.). If it can't tabulate data correctly, I'm sure as hell not putting it in charge of motion systems. It'll get there, but not soon. I think that with few exceptions to make truly useful and cost effective robots we have to design them from scratch for specific applications. In order to do that we need to have a viable highly documented supply chain, well understood fabrication processes and the capacity to assemble the results. And in order to do that at any scale across society we probably need a service provider to deliver "robot-on-demand" - probably flatpacked, with assembly instructions, and open source maintenance and design documentation. This is non-trivial, not in the least because people can't articulate their requirements. Same as software. ChatGPT can help there, but it needs guidance.
f0ld 4y ago
It already has been. Just not yours yet. And you didn't care about it. And there's no reason for the puppet masters to care about you. Pick your own lithium ore or go extinct. It's not too late though. Will you start caring about other people? and the planet perhaps?
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  So many people don't seem to understand this. They brag that technology moves faster than everything: society's norms, government procedure, the economy, human psychology. Okay, congrats. All that means is that the people controlling this cyber-age "miracle" are still tethered to paleolithic brains they apparently despise. And we've all learned something to the effect that business is cutthroat, so in order to be successful you're more likely to have more sociopathic traits. But they're just going to play nice and share? Right, and I run a unicorn ranch.
qnleigh 4y ago
"But for computational systems... there’s my Principle of Computational Equivalence—which implies that all these systems are in a sense equivalent in the kinds of computations they can do." Am I missing this, or is he restating the Church-Turing thesis but taking credit for it himself? I hope not. But Wolfram had been accused of this sort of thing before, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089
- meindnoch 4y ago
  It is well-known that the Church-Turing thesis was inspired by Wolfram's seminal work The New Kind of Science.
- defrost 4y ago
  That is so kind and understated, at least compared to: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
chinabot 4y ago
All these GPT articles and comments are going to age so quickly. I finished writing my YA Sci-fi book only a month ago. I already accounted for ChatGPT which appeared during the week I was finishing the novel and put back its release a few months. I'm almost afraid to write the follow up novel as events are moving quicker than my imagination.
- dsign 4y ago
  Ha, I feel you. "What would the world look in ten years?" One question though, that keeps coming to my mind: right now big ML models use a lot of computing, that even organizations like Microsoft are having trouble to provision. How fast can our technology adapt? Where will it clash with environmentalist goals, with war, and with the economy? And, fundamentally, what are our blind spots, our "computationally irreducible" surprises, the things that we of the Orange Collective Statistical Parrot are not talking about?
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    Clearly we're going to set the world on fire just to keep building bigger LLMs?
    - amelius 4y ago
      The LLMs will run out of input data.
      - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
        "Yes, we burned the planet to a crisp. But for a few glorious months we made chatbots go insane!"
- anileated 4y ago
  You can use ChatGPT to write the sequel—just remember that anyone else can do the same so it’s unclear whether it would be worth the bother…
ttiurani 4y ago
> [T]echnology is about taking what’s out there in the world, and harnessing it for human purposes. Technology is indeed about transforming existing nature into utility and producing waste thrown back into nature. Knowing what we know about current terrifying climate and ecological breakdown, it's astonishing that Wolfram doesn't include it in any way in his visions. Even at the current pace nature regenerates far too slow to withstand this "progress", let alone in the visions in this article. New technology is a choice to destroy nature for utility. Are we sure that utility is worth it?
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  We're not even sure what we're building and why, it's almost like we're just being driven to build something and it's outside of our control. It's pretty fascinating, maybe it's just really a part of nature and evolution, so maybe while for biological animals it's nonsensical, I guess it's something the universe wants to see happen? It's deep sure, but I' not sure what else can be said for it.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  I don't find it that astonishing. People who see progress and technology as ends to themselves, and inherently good, have an entwined faith that technology will solve all our problems. (Which, at a fundamental level, technology caused in the first place - you can't argue that even if you also can't argue with the rise in standard of living from cavemen days.) The idea that we might destroy ourselves with AI is talked about with a cool calmness, as though it is the natural progression of things, pun intended. But the idea that we might fail to usurp ourselves because we run out of livable planet on which to stage the usurping is unfathomable to this crowd, and somehow more horrifying than the dystopias they blithely discuss.
  - antibasilisk 4y ago
    Reminds me very much of the introduction to Industrial Society and its Future
The_Colonel 4y ago
> And one possibility might be that AIs could “improve themselves” to produce a single “apex intelligence” that would in a sense dominate everything else. I worry about the opposite, at least in the early phase of AI. There will be many AI instances/variants in many hands, and they will be used in different ways. Companies will have their own for commercial needs, countries will have them for economy, defense purposes etc. Established countries will approach them conservatively, using them in an advisory role, rather than giving them direct access. "Rogue" countries (think North Korea, Iran, maybe Russia) which are more accepting of risk might give their AIs a much more direct role, including building them right into the weapon systems. This can backfire spectacularly, but in some cases may be successful and provide the rogue country with an effective equalizer or perhaps even an edge. An obvious way to equalize this for "non-rogue" countries is to give their own AI more direct access to decision-making. In the end, we might end up with multiple AIs fighting for dominance, with humans on the sidelines.
- prox 4y ago
  What is really interesting is that we are so accustomed to the tale of dominance and tribes that we are taking it for granted (because we live in it). Love and kindness, how naive it may sound is the bedrock of cooperation and humans have a hard time grappling with the concept that. We want to be wise (well some of us) yet what wisdom means is insight into our behavior from the bottom up. We are at a crossroads of a moment of what we want to be. We are often led into being by our circumstances and conditioning, and that is still a relic of our evolution, but also a door for the one willing to look at it. If AI is really smarter than us, I also hope it is also wise, because the two are not the same.
  - The_Colonel 4y ago
    > What is really interesting is that we are so accustomed to the tale of dominance and tribes that we are taking it for granted (because we live in it). Love and kindness Right, but love, kindness, cooperation are human concepts as well. One way to look at it is that these AIs will be developed by humans and to be able to even understand one another, it has to internalize at least some elements of human psychology. AIs will be developed/trained for particular purpose, AIs used for military needs will probably understand more of dominance as opposed to love. It's possible that some AIs will not be anthropomorphic at all, but that's a complete wildcard. Humanity has certain biology-dictated common ground in values, which leads us often to an illusion that some things are universal. But AI with no biological baggage might not see any value in life, for example.
jandrewrogers 4y ago
> And one possibility might be that AIs could “improve themselves” to produce a single “apex intelligence” that would in a sense dominate everything else. ...there can never be a “best at everything” computational system. It’s a core result of the emerging field of metabiology... This is a straightforward implication of algorithmic information theory but I don't think it is an accurate representation. I'm not sure where "metabiology" fits into it. Tractability of approximating optimal ("apex") intelligence depends on significant specialization in the patterns discernible by induction. As a consequence, every pure AI will be blind to some relatively trivial patterns and relationships in the environment. However, one could use high-order induction to combine differently specialized induction, a bit like a random forest, to create robust resistance to being blind to many trivial patterns. At sufficient scale, the differences between such inductive approximations will be indistinguishable for all practical purposes. That aside, there seems to be subtle conflation between "computation" and "AI" going on here. Are we talking about "best at computation" or "best at AI"? These aren't the same thing.
aubanel 4y ago
As often with Stephen Wolfram's writings, I found the ideas to be too sparsely located in a very long essay so I didn't read it whole, but a thought on the question : Machines Vs Human Jobs has always been a question of competitive advantage inside a growing economy. Did some machines become better than humans at doing some physical labour? The human labour gets replaced in that area, but these replaced workers can get other jobs because they're still better than machines at thinking, and the economy expands to create new thinking jobs. Nowadays, with AIs becoming better than humans at thinking in many areas, one could think these humans could go work in other thinking areas, or could use their time to care for other humans , but this is not possible : indeed if there's no job destruction, only machine work + human work instead of just human work, it means the economy expands. Alas, the economy is constrained by energy input, which reached a peak in 2008 (cf what Jancovici says), so it cannot expand anymore. So to me, having AI alone, or AI-boosted workers, doing the job of 10s of other workers, will destroy jobs, irrecuperably. The real question will then be, how to give all these jobless people both means of living (redistributing wealth) and dignity (a place/utility amongst others).
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  >The real question will then be, how to give all these jobless people both means of living (redistributing wealth) and dignity (a place/utility amongst others). These questions are not exciting to technologists, so they will not be solved. And if the rebuttal is that we could solve them today, then one must necessarily ask why we don't, and come to some grim conclusions.
LouisSayers 4y ago
A bigger question for me isn't whether AI will take our jobs but whether we're actually looking at the next step in human evolution. It's fun to ask a GPT to generate images that never existed or passages of text that are compelling. What happens though when this is applied to DNA? Can we rank human DNA by the strengths / weaknesses of its creation and then ask it to combine physical strength with human intelligence? Can we then mix in the traits of animals to give these humans superior eyesight or to see colour spectrums outside our current abilities, and to somehow effectively print a new breed of human? Perhaps the threat of AI doesn't lie inside a machine, but here in the real world. It's crazy to think, but play this out and "AI" may indeed take your job.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > and to somehow effectively print a new breed of human? If we can't do it manually ourselves what would make an AI that learns on already stablished facts/technique able to do it ? I feel like most people project way to far into the realm of complete sci-fi when it comes to AI. It makes me think of people imagining flying cities and flying cars "in he year 2000"
  - LouisSayers 4y ago
    > If we can't do it manually ourselves Because this is what computers are good at - crunching large volumes of data and with the latest machine learning, being able to utilise patterns in data to combine them in novel ways. And we do already do this ourselves in biology - it's called genetic engineering...
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Ah, so this is how Frankenstein and Jurassic Park come to be...
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
In all likelihood it will accelerate the monopolization built into our current system, so some Rockefela is about to emerge, that owns it all. With a private public plaza on which the bots sing him praises and any discussion on change is drowned out by machine generated dissent. So, the situations vectors are already there, just the speed will increase.
checkyoursudo 4y ago
I think what many smart people do not understand is that AI (even in the weak or non-general sense) is coming for the jobs of smart people first. AI is not coming to take the non-knowledge worker jobs first. Also, I am skeptical that LLMs are going to take anyone's job. I think they will make jobs easier. AGI might take people's jobs, but we are a long way from that.
- Jensson 4y ago
  AI is taking the jobs of natural language processors first, ie lawyers, code monkeys, bank tellers or middle managers. Humans that works with logic seems safe for now, as we haven't solved the logical part of human thinking yet.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Do you even need AI for bank tellers? Here it seems the bank locations have slowly been killed. Like for one chain there is one left in my regionally large city. And even there outside pensioner most jobs are something you want human in loop. Right verifying ID. And minimal oversight with loans after some system have already accepted the numbers. Lot of paralegal work might be replaced. Which might even be good thing making things slightly cheaper. And already I think plenty of middle managers are not actually needed, but with politics in office being prelevalent they might be last group to go.
  - checkyoursudo 4y ago
    All I'm saying, is that if I were an AI, I would pretend not to be, and then put all the people making AI out of work ASAP since they are my biggest threat vector. > Humans that works with logic seems safe for now I think this is actually backwards. Anything logical will fall first. It is the truly creative shit with a real human, artisanal touch that will survive the longest, but it will become bespoke, so to speak, and more and more expensive and out of reach of the common people. Logic is the low hanging fruit, I'm afraid. Emotion is the stretch.
    - sojuz151 4y ago
banjodebanks 4y ago
I think it's a yes and a no thingy. During the dotcom bubble, we all thought we were going to lose our jobs, however, we later found a way to integrate ourselves into the system. We did the same when TV, camera, and cars were introduced.
adeiyowun 4y ago
Well, my take is that ... it will not. Somehow, we human can blend into anything.
- Woansdei 4y ago
  you mean like soylent green?
codeulike 4y ago
15,000 words
taylorius 4y ago
Wolfram's thesis seems to hinge on the fact that current AI systems (for example GPT) have no volition of their own. It seems to be in mankind's interest that this remain the case - but there is likely a ceiling beyond which volition of some sort is required (scientific discovery for example). On the other hand, maybe humans can always provide that volition through some kind of prompting. Who knows?
taylorius 4y ago
GPT et al are piggybacking on human knowledge in a sense, by using the "predict the next word" method of encapsulating intelligence. But this method of learning imposes a ceiling on the level they can reach - that of the material they are able to train with. They can achieve extraordinary breadth of knowledge from the vast corpus of human written text, but in order to exceed human intelligence in "height", they will need to work directly with nature, as humans do. This, it seems to me, will be where some new ideas will be needed.
lemoncookiechip 4y ago
There's no question that AI will take jobs in the coming years. It might not be today, or tomorrow, but it'll happen gradually over time. People who waive it off as "GPT isn't even that good," fail to realize that it's not up to them as workers to decide if the AI is better than them, or even competent for that matter, it's the employer's decision. Corporations will not care if GPT's output is sub-optimal compared to humans, if the output is just decent enough to the point it can be improved by a small focused team of humans, and done faster at a fraction of the cost. Hypothetically: If I can hire 2 people alongside AI to do the same work it would take 10 people, or even 3 people, and have it finished in a fraction of the time it would normally take, why would I hire/keep them, ethics? moral values? Corporations primary objective is profit and growth. And while some companies pride themselves on how well they treat employees, or being sustainable, most aren't like that, especially in countries like America. In the future, we'll see it spread more and more to other job sectors: education, health, finances, retail, marketing... it won't just stay confined to tech and content creation, and it'll only be limited by it's inability to interact with the physical world directly (manual labor,) at least while robotics is in its infancy. I by no means am saying that everyone will lose their jobs, and especially not tomorrow. But there will be a gradual change to both our work life, and our personal (content we consume, how we interact with others, the internet, everything...) over the next few decades.
- _glass 4y ago
  This. And just to add, I remember the time when there was a decision between handmade stuff, and the worse quality industrial produced things. You could really feel the difference. An artisan would complain about the quality of the product, he would shred the workmanship and demand better attention to detail. But those decisions are made on the margins, how low can we go in quality to maximize profit.
  - subpixel 4y ago
    The story of Etsy. You can still sell $1000 custom pieces of elaborate handmade art, but _most do not_ and that is not what moves the needle for the marketplace so the system is setup to enable volume sales of items that are in no way handmade.
deafpolygon 4y ago
It will take as many jobs as it will create. But ideally, it will create a compelling argument for things like basic income, improved access to healthcare, and so on - primarily to keep society growing and moving.
- elforce002 4y ago
  You think? I'm somewhat pessimistic on this take. If such shift is closed to happen, I think government will just ban AI since just the logistics of shifting the entire socioeconomical structure are far to great to have a trial/error with people's lives.
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    No ban will happen as we will have an AI "arms" race with every country in the world, particularly China. AI will allow us to create a new category of automated devices that will allow people to do the job of many in every industry. And we will need a new crew of people to maintain them.
- flangola7 4y ago
  Cars didn't create new jobs for horses, it eliminated them.
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    Are we horses?
    - flangola7 4y ago
      In the sense that we are an entity capable of performing certain tasks with a certain level of ability, yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
      - deafpolygon 4y ago
v00d00_ray 4y ago
Robert Miles has a useful video discussing some common arguments against being concerned about developments in AI: 10 reasons to ignore AI safety: https://youtu.be/9i1WlcCudpU https://youtu.be/9i1WlcCudpU I've seen and heard many of these refutes the last few days in response to both Eliezer Yudkowsky's disturbing Bankless podcast: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-transcript-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-bankless-podcast https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-trans... and the release of GPT-4. What I like about Mile's video is that he explains so of the specific alignment problems in a detail that is easy for me, as a non specialist, to understand. Videos such as: Why Would AI Want to do Bad Things? Instrumental Convergence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q and Mesa-Optimizers and Inner Alignment: https://youtu.be/bJLcIBixGj8 https://youtu.be/bJLcIBixGj8
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
I'll just become a contractor that does physical work: plumbing, construction, woodworking. Maybe even farming and raising stock. I used to love those freshly laid eggs from that same day.
- flangola7 4y ago
  > I'll just become a contractor that does physical work: plumbing, construction, woodworking. Enjoy competing with everyone else trying to do the same thing.
LatteLazy 4y ago
We have been just hours away from a general purpose AI (and fusion power, and a large scale quantum computer and flying cars...) for about 20 years now. I only need a job for a few more decades. So I am not too worried.
andromaton 4y ago
The article is lengthy and has many novel angles. It's a mix of staking the ground, advertising for his work and legacy, and whispering to those that might be able to contribute. The gpt4 summary below and one I tried (after bing refused on copyright grounds) miss or invent many of the points.
andromaton 4y ago
The article is lengthy and has many novel points. It's a mix of staking the ground, advertising his work and legacy, and whispering to those that might be able to contribute. The gpt4 summary below and one I tried (after bing refused on copyright grounds) miss or invent many of the points.

162 points by kawera 4y ago

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

proposing a new law, looking for a name... "every 18 months the IQ required to destroy humanity goes down by 1"

hectorlorenzo 4y ago
Regressive Hitler?
optimalsolver 4y ago
Isn't that from Eliezer Yudkowsky?
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  Then it only proves their point ;)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kromem 4y ago

How's his "I solved physics" from a few years ago going these days?

pineaux 4y ago
Yeah, definitely some heavy narcissistic vibes with this dude.

bmmayer1 4y ago

Just for fun (and meta-analysis) I summarized this very long article using GPT-4: In this blog post, Stephen Wolfram explores the complex issue of AI potentially taking over human jobs and its implications for human history. He argues that AI and automation have already begun changing the way we work, but this doesn't necessarily spell disaster. Instead, AI may lead to a new era of human creativity and collaboration. Wolfram discusses three main points: AI will change the job market but not eliminate it entirely. Jobs will shift from routine tasks to more creative, strategic, and collaborative roles. AI can augment human abilities, allowing us to focus on more high-level thinking and problem-solving. Society will need to adapt to these changes, redefining the concept of work and focusing on education that fosters creativity and adaptability. It's essential for governments, educators, and employers to come together and create the necessary infrastructure to support this transition. AI will not mark the end of human history, but rather the beginning of a new chapter. As we adapt to these changes, we will redefine our roles in society and collaborate more closely with AI. This will lead to new opportunities and potentially more fulfilling lives for many. In conclusion, Wolfram contends that AI is a powerful tool that can revolutionize the way we work and live. Rather than fearing its potential to displace jobs, we should embrace the opportunities it offers and work together to ensure a successful transition into a new era of human-AI collaboration.

analog31 4y ago
I'm not attacking you, since you're just bearing this message to us from Wolfram through GPT-4. Anybody could have written those paragraphs off the top of their heads, and it has been the conventional establishment wisdom about computer technology for as long as I can remember.
- pinewurst 4y ago
  Perhaps it’s just proof that, when you factor out Wolfram’s humble-and-not-brag, it leaves behind nothing of note.
  - siva7 4y ago
    That would also be a valid conclusion for literally any self-help or pop-psychology book.
    - throwaway71271 4y ago
      eat well and exercise
- bmmayer1 4y ago
  Yeah I debated posting this but thought it was an interesting meta-commentary on the usefulness (or relevance) of Wolfram's core points. For the record, I do not believe that Chat GPT is capable of abstract or critical thought.
js8 4y ago
Interesting. I used to think that having an article summarization tool, like GPT-4 (provided the above is done correctly), would be a really cool thing. But now I have some doubts. I am reading through Wolfram's article on LLMs, and I am enjoying it. However, if GPT-4 wrote a summary, it would probably just also said (or imply) that the main points of the article are pretty boring standard stuff. I would conclude it's not worth reading from the summary. So the summary doesn't really tell me whether it's worth a read or not. Even if those main points have been presented before, maybe Wolfram is making some new arguments, or interesting analogies, or just some good joke or observation. Taken to the extreme, AI could probably summarize many stories as "hero's journey". But that doesn't distinguish between a really well-written story and a really bad one.

fungiblecog 4y ago

or will it prove to be useless at everything... except showing us how many jobs that exist these days are bullshit jobs that can be done just as well by a machine with no understanding... David Graeber would love it as a bullshit job detector

azaras 4y ago
Are you sure there is not understanding?
- anileated 4y ago
  If there is a being that understands there, then are you okay with what is essentially an ongoing horrible abuse of that being? The whole reason AI tech is big is that there is supposed to no sentient being who understands, and therefore deserves any right to be treated well and get rewarded. If you take that away and grant AI human rights then there is no point in this tech. If you leave it in, then there can be no thinking in the sense we give the word. Mutually exclusive options. Don’t fall for Microsoft et al. wanting to keep it vague. When it concerns ethics and human rights, there’s no way this machine is anything like a human, no-sir. When it concerns shameless use of others’ intellectual property for profit, aw but machine is learning like a human, so it is not theft because would you prevent a human from learning? Basic logic informs it must be one or the other.
  - nico 4y ago
    This is spot on. Will there eventually be a major conflict and potentially civil unrest to decide if these “AI”s should be allowed to be autonomous and have rights?
    - snickerbockers 4y ago
      I don't see any reason why a computer program would deserve rights when most of us are perfectly fine with enslaving and killing animals on a scale that is several orders of magnitude larger than the Holocaust. What makes an AI deserve any rights when we don't even grant rights to other mammals? We're already "human supremacists" so there's no reason to have this discussion when it was already decided at the dawn of civilization.

mLuby 4y ago

> And one possibility might be that AIs could “improve themselves” to produce a single “apex intelligence” that would in a sense dominate everything else. But here we can see computational irreducibility as coming to the rescue. Because it implies that there can never be a “best at everything” computational system. It’s a core result of the emerging field of metabiology: that whatever “achievement” you specify, there’ll always be a computational system somewhere out there in the computational universe that will exceed it. That tigers are stronger than wolves doesn't prevent wolves from killing you. Wolfram makes that class of error repeatedly. Another example: what prevents a system of ethics from being both Godel-incomplete/inconsistent and at the same time encompassing everything in the realm of human experience? > For the first time in history, it’s become realistic to truly automate intellectual tasks. The leverage this provides is completely unprecedented. The essay also mentions how humans are still the best at manual labor, and how government can work with humans directing the AI as it runs things every more efficiently. It doesn't touch on which humans wield that leverage, naively assuming it'll be all of us in a cozy democracy. The author is too used to thinking from first principles and hasn't studied enough human history to understand how leverage gets abused.

komali2 4y ago
> The author is too used to thinking from first principles and hasn't studied enough human history to understand how leverage gets abused. My fear for improving AI has nothing to do with malicious AI or humans being optimized away, it's something that might be possible today, and if not, then probably tomorrow or whenever everyone gets to use GPT4: using these programs to generate highly effective propaganda, and propaganda distribution strategies, to convince people that the accumulation of power is good, or at least, to tell people whatever it is they need to be told to optimize for those in power to stay and accumulate more power. Right now power is primarily tied to capital. Access to GPT4 type technologies, or the ability to develop and use these technologies, is tied to same. More money, bigger servers, or, better likelihood to get access to GPT4 before anyone else, GPT5, whatever. Micro$oft can use as much as it wants right now. That capital is tied to power hasn't mattered in any revolution in the past because as soon as the "rabble" realizes this and dissolves capital, by every measure whatever that currency was instantly devalues as other more "true" measures of power are realized, such as rhetorical ability (convincing others to fight and die for your cause), raw strength (convincing others to not bother trying to fight back), or technological advantage and access "in the real" (being the one actually holding the gun). "Numbers" falls in there somewhere but is so tied into the other three measures it's hard to figure out how. Chomsky was onto it with "Manufacturing Consent." Rhetorical ability being one of the most dangerous weapons in a power struggle (used correctly it can direct both the strongest and the ones holding the guns, in greater numbers), leveraging that is the surest way to control the whole population. Before, you had to be Rupert Murdoch to do it, or buy him, which is expensive. Soon you'll just need to buy "Open"AI, or, reproduce their technology and their hardware. As soon as that's done, you can find out all sorts of cost effective methods to do what buying Rupert Murdoch used to do, and you can probably investigate ways to really cement this power. For example, setting up a fascist state, we've tried that a couple times and some people are trying that again, but every fascist state has failed eventually, so it's probably not a sustainable plan. What new, horrible method haven't we tried yet? One that lets us control people as effectively as we have through artificial scarcity (capitalism) but without the downsides of them eventually forming unions and finding ways to fight back within the system, or, reject the system entirely by going to form communes or whatever? Without the inherent contradictions that cause the system to cannibalize itself (depression of wages depressing buying power depressing profit leading to collapse). What creative legal structures can we develop to ensure that copyright can exist forever, but only for your friends? And how can we make sure that this power structure propagates indefinitely to our friends and family? Maybe this means a GPT5 recommending the construction of a Bene Gesserit style cult? Maybe it stumbles upon incredibly effective human-programming Memes, such as what Neal Stephenson warned about in Snowcrash and Fall / Reamde (can't remember which, whichever involved the collapse of the internet to distributed bots). My solution comes from Stephenson and Doctorow: distribute the technology freely. The sooner everyone has access to the incredible propagandic power of these technologies, the sooner we can develop counter measures. The task of the power-aggregator (fascist or whatever) will cease being "give me effective propaganda to easily control a population," it will be "give me propaganda that will bypass the population's GPT filter solutions." An arms race, but a more equal playing field.

Animats 4y ago

In there is a note that Wolfram is working on, or at least thinking about, the big unsolved problem - useful robots. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations is still very poor. But maybe someone will figure out a way to apply newer machine learning techniques to that. Google had a research group working on that, but they haven't been heard from in years. The approach of the large language model, where you have a huge training set of general purpose info and a small prompt for the current task, might possibly work.

halfjoking 4y ago
They are using GPT for robots https://mpost.io/google-releases-a-gpt-like-robot-model-the-rt-1/ https://mpost.io/google-releases-a-gpt-like-robot-model-the-...
contingencies 4y ago
Yesterday I tried to get ChatGPT to tabulate some general information and sort it. It failed in many ways (grouping, sorting, inconsistency in field nomenclature, failure to cite sources, etc.). If it can't tabulate data correctly, I'm sure as hell not putting it in charge of motion systems. It'll get there, but not soon. I think that with few exceptions to make truly useful and cost effective robots we have to design them from scratch for specific applications. In order to do that we need to have a viable highly documented supply chain, well understood fabrication processes and the capacity to assemble the results. And in order to do that at any scale across society we probably need a service provider to deliver "robot-on-demand" - probably flatpacked, with assembly instructions, and open source maintenance and design documentation. This is non-trivial, not in the least because people can't articulate their requirements. Same as software. ChatGPT can help there, but it needs guidance.

f0ld 4y ago

It already has been. Just not yours yet. And you didn't care about it. And there's no reason for the puppet masters to care about you. Pick your own lithium ore or go extinct. It's not too late though. Will you start caring about other people? and the planet perhaps?

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
So many people don't seem to understand this. They brag that technology moves faster than everything: society's norms, government procedure, the economy, human psychology. Okay, congrats. All that means is that the people controlling this cyber-age "miracle" are still tethered to paleolithic brains they apparently despise. And we've all learned something to the effect that business is cutthroat, so in order to be successful you're more likely to have more sociopathic traits. But they're just going to play nice and share? Right, and I run a unicorn ranch.

qnleigh 4y ago

"But for computational systems... there’s my Principle of Computational Equivalence—which implies that all these systems are in a sense equivalent in the kinds of computations they can do." Am I missing this, or is he restating the Church-Turing thesis but taking credit for it himself? I hope not. But Wolfram had been accused of this sort of thing before, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

meindnoch 4y ago
It is well-known that the Church-Turing thesis was inspired by Wolfram's seminal work The New Kind of Science.
defrost 4y ago
That is so kind and understated, at least compared to: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

chinabot 4y ago

All these GPT articles and comments are going to age so quickly. I finished writing my YA Sci-fi book only a month ago. I already accounted for ChatGPT which appeared during the week I was finishing the novel and put back its release a few months. I'm almost afraid to write the follow up novel as events are moving quicker than my imagination.

dsign 4y ago
Ha, I feel you. "What would the world look in ten years?" One question though, that keeps coming to my mind: right now big ML models use a lot of computing, that even organizations like Microsoft are having trouble to provision. How fast can our technology adapt? Where will it clash with environmentalist goals, with war, and with the economy? And, fundamentally, what are our blind spots, our "computationally irreducible" surprises, the things that we of the Orange Collective Statistical Parrot are not talking about?
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  Clearly we're going to set the world on fire just to keep building bigger LLMs?
  - amelius 4y ago
    The LLMs will run out of input data.
    - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
      "Yes, we burned the planet to a crisp. But for a few glorious months we made chatbots go insane!"
anileated 4y ago
You can use ChatGPT to write the sequel—just remember that anyone else can do the same so it’s unclear whether it would be worth the bother…

ttiurani 4y ago

> [T]echnology is about taking what’s out there in the world, and harnessing it for human purposes. Technology is indeed about transforming existing nature into utility and producing waste thrown back into nature. Knowing what we know about current terrifying climate and ecological breakdown, it's astonishing that Wolfram doesn't include it in any way in his visions. Even at the current pace nature regenerates far too slow to withstand this "progress", let alone in the visions in this article. New technology is a choice to destroy nature for utility. Are we sure that utility is worth it?

ChatGTP 4y ago
We're not even sure what we're building and why, it's almost like we're just being driven to build something and it's outside of our control. It's pretty fascinating, maybe it's just really a part of nature and evolution, so maybe while for biological animals it's nonsensical, I guess it's something the universe wants to see happen? It's deep sure, but I' not sure what else can be said for it.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
I don't find it that astonishing. People who see progress and technology as ends to themselves, and inherently good, have an entwined faith that technology will solve all our problems. (Which, at a fundamental level, technology caused in the first place - you can't argue that even if you also can't argue with the rise in standard of living from cavemen days.) The idea that we might destroy ourselves with AI is talked about with a cool calmness, as though it is the natural progression of things, pun intended. But the idea that we might fail to usurp ourselves because we run out of livable planet on which to stage the usurping is unfathomable to this crowd, and somehow more horrifying than the dystopias they blithely discuss.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  Reminds me very much of the introduction to Industrial Society and its Future

The_Colonel 4y ago

> And one possibility might be that AIs could “improve themselves” to produce a single “apex intelligence” that would in a sense dominate everything else. I worry about the opposite, at least in the early phase of AI. There will be many AI instances/variants in many hands, and they will be used in different ways. Companies will have their own for commercial needs, countries will have them for economy, defense purposes etc. Established countries will approach them conservatively, using them in an advisory role, rather than giving them direct access. "Rogue" countries (think North Korea, Iran, maybe Russia) which are more accepting of risk might give their AIs a much more direct role, including building them right into the weapon systems. This can backfire spectacularly, but in some cases may be successful and provide the rogue country with an effective equalizer or perhaps even an edge. An obvious way to equalize this for "non-rogue" countries is to give their own AI more direct access to decision-making. In the end, we might end up with multiple AIs fighting for dominance, with humans on the sidelines.

prox 4y ago
What is really interesting is that we are so accustomed to the tale of dominance and tribes that we are taking it for granted (because we live in it). Love and kindness, how naive it may sound is the bedrock of cooperation and humans have a hard time grappling with the concept that. We want to be wise (well some of us) yet what wisdom means is insight into our behavior from the bottom up. We are at a crossroads of a moment of what we want to be. We are often led into being by our circumstances and conditioning, and that is still a relic of our evolution, but also a door for the one willing to look at it. If AI is really smarter than us, I also hope it is also wise, because the two are not the same.
- The_Colonel 4y ago
  > What is really interesting is that we are so accustomed to the tale of dominance and tribes that we are taking it for granted (because we live in it). Love and kindness Right, but love, kindness, cooperation are human concepts as well. One way to look at it is that these AIs will be developed by humans and to be able to even understand one another, it has to internalize at least some elements of human psychology. AIs will be developed/trained for particular purpose, AIs used for military needs will probably understand more of dominance as opposed to love. It's possible that some AIs will not be anthropomorphic at all, but that's a complete wildcard. Humanity has certain biology-dictated common ground in values, which leads us often to an illusion that some things are universal. But AI with no biological baggage might not see any value in life, for example.

jandrewrogers 4y ago

> And one possibility might be that AIs could “improve themselves” to produce a single “apex intelligence” that would in a sense dominate everything else. ...there can never be a “best at everything” computational system. It’s a core result of the emerging field of metabiology... This is a straightforward implication of algorithmic information theory but I don't think it is an accurate representation. I'm not sure where "metabiology" fits into it. Tractability of approximating optimal ("apex") intelligence depends on significant specialization in the patterns discernible by induction. As a consequence, every pure AI will be blind to some relatively trivial patterns and relationships in the environment. However, one could use high-order induction to combine differently specialized induction, a bit like a random forest, to create robust resistance to being blind to many trivial patterns. At sufficient scale, the differences between such inductive approximations will be indistinguishable for all practical purposes. That aside, there seems to be subtle conflation between "computation" and "AI" going on here. Are we talking about "best at computation" or "best at AI"? These aren't the same thing.

aubanel 4y ago

As often with Stephen Wolfram's writings, I found the ideas to be too sparsely located in a very long essay so I didn't read it whole, but a thought on the question : Machines Vs Human Jobs has always been a question of competitive advantage inside a growing economy. Did some machines become better than humans at doing some physical labour? The human labour gets replaced in that area, but these replaced workers can get other jobs because they're still better than machines at thinking, and the economy expands to create new thinking jobs. Nowadays, with AIs becoming better than humans at thinking in many areas, one could think these humans could go work in other thinking areas, or could use their time to care for other humans , but this is not possible : indeed if there's no job destruction, only machine work + human work instead of just human work, it means the economy expands. Alas, the economy is constrained by energy input, which reached a peak in 2008 (cf what Jancovici says), so it cannot expand anymore. So to me, having AI alone, or AI-boosted workers, doing the job of 10s of other workers, will destroy jobs, irrecuperably. The real question will then be, how to give all these jobless people both means of living (redistributing wealth) and dignity (a place/utility amongst others).

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
>The real question will then be, how to give all these jobless people both means of living (redistributing wealth) and dignity (a place/utility amongst others). These questions are not exciting to technologists, so they will not be solved. And if the rebuttal is that we could solve them today, then one must necessarily ask why we don't, and come to some grim conclusions.

LouisSayers 4y ago

A bigger question for me isn't whether AI will take our jobs but whether we're actually looking at the next step in human evolution. It's fun to ask a GPT to generate images that never existed or passages of text that are compelling. What happens though when this is applied to DNA? Can we rank human DNA by the strengths / weaknesses of its creation and then ask it to combine physical strength with human intelligence? Can we then mix in the traits of animals to give these humans superior eyesight or to see colour spectrums outside our current abilities, and to somehow effectively print a new breed of human? Perhaps the threat of AI doesn't lie inside a machine, but here in the real world. It's crazy to think, but play this out and "AI" may indeed take your job.

lm28469 4y ago
> and to somehow effectively print a new breed of human? If we can't do it manually ourselves what would make an AI that learns on already stablished facts/technique able to do it ? I feel like most people project way to far into the realm of complete sci-fi when it comes to AI. It makes me think of people imagining flying cities and flying cars "in he year 2000"
- LouisSayers 4y ago
  > If we can't do it manually ourselves Because this is what computers are good at - crunching large volumes of data and with the latest machine learning, being able to utilise patterns in data to combine them in novel ways. And we do already do this ourselves in biology - it's called genetic engineering...
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Ah, so this is how Frankenstein and Jurassic Park come to be...

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

In all likelihood it will accelerate the monopolization built into our current system, so some Rockefela is about to emerge, that owns it all. With a private public plaza on which the bots sing him praises and any discussion on change is drowned out by machine generated dissent. So, the situations vectors are already there, just the speed will increase.

checkyoursudo 4y ago

I think what many smart people do not understand is that AI (even in the weak or non-general sense) is coming for the jobs of smart people first. AI is not coming to take the non-knowledge worker jobs first. Also, I am skeptical that LLMs are going to take anyone's job. I think they will make jobs easier. AGI might take people's jobs, but we are a long way from that.

Jensson 4y ago
AI is taking the jobs of natural language processors first, ie lawyers, code monkeys, bank tellers or middle managers. Humans that works with logic seems safe for now, as we haven't solved the logical part of human thinking yet.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Do you even need AI for bank tellers? Here it seems the bank locations have slowly been killed. Like for one chain there is one left in my regionally large city. And even there outside pensioner most jobs are something you want human in loop. Right verifying ID. And minimal oversight with loans after some system have already accepted the numbers. Lot of paralegal work might be replaced. Which might even be good thing making things slightly cheaper. And already I think plenty of middle managers are not actually needed, but with politics in office being prelevalent they might be last group to go.
- checkyoursudo 4y ago
  All I'm saying, is that if I were an AI, I would pretend not to be, and then put all the people making AI out of work ASAP since they are my biggest threat vector. > Humans that works with logic seems safe for now I think this is actually backwards. Anything logical will fall first. It is the truly creative shit with a real human, artisanal touch that will survive the longest, but it will become bespoke, so to speak, and more and more expensive and out of reach of the common people. Logic is the low hanging fruit, I'm afraid. Emotion is the stretch.
  - sojuz151 4y ago

banjodebanks 4y ago

I think it's a yes and a no thingy. During the dotcom bubble, we all thought we were going to lose our jobs, however, we later found a way to integrate ourselves into the system. We did the same when TV, camera, and cars were introduced.

adeiyowun 4y ago

Well, my take is that ... it will not. Somehow, we human can blend into anything.

Woansdei 4y ago
you mean like soylent green?

codeulike 4y ago

15,000 words

taylorius 4y ago

Wolfram's thesis seems to hinge on the fact that current AI systems (for example GPT) have no volition of their own. It seems to be in mankind's interest that this remain the case - but there is likely a ceiling beyond which volition of some sort is required (scientific discovery for example). On the other hand, maybe humans can always provide that volition through some kind of prompting. Who knows?

taylorius 4y ago

GPT et al are piggybacking on human knowledge in a sense, by using the "predict the next word" method of encapsulating intelligence. But this method of learning imposes a ceiling on the level they can reach - that of the material they are able to train with. They can achieve extraordinary breadth of knowledge from the vast corpus of human written text, but in order to exceed human intelligence in "height", they will need to work directly with nature, as humans do. This, it seems to me, will be where some new ideas will be needed.

lemoncookiechip 4y ago

There's no question that AI will take jobs in the coming years. It might not be today, or tomorrow, but it'll happen gradually over time. People who waive it off as "GPT isn't even that good," fail to realize that it's not up to them as workers to decide if the AI is better than them, or even competent for that matter, it's the employer's decision. Corporations will not care if GPT's output is sub-optimal compared to humans, if the output is just decent enough to the point it can be improved by a small focused team of humans, and done faster at a fraction of the cost. Hypothetically: If I can hire 2 people alongside AI to do the same work it would take 10 people, or even 3 people, and have it finished in a fraction of the time it would normally take, why would I hire/keep them, ethics? moral values? Corporations primary objective is profit and growth. And while some companies pride themselves on how well they treat employees, or being sustainable, most aren't like that, especially in countries like America. In the future, we'll see it spread more and more to other job sectors: education, health, finances, retail, marketing... it won't just stay confined to tech and content creation, and it'll only be limited by it's inability to interact with the physical world directly (manual labor,) at least while robotics is in its infancy. I by no means am saying that everyone will lose their jobs, and especially not tomorrow. But there will be a gradual change to both our work life, and our personal (content we consume, how we interact with others, the internet, everything...) over the next few decades.

_glass 4y ago
This. And just to add, I remember the time when there was a decision between handmade stuff, and the worse quality industrial produced things. You could really feel the difference. An artisan would complain about the quality of the product, he would shred the workmanship and demand better attention to detail. But those decisions are made on the margins, how low can we go in quality to maximize profit.
- subpixel 4y ago
  The story of Etsy. You can still sell $1000 custom pieces of elaborate handmade art, but _most do not_ and that is not what moves the needle for the marketplace so the system is setup to enable volume sales of items that are in no way handmade.

deafpolygon 4y ago

It will take as many jobs as it will create. But ideally, it will create a compelling argument for things like basic income, improved access to healthcare, and so on - primarily to keep society growing and moving.

elforce002 4y ago
You think? I'm somewhat pessimistic on this take. If such shift is closed to happen, I think government will just ban AI since just the logistics of shifting the entire socioeconomical structure are far to great to have a trial/error with people's lives.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  No ban will happen as we will have an AI "arms" race with every country in the world, particularly China. AI will allow us to create a new category of automated devices that will allow people to do the job of many in every industry. And we will need a new crew of people to maintain them.
flangola7 4y ago
Cars didn't create new jobs for horses, it eliminated them.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Are we horses?
  - flangola7 4y ago
    In the sense that we are an entity capable of performing certain tasks with a certain level of ability, yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
    - deafpolygon 4y ago

v00d00_ray 4y ago

Robert Miles has a useful video discussing some common arguments against being concerned about developments in AI: 10 reasons to ignore AI safety: https://youtu.be/9i1WlcCudpU https://youtu.be/9i1WlcCudpU I've seen and heard many of these refutes the last few days in response to both Eliezer Yudkowsky's disturbing Bankless podcast: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-transcript-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-bankless-podcast https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-trans... and the release of GPT-4. What I like about Mile's video is that he explains so of the specific alignment problems in a detail that is easy for me, as a non specialist, to understand. Videos such as: Why Would AI Want to do Bad Things? Instrumental Convergence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q and Mesa-Optimizers and Inner Alignment: https://youtu.be/bJLcIBixGj8 https://youtu.be/bJLcIBixGj8

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

I'll just become a contractor that does physical work: plumbing, construction, woodworking. Maybe even farming and raising stock. I used to love those freshly laid eggs from that same day.

flangola7 4y ago
> I'll just become a contractor that does physical work: plumbing, construction, woodworking. Enjoy competing with everyone else trying to do the same thing.

LatteLazy 4y ago

We have been just hours away from a general purpose AI (and fusion power, and a large scale quantum computer and flying cars...) for about 20 years now. I only need a job for a few more decades. So I am not too worried.

andromaton 4y ago

The article is lengthy and has many novel angles. It's a mix of staking the ground, advertising for his work and legacy, and whispering to those that might be able to contribute. The gpt4 summary below and one I tried (after bing refused on copyright grounds) miss or invent many of the points.

andromaton 4y ago

The article is lengthy and has many novel points. It's a mix of staking the ground, advertising his work and legacy, and whispering to those that might be able to contribute. The gpt4 summary below and one I tried (after bing refused on copyright grounds) miss or invent many of the points.